Article ID: CBB413793567

From Eden to Savagery and Civilization: British Colonialism and Humanity in the Development of Natural History, ca. 1600–1840 (2019)

unapi

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 By the early 19th century, however, this theological framework for natural history had been superseded by an avowedly progressive vision of the relationship between humanity and nature.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

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Article Bruce Buchan; Linda Andersson Burnett (2019) Knowing Savagery: Humanity in the Circuits of Colonial Knowledge. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 3-7). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB413793567/

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Authors & Contributors
MacLeod, Roy M.
Irving-Stonebraker, Sarah
Silva, Ignacio Alberto
Sen, Joydeep
Sharma, Vaibhav
Wellenreuther, Hermann
Concepts
Great Britain, colonies
Colonialism
Natural history
Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence
Museums
Definition of human; human nature
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
17th century
20th century, early
Enlightenment
20th century
Places
Great Britain
India
South Africa
Latin America
Canada
Atlantic world
Institutions
Royal Society of London
Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science
Natural History Museum (London, England)
Jesuits (Society of Jesus)
British East India Company
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