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 By the early 19th century, however, this theological framework for natural history had been superseded by an avowedly progressive vision of the relationship between humanity and nature.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

. In his writings, Francis Bacon emphasized the interrelatedness between the migration of people and knowledge, arguing that Europeans of his time had surpassed the greatest civilizations because of their ability to traverse the world freely. Concentrating on Spanish observers who investigated New Spain’s flora, this article bridges theory and practice by examining the Iberian roots of Bacon’s views. The article examines scientific approaches for acquiring bioknowledge by Iberians who specialized in European medicine, including Francisco Hernández, Juan de Cárdenas and (...) Francisco Ximénez. While the article recognizes the contribution of travellers and expatriates to Spain’s bioprospecting project, it also points to the ways in which the limitations of the transfer of botanical information was acknowledged and discusses its meaning. By presenting the complexities in the communication of knowledge, I argue, naturalists in the colonies could highlight their unique vantage point in relation to “armchair” specialists in the metropole. (shrink)