Scientific Exploration and Empire

Rethinking expeditions: On critical expeditionary practice

“…This critique was accompanied by a parallel historiographical corpus that sought a more primary and empirical engagement with the archive of exploration, while trying to avoid the pitfalls of earlier biographies of "the great explorers" (on this shift, see Liebersohn 2014, 41-42). One strand in this corpus analysed the way expeditions served the social and ideological orientations of state institutions like the British Admiralty (Stafford 1999;Richardson 2007) and…”

“…voluntary societies that funded expeditionary work and to a large extent set their scientific agendas, the Royal Geographical Society being an obvious and well-documented example (Driver 2000;Stafford 2002;Gillham 2001). A second strand focused on the experience of expeditions in the field.…”

The Spectral Arctic

“…Yet taking account of the diversity of voices involved in Arctic exploration requires that we move beyond an exclusive focus on representations to an engagement with the 'nonrepresentational' also. Scholars of global exploration have highlighted the varieties of actors involved in the cultures of exploration but, when it comes to the ways western navigators and travellers thought about exotic and unmapped regions of land and sea, there has been a tendency to focus on the visual or representational -what they 'saw' over what they 'experienced' (see for example Smith, 1985;Stafford, 1999). This focus has undoubtedly brought out cogent themes in histories of imperial discovery (see Rose, 1993) but it has also resulted in a tendency to take bodies for granted.…”

A Yahgan for the killing: murder, memory and Charles Darwin

“…He offered it, instead, as evidence of the inherent bloodthirstiness of indigenous populations and the danger they posed to hapless Europeans. 57 Even the seemingly innocuous act of natural history, writes Gillian Beer, could be 'an expression of the will to control, categorize, occupy and bring home the prize of samples and of strategic information'. Indigenous groups were not entirely evil, according to FitzRoy, and he provided numerous examples of their strong fidelity to their children.…”