Article ID: CBB008329293

Among ‘Savage and Brutal Nations’: Instructing Identity and Science in the Pacific (2022)

unapi

This article reads the ‘hints’ provided by the President of the Royal Society Lord Morton to James Cook on his first Pacific voyage in 1768, first to show what they reveal about the contested views of technological advance as an index of progress in European thought in the later eighteenth century and, second, how that connection between technology and progress serves to entrench distinct differences between European and Indigenous identities in the colonial mind. Morton's ‘hints’ served as a kind of script that told the Europeans how to communicate their position as bearers of superior enlightened humanity. They functioned, therefore, as a technology of identity by ordering the behaviour of the European newcomers and curating their perceptions of the Indigenous people they encountered. Although the ‘hints’ were a self-conscious expression of enlightened sensibilities, they remained a technology for the colonial projection of those sensibilities and for performance of European identity.

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Authors & Contributors
Orchiston, Wayne
Williams, Glyndwr
Gascoigne, John
Igler, David
Kelly, Michael J.
McAleer, John
Journals
Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage
Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/Bulletin Canadienne d'Histoire de la Medecine
Eighteenth-Century Studies
History of Science
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies
Journal for Maritime Research: Britian, the Sea and Global History
Publishers
Yale University Press
University of Hawai'i Press
Cambridge University Press
Fordham University Press
Oxford University Press
University of California Press
Concepts
Colonialism
Travel; exploration
Indigenous peoples; indigeneity
Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence
Cross-national interaction
Natural history
People
Cook, James
Banks, Joseph
Solander, Daniel Charles
Austen, Jane
Dampier, William
Darwin, Charles Robert
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
Enlightenment
17th century
20th century
Early modern
Places
Pacific Ocean
Tahiti
Great Britain
Australia
France
New Zealand
Institutions
Great Britain. Royal Navy
Royal Society of London
National Maritime Museum (Great Britain)
East India Company (English)
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