Knowing savagery: Humanity in the circuits of colonial knowledge

While the term ‘savagery’ is entirely familiar, its development and deployment in the global circuits of knowledge of the early modern and Enlightenment periods remains unclear. Previous research on savagery in this period has tended to examine it in particular geographical contexts, such as Mexico or Australia (Buchan, 2008; Weber, 2005). Conceptual histories of the term have often been tightly chronologically defined (Pagden, 1986), or focussed largely on ‘canonical’ sources in the history of Western political thought (Pocock, 2005). More work is needed on lesser-known colonial actors, such as physicians, botanists, missionaries, or merchants, and their complicated entanglements, encounters, and influences in diverse global settings (see, for example, essays in Fullagar and McDonnell, 2018).

In this issue, we contribute new research on a range of actors, in a variety of colonial contexts, who contributed to the global circulation of ideas of savagery between the Renaissance and the early 19th century. This circulation helped to shape new understandings of humanity, as European sources of authority derived from the ancient Greeks or the Bible were gradually entwined with first-hand testimony of encounters, imperial and colonial engagements, and the global transmission of verbal and printed information (and artefacts). Human diversity became a problem for investigation, and history provided one avenue for this as European colonists, administrators, and intellectuals sought to explain the present as an embodiment of the past. Savagery was one of the key concepts deployed in this endeavour. Originally a term redolent of wildness and incivility, by the 18th century it had come to operate as both a moral foundation for progress and a natural condition to be investigated according to the methods of emergent natural history – observation, description, classification, and taxonomy (Andersson Burnett and Buchan, 2018). By investigating savagery, the relationships between changing perceptions of animal nature, humanity, and race in Enlightenment thought can be traced.

Contributors to this special issue of History of the Human Sciences interrogate the ways in which ideas of savagery circulated within and between empires – Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, and British. A key feature of the analyses presented here is that savagery was a field of knowledge that drew together different intellectual domains, notably history, moral philosophy, theology, and natural history. The articles in this issue explore the imbrication of empirical observations with the claims of divine providence, historical progress, and moral virtue. The mingling of these sometimes rival, sometimes reinforcing domains provided colonial travellers and natural historians with a uniquely fractious mix of knowledge claims they deployed to constitute ‘savagery’ as a field in which they claimed a special expertise. In this way, savagery was incorporated into the intellectual framework of Enlightenment historiographic and scientific thought. Savagery, then, did not obtain its power as a projection or fantasy of European Enlightenment (such as the fabled ‘noble savage’), or as its mirror image (Ellingson, 2001). Rather, savagery played a central and formative part in Enlightenment understandings of time, history, progress, and civilisation. An intellectual history of savagery and Enlightenment is long overdue.

A guiding thread in this special issue concerns the complex circulation of natural historical knowledge of savagery within Europe, and between Europe and its various colonies. This circulation ensured that savagery remained a site of confrontation between, and debate and reinterpretation of, European colonial and Indigenous knowledge. These articles investigate how the intellectual authority of natural historians in the late Enlightenment period was founded on their positioning as arbiters and brokers of colonial knowledge. This special issue therefore contributes to the re-evaluation of natural history in the formation of empire and the process of colonisation. The articles presented here also show the ways in which savagery operated as a pivotal point of debate and intellectual ferment. By paying closer attention to the natural historical constitution of knowledge of savagery, the engagement between European and non-European peoples in charged moments of colonial encounter can be brought to the fore.

This issue begins with an article by historian of science Antonella Romano, who investigates the role of missionaries in the Iberian empires as agents of colonial knowledge transfer. Another perspective on missionary discourse is provided by historian of emotions Jacqueline Van Gent, who traces Oldendorp’s inversion of savagery to describe the horrors of slavery in the Caribbean. The tension between a providential understanding of savagery and an emergent natural historical discourse is explored by historian of Swedish colonisation in America Gunlög Fur. She suggests that a shift between these two outlooks can be discerned in the depictions of the Lenape (First Nation Americans) by Andreas Hesselius and Pehr Kalm in the first half of the 18th century. While Fur contends that the difference in outlook was expressed in markedly different emotional and sensory registers, Sarah Irving-Stonebreaker argues that there was a transition in early modern British thought from a theologically inspired knowledge aimed at compiling inventories of nature to an Enlightenment-inspired natural history based on classification. By the early 19th century, this natural historical frame began to reshape the religious conviction that savage humanity needed rescue from its animal nature.

The borders between animal nature and humanity are at issue in Silvia Sebastiani’s study of savagery in the natural history of apes in the Enlightenment. By charting the multiple avenues of information – colonial, anatomical, and commercial – through which knowledge of apes developed in Britain and Europe, Sebastiani shows how the emergence of natural history was entangled with slavery, empire, and savagery. While Britain and its Empire were important avenues and sites for knowledge formation, Hanna Hodacs and Mathias Persson’s article demonstrates the significance of these developments in Europe more broadly. They show how a Swedish natural historian and an evangelical economist in the late 18th century drew together diverse threads of knowledge, including Linnaean natural history and Scottish moral philosophy, centring on the category of savagery to communicate a wider world to Swedish audiences. By the last decades of the 18th century, the concept of savagery was itself being overwritten by notions of human variety, which would have profound implications in the century to follow. Bruce Buchan and Linda Andersson Burnett’s article concludes the special issue by excavating the complicated fabric of ideas coalescing around savagery in Scottish moral philosophy, natural history, and medicine. By connecting curricula at the University of Edinburgh and a colonial expedition to Australia at the turn of the century, their article contributes to a deeper understanding of the multiple sources that shaped the emergent discourse of race in the 19th century.