In 1825 the commissioners of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Sierra Leone sent the black surgeon William Fergusson a set of detailed queries about tropical health in Britain's West African colonies. Fergusson had studied medicine at Dumfries Infirmary, Edinburgh University and Edinburgh’s Royal College of Surgeons.  When the queries arrived, he had been working in Sierra Leone as a surgeon for a decade and was arguably the leading medical statistician in the colony.  Like other contemporary parliamentary directives related to health and natural history, Fergusson and the colony’s other medical staff saw the queries as a set of scientific instructions, a list of data-gathering categories that needed to be filled by officials. 

Though the official purpose of the Commission’s health queries was to identify whether the tropical climate of Sierra Leone helped or hindered its financial viability as a crown colony, Fergusson realised that its questions were framed by racialised assumptions about the climate’s impact upon the bodies of Africans and Europeans.  This essay explores the actions he took to prevent a seemingly bureaucratic exercise from contributing to the alarming rise of racialised health data within British colonial information systems.

The evidentiary centrepiece of Fergusson’s report was a statistical table, a databank of numbers, that demonstrated race was an ethnographic, not a biomedical or climatological, distinction. Treating the table as a data artefact, I argue he exerted moral agency against the racialised assumptions of the British state in the way he gathered, categorised and calculated the information he had ascertained on the ground in the colony. Using hitherto lost printed and manuscript documents from the British Library that were compiled and written by Fergusson, I reveal that his table was not merely a list of numbers.  Rather, it was a moral engine, an object created to counter the racialised assumptions imbedded in the scientific instructions he had received from Parliament.

Professor Matthew Daniel Eddy Durham University’s Chair and Professor in the History and Philosophy of Science and the Co-Director of the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. He is also one of our research partners in the Instructing Natural History project. He studies the history of science in Europe and its former empires. He is currently examining medical instructions in India in the nineteenth century. Read more about his work here.

The Instructing Colonial Natural History Seminar Series is organised by the Instructing Natural History Research Group, Uppsala University

To register for the Zoom link, please email instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se

Image credit: print of Pteroglossus macullatus, collected by William Fergusson from Sierra Leone, in William Jardine, John Prideaux Shelby, Illustrations of ornithology, 1826. Wikimedia Commons .

The presentation analyzes the prize contests of the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences in the last three decades of the eighteenth century. The Society was founded by a handful of learned men employed by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Batavia (today’s Jakarta), inspired by the mushrooming of learned societies and academies in the Netherlands and Europe, and motivated by the perceived isolation from European culture. By adopting the modus operandi of Enlightenment learned societies, the Batavian Society not only promoted the collection of objects from Dutch colonial holdings and their surroundings but also encouraged the gathering of useful knowledge through prize contests, a popular academic genre in Europe.

Unlike the metropolis, where the primary focus was on philosophy, the colonial outpost prioritized practical knowledge. The questions concerned shipbuilding methods, the health of slaves in transit, caring for sick sailors once in Batavia, and so on. Initially, the contest was opened to other VOC members in Batavia and the Asian colonial outposts, but responses were few and unsatisfactory. Determined to make the contests a success, the Society sponsored three Dutch-based societies that held prize contests to ask similar questions, but even fewer responses were received due to the lack of knowledge about colonial issues. In a final attempt to make the contests relevant, the Society sponsored questions addressing local Dutch issues, such as Reformed education and the reconsideration of church burials.

The presentation will investigate why the founding members of the Batavian Society sought to emulate European learned societies in a colonial outpost and why they sponsored the prize contests in the Dutch Republic at a time when the VOC was going bankrupt. In doing so, it will argue, firstly, that European intellectual sociability during the Enlightenment became a criterion for self-identifying as civilized, especially among the Dutch mercantile classes and particularly in a non-European context. Secondly, it will demonstrate that useful knowledge was seen as a potential solution for the overall decay of the VOC and the perceived decline of the Dutch Republic, engaging learned men both in the metropolis and the colonies. Lastly, it will conceptualize the genre of colonial instructions by showing that prize questions were public-facing instructions, defined by utility and epistemological optimism.

