"latter" and "confident expansion"

Question

I have a couple of questions about the following passage:

Kant explained that through a free-play between intuitive imagination and conceptual understanding, especially if mediated by feeling, we can be moved by the beauty of a work of art and come closer to the essence of nature.4 This vision of the Sublime can be discerned in many of Turner’s paintings and in the astonishing vistas of wild American territory in the Hudson River School paintings of Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church, although there is an element to the latter which suggests that they express not simply wonder at the overwhelming beauty of the landscape but a desire to control and own it, indicative of the confident expansion of the New World, and, indeed, of other parts of the world, in the nineteenth century.

1. Does here "latter" refer to "Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church's paintings" in comparison with Turner's paintings?

2. What does "confident expansion" man here?

Answer 1

The second sentence, though long, is syntactically transparent:

This vision of the Sublime can be discerned
  in 1 many of Turner’s paintings and
  in 2 the astonishing vistas of wild American territory
            in the Hudson River School paintings
               of Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church,

although there is an element to the latter (2) which suggests that they express &c

That is, although both the paintings and the vistas exemplify the sense of wonder which Kant attributes to the Sublime, there is an element in the astonishing vistas which suggests that they express not only wonder at nature but a desire to control and own it.

The author claims that this desire reflects the confident drive of Americans to expand across the continent, and of others to expand into "other parts of the world". As she says in the next paragraph,

There was an unresolved tension between a reverence for wild nature and the desire to colonize it.

Answer 2

Note: The text is from Art and Science By Sîan Ede

latter

The author is at fault here.

1. The natural reading is to make Church the latter of Cole and Church. This is because the two names are in close proximity and Kant is way back in the text.

2. However the author forces us to make both Cole and Church "the latter." Her subsequent words are, "...which suggests that they express...", and, as we read on, it is clear from the context that she means both of them.

3. She has misused "latter" because it is a comparative between two individual items. Grammatically it cannot refer to two things at once.

4. Ede could have lessened the problem by saying something like "the latter pair" but even so this would make us look for a previous 'pair' where there is none.

Ede, surprisingly, appears not to be aware of the history of the word "latter"; in Old English we had:

late, later, latest

but

laet, laetra/latter, last

EDIT - The above statement that I just made about Old English is from memory and therefore not up to the standards of Stack Exchange. I shall research my facts and report back.

Answer

We can tell from the context (but not the grammar) that "latter" is intended to mean "Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church".

...

P.S.

"confident expansion" refers to the ebullience and optimism shown by people of European stock during their colonisation of North America and other places.