This article is concerned with the relationship between British colonization and the intellectual underpinnings of natural history writing between the 17th and the early 19th centuries. During this period, I argue, a significant discursive shift reframed both natural history and the concept of humanity. In the early modern period, compiling natural histories was often conceived as an endeavour to understand God’s creation. Many of the natural historians involved in the early Royal Society of London were driven by a theological conviction that the New World contained the natural knowledge once possessed by Adam, but lost in the Fall from Eden. By the early 19th century, however, this theological framework for natural history had been superseded by an avowedly progressive vision of the relationship between humanity and nature. No longer ontologically distinct from the rest of creation, the human became a subject of natural history writing in a new way. Encounters between colonizers and colonized thus became a touchstone for tensions between divine and natural historical knowledge. The resolution of these tensions lay in the emergence of a concept of savagery that imbibed both a rational account of historical progress towards civilization and a religious conviction that savage humanity needed rescue from its animal nature.
Historians do not typically associate the use of concepts like “civil and religious freedom” and “liberty of conscience” with colonial New South Wales. Indeed, for many years, historians assumed that the people of New South Wales were largely indifferent to religious ideas, and often unthinkingly sectarian. The research presented here suggests we revise this assumption. When the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 passed through the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1829, it triggered a lively and genuinely intellectual discussion in New South Wales about religious liberty and its implications. Through a careful analysis of the colony's 1830s press, I argue that there existed a robust discussion about the nature of religious freedom: its theology, its history, and its relationship to the legal and political question of establishment. This period provides an interesting vignette of, and point of entry into, the broader issue of the role of religion in colonial New South Wales.
Traditionally, historians have played down the role of religion in colonial New South Wales. This article contributes to a bourgeoning scholarly literature that revises this position and deepens our understanding of the intellectual culture of colonial New South Wales. Through an examination of the colonial press and the work of public figures such as John Dunmore Lang, I argue that there was a robust debate about liberty of conscience in the first half of the nineteenth century. These discussions did not primarily stem from liberalism. Rather, advocates of liberty of conscience, across the religious and political spectrums, drew primarily upon the natural rights tradition of Christian thought which identified liberty of conscience as the archetype of a natural right. Advocates of this tradition were in dialogue with not only the British imperial world but also across the Atlantic, Ireland, and the United States.*I would like to thank Terry Irving, and the anonymous reviewers for AJPH, for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.
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