This article analyses the construction and dissemination of natural-history knowledge in the eighteenth century. It takes the mapping and narration of Orkney as a case study, focusing on the local minister and amateur natural-historian George Low and his network of patron-client relationships with such prominent natural historians as Joseph Banks and Thomas Pennant. It focuses too on Low’s network of informants and assistants among local island farmers, and argues that canonical natural-history texts were the products of collaborative and interdependent processes that included a large number of actors from all strata of society. To conceptualise how natural-history knowledge was created in this period, the article applies the metaphoric description ‘an ecology of knowledge’. This approach enables a focus on a large number of actors, their collaboration and influence on each other, while also paying attention to asymmetrical power relationships in which competition and appropriation took place.
When Australia was circumnavigated by Europeans in 1801–02, French and British natural historians were unsure how to describe the Indigenous peoples who inhabited the land they charted and catalogued. Ideas of race and of savagery were freely deployed by both British and French, but a discursive shift was underway. While the concept of savagery had long been understood to apply to categories of human populations deemed to be in want of more historically advanced ‘civilisation’, the application of this term in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was increasingly being correlated with the emerging terminology of racial characteristics. The terminology of race was still remarkably fluid, and did not always imply fixed physical or mental endowments or racial hierarchies. Nonetheless, by means of this concept, natural historians began to conceptualise humanity as subject not only to historical gradations, but also to the environmental and climatic variations thought to determine race. This in turn meant that the degree of savagery or civilisation of different peoples could be understood through new criteria that enabled physical classification, in particular by reference to skin colour, hair, facial characteristics, skull morphology, or physical stature: the archetypal criteria of race. While race did not replace the language of savagery, in the early years of the 19th century savagery was re-inscribed by race.
How was 'savagery' constituted as a field of colonial knowledge? As Europe's empires expanded, their reach was marked not only by the colonisation of new territories but by the colonisation of knowledge. Path-breaking scholarship since the 1990s has shown how European knowledge of colonised territories and peoples developed from diverse travel writings, missionary texts, and exploration narratives from the 16th century onwards (Abulafia, 2008; Armitage, 2000; De Campos Francozo, 2017; Pratt, 1992). Of prime importance in this work has been the investigation of the pre-positioning of colonised peoples within categories derived from European traditions of historical, religious, legal, and political thought as either 'savages' or 'barbarians' (Richardson, 2018; Sebastiani, 2013).