From Eden to savagery and civilization: British colonialism and humanity in the development of natural history,ca. 1600–1840

Introduction

In October 1667, Henry Oldenburg (1619–77), the secretary of the Royal Society of London, wrote to John Winthrop Jr, the governor of Connecticut, to remind his friend that

though you are in New-England;…even at so great a distance, you may doe that Illustrious Company [the Royal Society] a great Service…[by] communicating to them all the Observables of both Nature and Art, [that] occur in the place you are. (Vol. 3, 1965–86: 525)

Winthrop was one of many correspondents of the Royal Society, sometimes Fellows themselves, who would send back ‘rarities’, ‘curiosities’, and detailed knowledge from colonial locations to London. This transfer of knowledge was tangible and haphazard; letters and wooden boxes were shipped back across the Atlantic. The correspondence recorded natural histories of places and peoples throughout the Americas, while the wooden boxes contained berries, jars of soil samples, rocks, and occasionally even animal specimens.

How did naturalists like Oldenburg understand the significance of knowledge collected in the New World? What was their purpose in compiling these natural histories? 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 the practice of natural history and the concept of humanity (as Fur also discusses in this issue). 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 By the early 19th century, however, this theological framework for natural history had been superseded by a progressive vision of the relationship between humanity and nature. No longer ontologically distinct from the rest of creation, the human became the subject of natural history writing in a new way. In effect, humanity was understood to be in a process of development from nature – a condition frequently described as mere savagery – towards civilization.

This article examines selected examples of this long-term transformation to illustrate how it related to the development of English and British colonization. I argue that the spread and intensification of English colonialism throughout this period created a new strand of natural history writing that focused upon understanding and creating governable colonial subjects. I begin in the mid-17th century, when a group of prominent natural philosophers, including Robert Boyle (1627–91) and his colleagues in the Royal Society of London, pursued natural history writing through their colonial connections, establishing themselves as brokers of colonial natural knowledge. They conceived of their task as a contribution to a Protestant epistemological project to recover humanity’s pre-lapsarian knowledge of nature.

In the second part of the article, I explore the ways in which the 18th-century spread and intensification of British colonialism placed new demands on natural history as the form of knowledge able to reveal nature as the original domain from which humans developed towards their rational mastery of nature. Here I focus on the British missionary and naturalist in the Pacific, John Williams (1796–1839), and the American physician Benjamin Rush (1746–1813). Each compiled information that rendered colonial subjects knowable by classifying and categorizing their stages of progress. In the final section of the article, I argue that a measure of the predominance of this new colonial and natural historical knowledge, and its subsuming of earlier theological models of natural history, can be illustrated by John Williams’ uses of the concept of savagery.

Eden

Some recent scholarly works have called attention to the many connections between natural history and English colonialism (for example, Drayton, 2000; Gascoigne, 2009; Irving, 2016). One of the most important figures in the 17th-century context is the natural philosopher Robert Boyle, now famous as one of the founders of modern chemistry, as well as the experimental method, who served on the board of the English East India Company, held shares in the Hudson’s Bay Company, and served as president of the Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, a missionary society that sponsored the translation of the Bible into the indigenous Algonquian language. He also served on the Council for Foreign Plantations. Boyle’s intellectual predecessor, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), wrote Novum Organum, the foundational anglophone text on the method of natural history writing. Bacon also held shares in the Virginia Company and the Newfoundland Company, and wrote extensively on the issue of colonizing Ireland. Moreover, many of Boyle’s contemporaries in the Hartlib Circle, as well as those in the Royal Society of London such as Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) and Henry Oldenburg, gained their information from corresponding with merchants, sailors, and governors in England’s colonies (Irving, 2016; Keller, 2012).

These naturalists functioned as brokers and arbiters of natural knowledge. But why were they so interested in the New World? In the chapter ‘Containing Various Observations About Diamonds’ within his diverse collection of scientific experiments entitled Experimenta et Observationes Physicae (Vol. 11, 1999–2000) is Boyle’s most succinct statement about his interest in English maritime trade. He referred to ‘the Opportunity I had of being one of the Committee or Directors of the English East-India Company, (whereto the desire of Knowledge, not Profit, drew me)’ (Boyle, Vol. 11, 1999–2000: 377). Boyle’s express motivation was to collect knowledge. The newly traversed oceans heralded the dawn of a new era, and for English Protestants in particular, the opening up of the New World resonated with profound religious significance. The opening-up of the geographic world, and the expanding territories of knowledge, signified that humankind was finally beginning to recover the perfect encyclopaedic knowledge of the whole of creation that humanity had once possessed, but had lost in the Fall. ¹

The theology of the Fall, and of the final restoration of the world in the new creation, was central to the imagery of 17th-century anglophone natural philosophy. Historians of science have long pointed out the significance of the frontispiece of Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, for example. ² The frontispiece shows the boundaries of the known world, signified by the Pillars of Hercules, being traversed by a ship. Underneath is the Biblical inscription from the Old Testament prophet Daniel (Dan. 12:4): ‘multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia [many will travel to and fro, and knowledge will increase]’. This referred to the prophet’s pronouncement about one of the events leading up to the final days of the world, before Christ’s return. As Bacon (2004[ca. 1620]: 151) explained in the New Organon, the ‘thorough exploration of the world (which so many long voyages have apparently achieved or are presently achieving) and the growth of the sciences would meet in the same age’.

