Week 15. Scientific Travel and the Natural World
Starting in the mid-eighteenth century, dozens of French, British, and Spanish expeditions fanned out across the globe in search of new plants and animal species and to record observations regarding human diversity. Part of the Enlightenment project to chart the natural world, the growth of scientific travel also formed part of the drive by Europe's imperial powers to lay claim to new territories and control natural and human resources for colonial and capitalist exploitation. Traditionally concerned with the achievements of European traveller-naturalists such as Joseph Banks and Alexander von Humboldt, recent scholarship has re-oriented its focus towards a consideration of cross-cultural encounters and the roles played by Polynesian, Asian, African, or South American interlocutors in the co-production of scientific knowledge.
Core Readings (pick two)
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), Ch. 6: 鈥楢lexander von Humboldt and the reinvention of Am茅rica鈥�, pp. 111-140. .
Daniela Bleichmar, 'Exploration in Print: Books and Botanical Travel from Spain to the Americas in the Late Eighteenth Century', Huntington Library Quarterly 70.1 (2007), pp. 129-151. .
Susan Scott Parrish, 'Diasporic African Sources of Enlightenment Knowledge', in: James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (eds.), Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2008). .
Vanessa Smith, 'Joseph Banks鈥檚 Intermediaries: Rethinking Global Cultural Exchange', in: Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (eds.), Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 81-109. .
Primary sources
Read about the collections generated by the HMS Endeavour voyage at the and study at least one chapter from the project on . Be prepared in the seminar to talk about the history behind one of the objects in the NHM collection.
Seminar Questions
- How did global travel shape European science and knowledge-making in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? What was its relation to colonialism and capitalism?
- What was the role of local interlocutors and indigenous knowledge in the scientific projects of European travellers? What are the challenges in making this role visible?
- How did diasporic Africans produce, circulate, and mediate in the making of botanical knowledge?
- Pratt suggests that Humboldt "reinvented South America" (p. 118). Why was this a re-invention, and what was its significance?
- Bleichmar discusses naturalists's "bookish approach to travel" (p. 130). What role did books play in shaping scientific travel?
- in 1769, Joseph Banks wrote about Tupaia: "I do not know why I may not keep him as a curiosity, as well as some of my neighbours do lions and tygers" (Smith, p. 81). In 1775, French pharmacist Fus茅e Aublet complained about "The slaves and Indians who one is forced to take along as guides and to carry supplies" (Bleichmar, p. 150). What do both statements reveal about scientific practice in the contact zone?
Further Reading
Anderson, Katherine, 'Natural History and the Scientific Voyage', in: Helen Anne Curry, Nicholas Jardine, and Emma Spary (eds.), Worlds of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 304-318. .
Anderson, Katherine, 'Reading and Writing the Scientific Voyage: FitzRoy, Darwin and John Clunies Ross', British Journal for the History of Science 51.1 (2018), pp. 369-394. .
Arnold, David, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800-1856 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). .
Barnes, Geraldine, and Adrian Mitchell, 'Measuring the Marvelous: Science and the Exotic in William Dampier, Eighteenth-Century Life 26.3 (2002), pp. 45-57. .
Beinart, William, 'Men, Science, Travel and Nature in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Cape', Journal of Southern African Studies 24.4 (1998), pp. 775-799. .
Bell, Leonard, 'Not Quite Darwin鈥檚 Artist: the Travel Art of Augustus Earle', Journal of Historical Geography 43 (2014), pp. 60-70. .
Bleichmar, Daniela, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012). .
Bourget, Marie No毛lle, Christian Licoppe, and H. Otto Sibum (eds.), Instruments, Travel and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2002). .
Byrne, Angela, 'The Scientific Traveller', in: Alisdair Pettinger and Tim Youngs (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 17-29. .
Craciun, Adriana, and Mary Terrall (eds.), Curious Encounters: Voyaging, Collecting, and Making Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). .
Das, Nandini, and Tim Youngs (eds.), Cambridge History of Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), Chapters on Travel and , , , the , and .
Das, Subhadra, and Miranda Lowe, 'Nature Read in Black and White: Decolonial Approaches to Interpreting Natural History Collections', Journal of Natural Science Collections 6 (2018), pp. 4-14. .
Delbourgo, James, and Nicholas Dew (eds.), Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2008). .
