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
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