Maria Florutau is a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Project Early Citizen Science at Uppsala University. She studies the transnational historian of European Enlightenment and is particularly interested in decentralising the circulation of knowledge across the continent from Eastern to Western Europe and back during the long eighteenth century, as well understanding the contributory nature of non-European thought on enlightened philosophy and culture. In the project, she examines the uptake of Linnaean instructions in the Netherlands and its colonies and in the Habsburg Empire. Maria completed a DPhil in Early Modern History at the University of Oxford (2022), having previously studied at University College London. She is currently revising her thesis, Transnational knowledge transfer in the Enlightenment (c.1750-1790): the case of József Fogarasi Pap, to be published with Oxford University Press.

The Instructing Colonial Natural History Seminar Series is organised by the Instructing Natural History Research Group, Uppsala University

To register for the Zoom link, please email instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se

Image source: Gezicht op de Tijgersgracht te Batavia, 1682, Wikimedia Commons.

Seaweed collecting was one of the natural history ‘crazes’ in nineteenth-century Britain. Both popular pastime improving the minds and bodies of sea-side vacationers and emerging branch of science, the study of marine botany particularly attracted many women from various social backgrounds. While women had limited if any access to scientific institutions, many of them penned popular science works, teaching communities of ‘amateur’ women and children how to observe, collect, preserve and display marine botanical specimens. The popularity of the genre at mid-century was exemplified by such works as Elizabeth Anne Allom’s The Sea-Weed Collector (1841), Isabella Gifford’s The Marine Botanist (1848), Anne Pratt’s Chapters of the Common Things of the Sea-Side (1850), Margaret Gatty’s British Sea-Weeds (1863) and Louisa Lane Clarke’s The Common Seaweeds of the British Coast and Channel Islands (1865). This presentation will examine the type of instructions these popular science books circulated and show how women’s sharing of their natural history practices helped them promote their scientific expertise, especially in local marine flora.

Laurence Talairach is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès and associate researcher at the Alexandre-Koyré Center for the History of Science and Technology (Paris). Her research interests cover medicine, natural history and British literature in the long nineteenth century. She is currently co-PI of a CNRS International Emerging Action project (WOMNH-19, 2024–25), with Associate Prof. Linda Andersson Burnett (Uppsala University, Sweden), which aims to re-evaluate nineteenth-century British women’s contributions to natural history. She is the author of 5 monographs and has edited several collections of articles on the interrelations between science and literature and the popularisation of science in the nineteenth-century.

Image credit: Plates from Margaret Gatty's British Sea-Weeds (1863). Public Domain.

We present our plans for a collaborative research project that consists of two intertwined elements: a new English on-line edition and translation of Carl Linnaeus’s diary of a journey through Lapland undertaken in 1732, and a re-tracking of that journey. We envisage a novel methodology of scholarly edition, in which translation and re-tracking work in tandem as catalysts of public discourse. One of the principal subjects Linnaeus enquired about, and took note of, was how natural resources and ways of life contributed to the well-being of local populations. In particular, he exalted Sámi culture as a model of healthy life, while also promoting its colonization. But he also was on a guided tour, eagerly collecting information provided by people that were on the move as well, usually spoke more than one language, hosted him and helped him find his way. The diary therefore provides a window on past practices of generating biomedical knowledge at the intersection of diverse cultures and touches on issues that are of contemporary relevance as well, ranging from sustainability and wellbeing to indigeneity and sovereignty. The presentation will build on results from a project piloting the methodology on trips to Sámi areas in 2019 and 2020 and more information on the research can be found on the project website: https://linnaeus-in-lapland.net/

Staffan Müller-Wille is Professor in History and Philosopohy of the Life Sciences at the University of Cambridge. His research covers the history of the life sciences from the early modern period to the early twentieth century, with a focus on the history of natural history, anthropology, and genetics. Publications include "Names and Numbers: ‘Data’ in Classical Natural History, 1758–1859" (Osiris 32, 2017), and more recently, "Hospitality and Knowledge: Linnaeus’s hosts on his Laplandic Journey (1732)" (Social Research 89, 2022).

