The birth of natural history has traditionally been linked to European encounters with the natural world in the Renaissance and early modern period—especially “new” worlds engaged through colonization. But challenges to that basic premise have emerged with the recent explosion of interest in natural history’s checkered history. Scholars have moved their sights toward natural history taking place beyond Europe at that time—from Asia to Africa to Mesoamerica. They have unearthed invisible laborers, drawing attention to the many unsung Indigenous experts, enslaved collectors, and lay people with deep expertise of flora and fauna, and have put the questionable collecting practices of museums under the microscope. Moreover, they have sought to redefine what natural history even is.
Does natural history encompass merely the study of plants, rocks, and animals, or does it include people and spiritual forces too? Is it a particular subject matter, or rather a way of knowing and being in the world? And how might we reconcile the wonder and excitement that natural history invites with the violence it has so often occasioned?
The following reading list offers an initial primer on some of the major scholarly trends in the vibrant history of natural history. The list emphasizes the years prior to 1800, natural history’s formative era. As evident from the range of journals sampled here, the relevance of natural history reaches far beyond the history of science.
Marwa Elshakry, “When Science Became Western: Historiographical Reflections,” Isis 101, no. 1 (March 2010): 98–109.
Although not exclusively focused on natural history, this essay looks at the construction of “science” as a category, particularly one that’s broken into “the West and the rest.” Elshakry argues that the very notion of “Western science” relied on the conceptualizations of actors beyond Europe, particularly in Egypt and China in the nineteenth century. She estranges Western science by foregrounding how those beyond its purview defined it, sized it up, and offered alternative sciences. The piece is both an essential corrective to the Eurocentrism of the history of science and a call to examine the discipline’s basic assumptions and categories.
Bruno J. Strasser, “Collecting Nature: Practices, Styles, and Narratives,” Osiris 27, no. 1 (2012): 303–340.
Strasser subverts a familiar narrative among historians of science: that natural history met its demise in the late nineteenth century thanks to the rise of experimentalism and the subsequent hegemony of molecular biology. Strasser challenges this narrative by showing how collections have shaped both experimentalism and natural history since the Renaissance, while also suggesting how today’s data-driven sciences, and especially their vast databases, resemble natural historical collecting.
Brian W. Ogilvie, “The Many Books of Nature: Renaissance Naturalists and Information Overload,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (January 2003): 29–40.
While most of the case studies on this reading list feature the eighteenth century onward, Ogilvie shifts our attention to Renaissance natural history, beginning in the late fifteenth century. Natural history in this period focused on comprehensive empirical description over the arrangement and taxonomy that would become the hallmark of eighteenth-century science. With an emphasis on botany, Ogilvie’s work is foundational for establishing the roots of European natural history while also avoiding a teleology that leads straight to Linnaeus.
Londa Schiebinger, “Why Mammals are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in Eighteenth-Century Natural History,” The American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (April 1993): 382–411.
Schiebinger puts gender politics squarely at the center of eighteenth-century natural history by puzzling out why Linnaeus devised a class called Mammalia, literally “of the breast.” Other classes he conceived, like Aves, meaning “bird,” were more neutral. But for our own group of beasts he used a reproductive trait that was not even functional among half its members (nor present at all among platypuses and echidnas). The surprising answer has to do with the history of wet nursing, racial anxiety, and the cultural possibilities of breasts. At this historical moment, middle- and upper-class European women were increasingly urged to nurse their own babies for growing fear that wet nurses—usually of lower social rank, and sometimes another race—contributed to infant mortality. Linnaeus, a physician, proved a key figure in this social crusade, which coincided with women’s mounting political disenfranchisement. Pinning humanity’s natural state to the breast helped justify the sexual division of labor in European society by suggesting a woman’s natural state was to suckle and raise her babies. As Schiebinger shows in this essay (among many other samples of her scholarship), gender lay at the heart of eighteenth-century conceptions of nature. Natural history was far from value neutral.
Marcy Norton, “The Chicken or the Iegue: Human-Animal Relationships and the Columbian Exchange,” The American Historical Review 120, no. 1 (February 2015): 28–60.
