The desire of the "civilized" to be restored to a "state of nature" is as longstanding as civilization itself.[1] In antiquity the superiority of "primitive" life principally found expression in the so-called Myth of the Golden Age, depicted in the genre of European poetry and visual art known as the Pastoral. Primitivist idealism between gained new impetus with the onset of industrialization and the European encounter with hitherto unknown peoples after the colonization of the Americas, the Pacific and other parts of what would become the modern imperial system.