Elena Isayev's work focuses on ancient historical and current migration, hospitality, displacement and civic memberships, which she has explored inMigration Mobility and Place in Ancient Italy(2017), People Out of Place: Mediating Sovereignty and Power, Past and Present (forthcoming),Displacement and the Humanities (2023) – as co-editor with Evan Jewell. As well as in collaboration with Staffan Mueller-Wille ‘Hospitality and Knowledge: Linnaeus’s hosts on his Laplandic Journey (1732)’, (Social Research 89, 2022).  She is currently leading Imagining Futures through Un/Archived Pasts project (AHRC-UK), and is Professor of Ancient History and Place at University of Exeter, UK.

The Instructing Colonial Natural History Seminar Series is organised by the Instructing Natural History Research Group, Uppsala University

To register for the Zoom link, please email instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se

Image credit: Staffan Müller-Wille

In 1784 the famed Scottish anatomist, William Hunter, declared to his students that only in the last 300 years had: “European science made a push westwards”. Daring “to go in search of another hemisphere,” Hunter continued, science “found it, and took possession of the whole.”[i] Hunter left his audience in no doubt that the greatest conquest of knowledge was the emerging “science of man”, won from new terrains and innumerable peoples now made subject to Enlightenment categories of knowledge across the globe. Far from being a merely parochial European consideration, this empire of science was truly universal in aspiration. Just over a decade after Hunter’s declaration, the professor of natural history and medicine in Philadelphia, Benjamin Smith Barton, likened natural historians in America to its colonial conquerors. “I may, without vanity, compare myself to the new settler in the wilderness of our country”, Barton wrote in 1798. Here in America, he declared: “I found no cultivated spot. … [but] succeeded in opening a path, which will serve to direct the traveller in his pilgrimage of science.”[ii] Natural historians following his trail, Barton wrote, will be like intellectual settlers who: “take possession of another, and perhaps richer, soil” by mapping the “physical and moral history of whole nations...”.[iii] In Hunter and Barton’s avowedly colonial conceptualisations of science lies a strangely neglected chapter in the history of humanity in the era of Enlightenment. In the reduction of all human populations and every human variation to categories of supposedly scientific knowledge, humanity became both subject to and an object of colonial Enlightenment. In this paper, I trace the extension of that colonisation of humanity in a series of instructions provided to a succession of British and French colonial voyages to the Pacific between 1768 and 1800.

[i] William Hunter, Two Introductory Lectures, Delivered by Dr William Hunter, to his last course of Anatomical Lectures, at his Theatre in Windmill-Street: as they were corrected for the Press by himself (London: Printed by order of the Trustees, for J. Johnson, 1784), 9.

[ii] Benjamin Smith Barton, New Views on the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America, Philadelphia: printed for the author by John Bioren, 1798, xxiii.

[iii] Barton, New Views, xxv.

Bruce Buchan is a professor of history at Griffith University, Australia. Focused on intellectual history, his work traces the entanglement of European political thought with the experience of empire and colonisation, focussing on the Early Modern and Enlightenment periods. Bruce's research seeks an understanding of concepts by bringing different fields of historical enquiry into productive conversation, most notably colonial history, histories of sound and noise, the history of science and medicine, and the history of ideas and political thought. His previous research on European perceptions of Indigenous government, the conceptual history of asymmetric warfare, and the meanings of civility, savagery and civilisation have appeared in a wide range of journals. Bruce's research has been supported by a competitively awarded Discovery grants and a Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council. His current research (with Linda Andersson Burnett) focusses on the conceptual prehistory of race in the teaching of medicine and moral philosophy, and in colonial travel during the Scottish Enlightenment. In Spring 2024, he will be a Visiting Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies, Uppsala.