Dew, Nicholas, 'Scientific Travel in the Atlantic world: the French Expedition to Gor茅e and the Antilles, 1681–1683', British Journal for the History of Science 43.1 (2009), pp. 1-17. .
Douglas, Bronwen, Science, Voyages, and Encounters in Oceania, 1511–1850 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). .
Driver, Felix, 'Distance and Disturbance: Travel, Exploration and Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 14 (2004), pp. 73-92. .
D'Souza, Florence, 'Voyages through Empirical Common Sense: the Practice of Science in India by James Tod (1782–1835)', Studies in Travel Writing 13.3 (2009), pp. 207-218. .
Eckstein, Lars, and Anja Schwarz, 'The Making of Tupaia鈥檚 Map: A Story of the Extent and Mastery of Polynesian Navigation, Competing Systems of Wayfinding on James Cook鈥檚 Endeavour, and the Invention of an Ingenious Cartographic System, Journal of Pacific History 54.1 (2019), pp. 1-95. . [also see the subsequent on Tupaia's map].
Fan, Fa-Ti, 'Victorian Naturalists in China: Science and Informal Empire', British Journal for the History of Science 36.1 (2003), pp 1-26. .
Finn, Margot, 'Material Turns in British History III: Collecting. Colonial Bombay, Basra, Baghdad, and the Enlightenment Museum', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 30 (2020), pp. 1-28. .
Fisk, Bethan, 'Black Knowledge on the Move: African Diasporic Healing in Caribbean and Pacific New Granada', Atlantic Studies 18.2 (2021), pp. 244-270. .
Fornasiero, Jean, and John West-Sooby, 'The Narrative Interruptions of Science: The Baudin Expedition to Australia (1800–1804)', Forum for Modern Language Studies 49.4 (2013), pp. 457-471. .
G贸mez, Pablo F., The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017). .
G枚rbert, Johannes, 'James Cook and George Forster, Journals and Travel Reports from their 'Voyage Round the World' (1777)', in: Barbara Schaff (ed.), Handbook of British Travel Writing (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2020), pp. 247-266. .
Grove, Richard, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). .
Guelke, Jeanne Kay, and Karin M. Morin, 'Gender, Nature, Empire: Women Naturalists in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Literature', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 26.3 (2001), pp. 306-326. .
Havens, Thomas R.H., Land of Plants in Motion: Japanese Botany and the World (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2020). .
Igler, David, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), Ch. 5: 'Naturalists and Natives in the Great Ocean'. .
Igler, David, 'Indigenous Travelers and Knowledge Production in the Pacific: The Case of Kadu and Ludwig Choris', History Compass 15 (2017), pp. 1-16. .
Johnson, Nuala C., 'Botanical Travel, Climate and David Moore's Moral Geographies of Europe', Journal of Historical Geography 44 (2014), pp. 122-132. .
Konishi, Shino, Maria Nugent, Tiffany Shellam (eds.), Indigenous Intermediaries: New perspectives on Exploration Archives (Acton: ANU Press, 2015). .
Liebersohn, Harry, The Travelers' World: Europe to the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). .
Martin, Alison E., 'Outward Bound: Women Translators and Scientific Travel Writing, 1780–1800', Annals of Science 73.2 (2016), pp. 157-169. .
McAleer, John, and Nigel Rigby, Captain Cook and the Pacific: Art, Exploration & Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). .
Miller, David Philip, and Hanns Reill (eds.), Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). .
Robinson, Michael F., 鈥楽cientific Travel鈥�, in: Nandini Das and Tim Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 488-503. .
Schaffer, Simon, Linda Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo (eds.), The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820 (Sagamore, MA: Science History Publications, 2009). .
Smethurst, Paul, Travel Writing and the Natural World, 1768–1840 (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012). .
Sprang, Felix, 'Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839)', in: Barbara Schaff (ed.), Handbook of British Travel Writing (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2020), pp. 373-396. .
Skott, Christina, 'Human Taxonomies: Carl Linnaeus, Swedish Travel in Asia and the Classification of Man', Itinerario 43.2 (2019), pp. 218-242. .
Turnbull, David, '(En)-Countering Knowledge Traditions: The Story of Cook and Tupaia', in: Tony Ballantyne (ed.), Science, Empire and the European Exploration of the Pacific (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 55-76. .
- Natural History Museum
- Natural History Museum
- Astrolabe special issue (2020)
- Illustrations
- Rare book collection
- Cambridge Digital Library