Focusing on the Columbian Exchange, Norton orients her essay around the Carib concept of iegue—a term with some similarities to the Western idea of a pet but which denoted individual beings who had been adopted and tamed, regardless of species. She does so to “recover ideas about animal agency from non-European perspectives” and counteract longstanding narratives, made popular by writers like Jared Diamond, who equate domestication (as it has been traditionally understood) with modernization. Although the essay ventures beyond natural history proper, it is a deep reflection on Indigenous subjectivities and animal personhood. It also dangles a tantalizing suggestion: European notions of pet keeping may in fact be based on Amerindian traditions.
Michael Gaudio, “Swallowing the Evidence: William Bartram and the Limits of Enlightenment,” Winterthur Portfolio 36, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 1–17.
Art historians have made rich contributions to this field, as showcased in Michael Gaudio’s essay on early American naturalist William Bartram and his travels in the deep south. Previous discussions of Bartram and peer artist-naturalists have highlighted how their art sought to make the natural world highly visible and knowable. By contrast, Gaudio considers what Bartram withheld from view—as emblematized in the depictions of sink holes, swallowing alligators, and other obscured creatures and looming voids in his artworks.
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Kathleen S. Murphy, “Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History, and the British Slave Trade,” The William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 4 (2013): 637–670.
Murphy’s oeuvre has revolutionized the study of natural history’s entanglements with slavery. In this article, Murphy dives into the archives surrounding London-based apothecary James Petiver. Although Petiver never stepped foot beyond Europe, he amassed a global collection of curiosities, from seashells to plants to human remains. But the provenance of these far-flung objects nevertheless leans toward a shared point of origin: they were collected in or near slave ports. Petiver relied on captains of slave ships, surgeons on those ships (whose job it was to keep human property alive), and very often enslaved collectors themselves to compile his natural history collection. His story raises disquieting questions about the origins of the modern natural sciences and the future of many specimens held by museums today with deep ties to the slave trade.
Christopher M. Parsons, “The Natural History of Colonial Science: Joseph-François Lafitau’s Discovery of Ginseng and Its Afterlives,” The William and Mary Quarterly 73, no. 1 (January 2016): 37–72.
Christopher Parsons narrates how Jesuit Joseph-François Lafitau’s “discovery” of ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) in New France drew intimately from the knowledge of Mohawk women. Lafitau’s dissemination of this Indigenous knowledge, according to Parsons, was an exemplar of collaboration across cultures. Yet the afterlives of this partnership were devastating, as markets hungry for ginseng sent foragers to ravage North American landscapes for the plant. Parsons deftly combines environmental history, history of science, and contemporary scientific literature—including the complexities of incorporating Indigenous expertise and ideas about gender into European science. The result is a cautionary tale about the globalization of local, Indigenous knowledge.
Cameron B. Strang, “Violence, Ethnicity, and Human Remains during the Second Seminole War,” The Journal of American History 100, no. 4 (March 2014): 973–994.
Strang puts the history of science and the history of war in dialogue by chronicling a bloody truth behind natural history collections: many specimens of human remains were acquired through violent means, including scalping. Focusing on Florida during the Second Seminole War (1835–1842), Strang reveals with great nuance how both Euro-Americans and Seminoles participated in mutual scalping, leading each group to conceive of a distinct Seminole ethnic identity in this period. Strang’s article contributes to a growing corpus of scholarship invested in documenting state-sanctioned violence in the name of science, while also considering the naturalists who died in the name of making natural knowledge.
Lorraine Daston, “Type Specimens and Scientific Memory,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (Autumn 2004): 153–182.
Lorraine Daston draws our attention to the emergence of an odd idea that has become a gold standard in today’s biological science: the type specimen, whereby entire species are defined by an individual—even if it is atypical. Daston charts how the need for type specimens arose from the “Babel” of synonymy that proliferated in the nineteenth century, particularly in the study of botany, even though such specimens represented a virtual reversal of prior botanical norms. Type specimens constitute, in Daston’s estimation, a radical and nonobvious solution for representing multitudes and rendering the abstract via the concrete—a process she terms “metaphysics in action,” and akin to representative democracy.