Bacon’s successors also held steadfastly to this idea. Robert Boyle, who was probably the most famous of Bacon’s heirs to the new natural philosophy, described his overarching project as the re-creation of ‘The Empire of Man over inferior Creatures’ (Vol. 6, 1999–2000: 406). The ‘empire’ Boyle mentioned here denoted the original dominion that Adam commanded over nature in the Garden of Eden. Indeed, Boyle described the purpose of natural philosophy in explicitly religious terms:

Tis recorded in the Book of Genesis, the Design of God in making man, was, that men should Subdue the / Earth (as vast a Globe as ’tis) and have dominion over the Fish of the Sea, and over the Fowle of the Air, and over the Cattle, and over all the Earth, and (to speak Summarily) over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth. (Boyle, Vol. 11, 1999–2000: 108)

During this period, natural philosophers based in London began to create networks of correspondents to circulate knowledge back to London from the New World. One of these was Samuel Hartlib (1600–62), a Prussian émigré who fled Prussia for London during the Thirty Years’ War. Once in England, Hartlib established a manuscript service providing intelligence to the exiled English Protestants who were dispersed through continental Europe. Using the term ‘intelligencer’, Hartlib established himself as a human hub of information. His extensive collection of surviving papers reveals that he began to correspond with a significant number of men who were either born in, or travelled to, the New World. These included the alchemist and Bermudan-born George Starkey; the natural philosopher and governor of Connecticut, John Winthrop Jr; Edward Digges, the governor of Virginia; and the New England physician John Child, who later came to work with members of Hartlib’s circle on the project of surveying those other English Atlantic colonies in Ireland (Irving, 2016: 47–68).

One of the Hartlib Circle’s best-known friends and allies, unsurprisingly, was Robert Boyle. Boyle explicitly called for the compilation of natural histories that drew upon information collected from traders and travellers, particularly those to the Americas:

If Schollars and Travellers were more generally conversant, the History of Nature would be far better adorn’d with lively representations of Plants, Animals, Meteors, &c. and also by several parts of the Art of Navigation. (Boyle, Vol. 6, 1999–2000: 451)

Hans Sloane, for example, was deeply interested in human cultures and, in addition to his botanical specimens, collected ethnographic curiosities during and after his two-year stay in Jamaica between 1687 and 1689. As James Delbourgo has shown, Sloane was particularly interested in African peoples, and his collection included artefacts specific to the institution of slavery (Delbourgo, 2007). Of particular interest was the nature of racial difference – could the darker skins of Africans be accounted for by climate, or were they a distinct race of men? These interests were echoed by some of Sloane’s colleagues in the Royal Society of London; a meeting in 1690 discussed precisely this question (ibid.: 11).

Boyle, however, was most interested in gleaning information about the non-human natural world. For this he drew extensively upon the testimony from employees of colonial companies, as well as merchants and governors of colonies. In the preface to Observations and Experiments about the Saltiness of the Sea (1673), Boyle (quoted in Deacon, 1997: 119) told his audience that he had gleaned the information from ‘Sea Captains, Pilots, Planters, and other Travellers to remote parts’. Like his near contemporary, John Locke, Boyle’s contact with these various travellers was the fruit of his ‘years [as] a member of the Council appointed by the King of Great Britain to manage the business of all the English Colonies in the Isles and Continent of America, and of being for two or three years one of that Court of Committees (as they call it) that has the superintending of all the affairs of the justly famous East-Indian Company of England’ (ibid., original emphasis).

One illustration of Boyle’s belief in the benefits of knowledge gained from colonization was his description of the potential benefits of the commodities of sugar and tobacco. In The Christian Virtuoso, Boyle asked his readers to

consider what great benefits accrue not only to single persons, but to whole communities, and sometimes even to nations by two or three vegetables, as many reptiles and insects, and as few minerals.…The first of these is sugar, made of the express juice of the sugar cane, which is brought both from the West and East Indies, and that in such quantities, that the little island of Barbados alone furnishes Europe with the lading of many score ships in a year.…The other plant, though reckoned but a weed, makes at this day a great part of the commerce between Europe and some American country, especially Virginia; the latter of which country sends yearly to England alone a considerable fleet freighted almost only with tobacco.…All which improvements ought to excite man’s gratitude to him [God] [who]…made those creatures to his hand, and endowed him with a rational faculty and fit organs to exercise his plenary dominion over them. (Boyle, Vol. 12, 1999–2000: 444–5, original emphasis)