The Instructing Colonial Natural History Seminar Series is organised by the Instructing Natural History Research Group, Uppsala University

To register for the Zoom link, please email instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Dominik Huenniger is an environmental historian of science and collections. He works as the curator for innovation research at the German Port Museum in Hamburg. He published on human-animal-history, the history of museums and collections, as well as the material culture of the sciences in the long 18th century. He is the co-founder of the Collection Ecologies Research Collective and recently co- edited a Focus section on insects in the history of science: Lisa Onaga and Dominik Huenniger (ed.), Magnifying Insect Histories, in: Isis - The Journal of the History of Science Society, 115, 1 (2024).

The Instructing Colonial Natural History Seminar Series is organised by the Instructing Natural History Research Group, Uppsala University

To register for the Zoom link, please email instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se

In early 1865, the German obstetrician-botanist Wilhelm Hillebrand (1821-1886) received a triple commission from King Kamehameha V to travel to China and India to recruit labour migrants, inquire about new treatments for leprosy, and transmit new flora and fauna species to the Hawaiian Islands. For Hillebrand, the mission represented a convenient conjecture between government and settler projects and his personal passion of botany. Prior to setting off for his journey, he received extensive instructions from R.C. Wyllie, a Scottish businessman turned Minister of Foreign Affairs, who envisioned the trip as a type of fact-finding expedition for Hawai‘i’s nascent plantation sector. Over the course of his 18-month long travels, Hillebrand would stray substantially from Wyllie’s intentions, dedicating the great bulk of his time and resources to botanical collection in present-day Indonesia, including a visit to the Buitenzorg Botanical Gardens (today, Bogor).

This paper will explore the interplay between Hillebrand’s official instructions and unofficial botanizing. As was the case with other natural historical travelers of the period, Hillebrand’s research was not funded for its own sake, but rather, for its potential contributions to state priorities and private initiatives. Hillebrand’s tripartite commission conjoined practical botany with medical concerns and, in initiating the migration of indentured laborers to Hawai‘i, also participated in the longer-term production of labor-based hierarchies of race and class in the islands. By probing the plantation imperatives and state politics that shaped Hillebrand’s information-gathering and collecting practices, this paper will afford insights into how individual actors adapted state instructions to pursue scientific travel in the mid nineteenth-century Pacific world.

Nicholas B. Miller is Associate Professor of History at Flagler College (St. Augustine, Florida). He is a social and intellectual historian whose research spans early modern and modern history, including the Enlightenment, cross-cultural encounters, international migration, and comparative studies of colonialism. His books include 'John Millar and the Scottish Enlightenment: Family Life and World History (Voltaire Foundation, 2017) and Cameralism and the Enlightenment: Happiness, Governance and Reform in Transnational Perspective (Routledge, 2020, with Ere Nokkala). Most recently, he edited a forthcoming volume on plantations and the history of knowledge with Ulrike Lindner (SUNY Press). Email at nbmiller@flagler.edu

The Instructing Colonial Natural History Seminar Series is organised by the Instructing Natural History Research Group, Uppsala University

To register for the Zoom link, please email instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se

Image credit: Hathi Trust, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hxj1im&seq=225

This paper examines the system of production and circulation of knowledge linked to Spanish bureaucracy and the Atlantic trade. Based on primary sources from the General Archive of the Indies (AGI), the General Archive of the Nation (Argentina-AGN), the Archive of the Royal College of Surgeons (London-RCS), and on secondary bibliography, this article, rather than focus on the objects collected, considers the documents that resulted from the “necessity” of collecting minerals, plants and animals, revealing the true protagonists of this story: the pathways of bureaucracy and the flow of paperwork where data about nature and man in the Americas were generated and took shape. At the same time, it reflects on the adoption of the "three kingdoms of nature" defined by Linnaeus and adopted in the instructions to complete the Royal Cabinet of Natural History of Madrid, which, at the end of the XVIIIth century and as a result of these instructions, a strange and mighty animal found near Buenos Aires would arrive.