Sadiah Qureshi, “Robert Gordon Latham, Displayed Peoples, and the Natural History of Race, 1854–1866,” The Historical Journal 54, no. 1 (March 2011): 143–166.
Qureshi has written widely on the connections among science, race, and empire. In this piece, she places world’s fairs and the study of human variation in conversation. While nineteenth-century ethnological exhibits of colonized people have long been regarded as mass culture displays of scientific knowledge—rather than productive of scientific knowledge themselves—Qureshi shows how displayed peoples became scientific specimens. Through the case study of physician Robert Gordon Latham and London’s Crystal Palace, Qureshi reveals how human models and individual people became raw material for the rising sciences of ethnology and anthropology, and with them, racial science—including unwilling dismemberment and dissection upon their deaths. Qureshi’s work here, along with her article on Sara Baartman, is essential reading for unveiling the ties between public exhibition and racial violence.
Britt Rusert, “Delany’s Comet: Fugitive Science and the Speculative Imaginary of Emancipation,” American Quarterly 65, no. 4 (December 2013): 799–829.
In both this essay and her 2017 book Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture, Rusert formulates the notion of fugitive science to uncover how Black thinkers mobilized against racial science to form a new, subterranean science of their own. She contributes to a broadening of science’s very definition, one that is “purposively vast” and politically engaged. In this essay, for example, Rusert examines how Black writers coopted the microscope. Fugitive scientists used this tool—one typically associated with dissection and racial science—to instead unleash imaginative speculative possibilities for world making and reclaim human skin as an object of study. Elsewhere in her work, Rusert also reconstructs the natural history collections of Black women like Sarah Mapps Douglass.
Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936,” Social Text 11 (Winter 1984–1985): 20–64.
This classic essay gives a history-qua-epic of Carl Akeley’s taxidermy work, as embodied in the mountain gorilla diorama of New York City’s American Museum of Natural History. Through their naturalism, dioramas seem to faithfully replicate particular landscapes and scenes of animals, offering a keyhole into nature “as it really is.” But Haraway shows their deeply biased and constructed nature. For example, aged or diseased animals are not welcome, and an adult male usually anchors the scene as the apex of its kind. By killing animals for exhibition and subduing their bodies in such tableaux, taxidermy celebrates the subjugation of nature and colonial exploitation, all while effacing the African labor undergirding some dioramas, as with the mountain gorilla scene. Haraway ultimately reads the diorama as an expression of the anxieties of white male masculinity in the face of industrialization and racial mixing.
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Jung Lee, “Between Universalism and Regionalism: Universal Systematics from Imperial Japan,” The British Journal for the History of Science 48, no. 4 (December 2015): 661–684.
Lee uses the case of Japanese botanist Nakai Takenoshin (1882–1952) and his service on the International Committee on Botanical Nomenclature to deconstruct European science’s claims to universality from non-European perspectives. As a discipline, botany has always sought a universal system of taxonomy. Yet to do so it must rely on what are often highly localized studies of plants. While Nakai aligned himself with European botanists, he also developed a regional systematics based on colonized Korean plants, eventually claiming it as a new universal that might be used to justify continued Japanese expansion. The article wrests the monopoly on scientific colonialism away from the West.
Philip J. Deloria, “The New World of the Indigenous Museum,” Daedalus 147, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 106–115.
Deloria sketches a history of museums in the West—stretching from the curiosity cabinets of four centuries ago to the rise of tribal museums today. He puts Native Americans and the abuses museums have long committed against them front and center. For from their very beginnings, the progenitors of natural history museums turned “the Indigenous” into a category associated with primitivism and a type of object to collect—whether baskets and wampum, or the sacred artifacts and interred bodies of raided graves. Deloria considers how Native-led institutions like the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian disrupt entrenched museological conventions by privileging strategies that are nonlinear, polyvocal, and apt to put viewers in reciprocal relations with the objects on view. His article also provides a useful primer on NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, as a historic corrective to past collecting practices.
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