From Eden to savagery and civilization: British colonialism and humanity in the development of natural history, ca. 1600–1840

Abstract

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 By the early 19th century, however, this theological framework for natural history had been superseded by an avowedly progressive vision of the relationship between humanity and nature.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.

Among ‘Savage and Brutal Nations’: Instructing Identity and Science in the Pacific

“…Throughout the seventeenth century, European intellectuals in correspondence with networks of travellers and colonists compiled inventories of natural phenomena, cataloguing knowledge in order both to know the beneficence of God's creation and to turn that knowledge to profitable effect. 19 As Joyce Chaplin has noted, colonisation provided a constant spur to the promotion of knowledge that would prove profitable and prompted the further systematisation and accumulation of natural histories of lands, peoples, plants and animals. 20 This form of knowledge was based on the accumulation of knowledge from networks of travellers who themselves absorbed, transcribed and transformed information fed to them by European and non-European interlocutors.…”