Irina Podgorny is an Argentine historian of science at the National University of La Plata, permanent RESEARCHER at CONICET, professor ad honorem and Director of the Archive of History and Photographs at the Museum of La Plata, and winner of the Bernardo Houssay Young Researcher and Georg Forster Research (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation) Awards . She has held numerous professorships and scholarships in Berlin,  Paris,  New York City, Rio de Janeiro, Canberra and held the Lewis P. Jones Professorship at Wofford College in South Carolina in 2012. Since 2021, she has been a co-director of an EU-funded project: Scientific Collections on the Move: Provincial Museums, Archives, and Collecting Practices (1850–1950), more details of which can be found here: https://scicomove.hypotheses.org/.

The Instructing Colonial Natural History Seminar Series is organised by the Instructing Natural History Research Group, Uppsala University

To register for the Zoom link, please email instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se

Image credit: https://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/docannexe/image/75454/img-2.jpg

This paper examines the role of written instructions in the establishment of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew as a colonial organisation in the 1790s-1810s. Joseph Banks, as informal director of Kew from the 1770s, issued formalised sets of instructions to each botanist that he sent on expeditions to collect plant specimens and commercial intelligence from colonial destinations. In this paper, I examine the instructions written by Banks to the botanist Archibald Menzies for a circumnavigation captained by Lieutenant George Vancouver in 1790. The instructions stipulated a set of botanical aims, broader colonial knowledge that Menzies should gather, and how he should comport himself in relation to his finances, correspondents at Kew, and in his relations on board. These written instructions, I suggest, proposed an ideal relationship between Kew and its botanists that served to stimulate and evaluate botanical collecting and colonial prospecting. But, in addition, the form of instructions played a significant role in instigating an institutional culture at Kew, and establishing it as a colonial organisation. Written instructions for expeditions provided Banks a means to standardise botanical collecting, to cohere internal relationships, and to establish administrative norms. I argue that Banks was aware of the capacities of instructions to establish social and epistemological practices, and also hierarchies: between individuals working on behalf of Kew, and between the geographical spaces of the British metropole and colonies. Analysing Banks’s instructions therefore offers a glimpse into how Banks enlisted textual and paper technologies to enact his vision for Kew, and to position it as a metropolitan centre in an expanding colonial network.

To register for the Zoom link, please email instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se

The historiography on natural history collecting often draws a distinction between ‘travelling naturalists’ and those who were more settled. While the former, unfamiliar with the territories through which they travelled, often relied on local informants, the latter were likely to develop over time a stronger understanding of local environments and local information networks, and they often then acted as hosts to travelling naturalists. This paper, however, focuses on a third category of natural history collector: colonial personnel who lacked training in natural history collecting but who nonetheless expressed a desire to serve the state by collecting specimens. Such ‘amateur’ collectors have received little attention in existing histories of colonial science because their contributions to knowledge were generally very slight. But they were nevertheless culturally significant, playing a role in a broader enlightenment culture of collecting and learning which, in colonial contexts, touched both Europeans and non-Europeans alike.

Working with the correspondence between the personnel at the Jardin du Roi in Paris and the French merchants and officials located around the Indian Ocean World in the 1750s and 1760s, this paper will examine the extent to which the latter learned about natural history collecting, with whom they communicated their interest and how far their activities were directed by the Jardin. We will see that, while instructions were important, so also were incentives: The personnel at the Jardin du Roi not only needed to ensure that useful specimens reached them intact, but also that collectors might maintain their connections with the Jardin over several years. After all, why would an amateur of natural history invest their time and money in following someone else’s instructions? 

The examples discussed in this paper thus allow us to explore two aspects of the history of instructions: the conventions surrounding instructions written for people with very little background knowledge; and, through examining incentivisation, the extent to which those instructions might actually shape the production of knowledge.

Dr Sarah Easterby-Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of St Andrews. A social and cultural historian of science, her work focuses on French, British and global histories of the eighteenth century. Much of her research has focused on how access to cultures of knowledge was permitted and constrained, particularly with regard to gender and social status. She is the author of Cultivating Commerce: Cultures of Botany in Britain and France (CUP, 2018) and ‘Recalcitrant Seeds: Material Culture and the Global History of Science’, Past and Present (2019).

The Instructing Colonial Natural History Seminar Series is organised by the Instructing Natural History Research Group, Uppsala University

To register for the Zoom link, please email instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se

The Orangery, Linnéträdgården, Uppsala

Programme:

9-9.15am Arrival and Coffee

9.15am Welcome and Introduction

Linda Andersson Burnett, Instructing Natural History

9.30-10.45am Panel 1: Theory and Questions

Millie Schurch, “Joseph Banks and the Instruction of Beauty: Contexts and Concepts”

Leonie Hannan, “Who Instructed Who? Power, Authority and Enquiry in the Pursuit of ‘Useful Knowledge’”

10.45-11am Coffee

11-12pm Panel 2: Groups and Institutions 

Linda Andersson Burnett, “Instructing Race: Edinburgh University's Natural History Museum”

Maria Florutau, “Academies' Prize Questions as Instructions and the Case of the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences (c. 1770-1800)”

12-1pm Lunch

1-1.30pm Primary Sources

Anna Svensson, “Portable Presses: An Overview of Travellers Pressing Plants in Books”

1.30-1.45pm Break

1.45-3pm Panel 3: People in the Field

Laurence Talairach, “‘Invalids sometimes become sea-weed collectors’ (M. Gatty, British Sea-Weeds (1863)): Victorian Women in the Field”

Hanna Hodacs, “Negotiating Terms and Conditions: Natural History Collection in Theory and Praxis, the case of Adam Afzelius (1790s)

3-3.15pm Coffee

3.15-4.15pm Reflections, Questions and Directions
Open discussion

4.30pm Tour of Linnéträdgården

7pmDinner, Villa Anna

This talk will discuss query lists with which U.S. ethnographers sought to solicit and organize information about Indigenous languages and history in the nineteenth century.  Taking as its focus the 1826 query lists that Albert Gallatin sent to the Cherokee lawyer John Ridge and the query lists and instructions that Bureau of American Ethnology head John Wesley Powell prepared for collecting Indigenous language words in the 1870s, this talk asks how these ethnographers hoped to use the form of the list and the materiality of paper to secure the form and content of collected information. I examine as well some of the returns to these queries, which both accede to and extend outside the query form (including to a scene of animal dissection).  This talk draws on both the history of science and Native American and Indigenous Studies methodologies to consider the historical and long lasting effects of query lists and collecting.

Kelly Wisecup is a literary and cultural historian whose work brings together early American studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and histories of books and archives. Across several books and digital projects, her research seeks to understand the many avenues through which Indigenous peoples—published authors and otherwise—created, interacted with, used, and read books, manuscripts, newspapers, and other texts.  Her recent scholarship traces relationships between 18-19th -century Indigenous literatures and colonial archives, examining how Indigenous communities made compilations, intentionally-assembled texts like recipes, scrapbooks, and lists, and how the travels of those texts into colonial archives constituted acts of anti-colonial criticism.  

The Instructing Colonial Natural History Seminar Series is organised by the Instructing Natural History Research Group, Uppsala University

To register for the Zoom link, please email instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se

In July 1772, shortly before the departure of James Cook’s second expedition to the Pacific from 1772 to 1775, the Admiralty appointed the German naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster to become the official naturalist of this voyage with the task of collecting the natural world. The decision could not have been better: Forster had acquired profound knowledge of taxidermy before the journey, while his son Georg had learned to draw in his early teens. As curator of a natural history collection sent by the Hudson's Bay Company to the British Museum, the elder Forster had not only catalogued and arranged the incoming zoological specimens, but also prepared them. His taxidermic knowledge resulted in a Catalogue of the Animals of North America, published in 1771, which was accompanied by an appendix entitled Short directions for collecting, preserving, and transporting all kinds of natural history curiosities, in which he gave detailed instructions for preserving all things from the realm of nature. In my paper, I will examine Forster's instructions on collecting which can be considered a technical guide to coping with the problem of the precarious material existence of natural objects. In a next step, I will show how Forster’s ideal of collecting became a problem in reality during his voyage with Cook and discuss the material limits of instructions in the context of the voyage and the knowledge production on board the Resolution.

The Instructing Colonial Natural History Seminar Series is organised by the Instructing Natural History Research Group, Uppsala University

To register for the Zoom link, please email instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se

Image credit: John Francis Rigaud, Portrait of Johann Reinhold Forster and his son George Forster, ca. 1780, oil on canvas. National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Public Domain: Wikimedia Commons.

My talk aims to reflect on the spread of questionnaires from the 16th century until the early part of the 18th century. Initially, I will focus on the development of questionnaires in the Atlantic area, in the context of the construction of Spanish colonial rule in the Americas. I will then move on to the analysis of their reception on the continent, particularly in the circle of the Royal Society. As a final point, I want to show how European 'wild' territories were also 'discovered' thanks to the spread of this empirical practice in the circles of naturalists; I am referring in particular to the Alpine region and the Apennines. My analysis aims to reflect on the importance of these practices for scientific development in the modern era and on the commercial and political interests linked to these practices in extremely diverse political contexts.

The Instructing Colonial Natural History Seminar Series is organised by the Instructing Natural History Research Group, Uppsala University

To register for the Zoom link, please email instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se

Image credit: Frontispiece of Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, Ούρεσιφοίτης Helveticus sive Itinera per Helvetiae alpinas regiones facta annis 1702-1707, 1709-1711. Plurimis tabulis æneis illustrata. In quatuor tomos distincta, Leiden, 1723.

Many early modern teacher-scholars and economic reformers viewed the production of instructions for travel and collecting as an enterprise compatible with much wider educational reform mandates.  By around 1700, efforts to devise new methods that could reliably teach any young person about the world using “real things” (realia) had commenced in earnest and resulted in several kinds of approaches to using collections, specifically, as pedagogical tools.  In this paper I consider the problem of compulsion and its relationship to object lessons in two very popular teaching genres from the period:  recreational mathematics, which included the study of natural history (Naturkunde), and school theater.  Those involved in expanding these genres often portrayed themselves as progressive teachers who were concerned about the proliferation of violence in schooling environments, for example.  Some viewed object pedagogies as inherently liberating.  Yet, these recreational teaching genres were still highly exploitative insofar as they aimed to capitalize on the labor of young people, specifically. I consider the implications of popular ideas about instruction, objects and “serious play” in colonial settings, including their appeal to early promoters of natural and political economy by the end of the period. 

Kelly J. Whitmer is Associate Professor and Chair of History at Sewanee: The University of the South. Her first book, The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment appeared in 2015 with the University of Chicago Press, and newer articles have appeared in Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth and the edited volume (Keller/Roos) Collective Wisdom: Collecting in the Early Modern Academy (Brepols, 2022).  She recently spent two years (2020-21) at the University of Göttingen’s Center for Advanced Study completing a new book about youth, science and object pedagogy thanks to the support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. 

The Instructing Colonial Natural History Seminar Series is organised by the Instructing Natural History Research Group, Uppsala University

To register for the Zoom link, please email instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se

Image credit: Johann Redinger, Vorpforte der Schul Unterweisung (Nürnberg, 1678)