A close reading of the Royal Society’s periodical, the Philosophical Transactions, reveals that in each of the 22 issues between its first publication in 1665 and 1700, there was at least one report pertaining to the natural environment of the New World, as well as ethnographic articles or discussions. The format and style of these reports varied. The most common type were copies of letters sent to the Society from correspondents in the Americas. A typical example is the letter from John Clayton, the Rector of Croston at Wakefield, ‘giving a farther account of the Soil, and other Observables of Virginia’ (Clayton, 1693: 978). Ethnographic discussions of the customs of indigenous and black peoples were also common. A typical illustration is the ‘account of the Moorish way of dressing their meat (with other remarks) in West Barbary, from Cape Spartel to Cape de Geer’, published in 1699 (Jones, 1699: 248–58). ³

The Royal Society also founded a Repository for its collected objects. Under the auspices of Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712), the collection became one of the earliest museums in the anglophone world. Unlike the British Museum, which was first opened to the public almost a century later in 1759, the Repository was not open to the public. Part of the collection has survived, however, and remains on display today, housed in the Ashmolean Museum. A letter from John Winthrop Jr to Henry Oldenburg described the kinds of objects from the New World that the Repository collected:

There is in a broad round box a strang kind of fish w[hi]ch was taken by a fisherman [in]…Massachuset Bay in New England.…There is in an other box a fish w[hi]ch is full of prickles w[hi]ch they call a seahedghog; as also a small flying fish. (Oldenburg, Vol. 6, 1965–86: 256–7)

Civilization

This theological motivation for natural history collecting and writing persisted in the anglophone world until the early to mid-18th century, when the British were becoming more established in their colonies. The exigencies of governing an increasingly commercial empire, particularly in the context of international rivalry, placed new demands upon natural knowledge. The emerging British state, struggling to maintain control over its colonies, required information about the people it governed. The British were not the only empire with this problem. Antonella Romano’s article in this issue illustrates just how important it was for Spanish and Portuguese missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries to produce natural historical inventories of God’s creation. As part of that ambition, missionaries were especially concerned to place newly encountered human societies in the order of creation. These earlier natural historical inventories tended to focus on the spiritual and moral implications of curious differences among human populations. By the 18th century, a more systematic approach had begun to emerge that centred on the explanation of differences and commonalities throughout humanity. In short, the idea of humanity increasingly became the subject of historical enquiry (Sebastiani, 2013: 45–71). A key problem this emergent form of knowledge sought to confront was how diverse peoples could be made governable.

As Buchan and Andersson Burnett argue in this issue, Europe’s Enlightenment gave rise to a concept of humanity defined by the capacity for reason and susceptibility to sensibility. The effort to understand the evident diversity with which reason and feeling were expressed underwrote the emergence of a new form of natural historical writing that took influential form in the work of Scottish Enlightenment authors Adam Smith (1723–90), Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), and Lord Kames (1696–1782) (Palmeri, 2008). Often referred to as conjectural or stadial history, this was a genre of historiography emerging from Montesquieu’s universal, comparative method of analysing the variety and mutability of social mores, catalysed by Rousseau’s provocative positing of a benign original, natural human condition. Stadial history charted a universal path of human development from simple savagery to advanced civilization. It held that all human societies were, at their inception, very similar, and that human difference could be accounted for by understanding the different forms of development expressed in social mores and manners, as well as political institutions and laws. As Silvia Sebastiani (2013: 45) has explained, ‘differences between peoples were ascribed to broad historical and sociological categories for the classification of societies: the stages of the hunter-savage, of the shepherd-barbarian, of agriculture, and of commerce’. The explanatory categories, and the engines of historical change, were understood as long-term processes: the development of agriculture, trade, and ‘manners’. The business of governing colonies stimulated and helped to institutionalize these emerging types of writing, which were grounded in the historicization and naturalization of humanity.

The Scottish Enlightenment has come to be seen through the lens of David Hume’s argument that humans were like any other sentient animal, provoked to thought and action by the operation of external forces upon our senses that obviated the need for any notion of an innate soul (Hume, 1777[1755]: 1–5). Other Scottish intellectuals, however, saw nothing inconsistent between natural and historical explanations of human diversity, and a profound faith in divine providence. Some theorists of stadial or conjectural history were able to accommodate ideas about humanity, nature, and providence in more experientially grounded assumptions about the universe and humanity’s place within it, and employed ideas of divine creation and purpose as central forces behind historical development. Ordained members of the kirk like Adam Ferguson, William Robertson (1721–93), and John Walker (1731–1803) were leading exponents of stadial theory and natural history, while others, such as Thomas Reid (1710–96) and James Beattie (1735–1803), argued that human progress was due to the presence and cultivation of an innate moral sense, divinely instilled in all human beings (Sebastiani, 2013: 107).

Whether from divine or natural causation, the idea that humanity could be understood according to a universal model of historical, stage-like progress became a distinguishing feature of Scottish thought and pedagogy in the 18th century. As Andersson Burnett and Buchan (2018) have shown, the University of Edinburgh’s medical school was particularly significant to the development of stadial or conjectural histories. An extensive cohort of physician-naturalists trained in medicine at Edinburgh subsequently became influential in a variety of colonial settings. Among them was Benjamin Rush (1746–1813). ⁴ In addition to medicine, Rush was very interested in conjectural history, and penned a study of the development of Pennsylvania, entitled ‘The Progress of Population, Agriculture, Manners and Government in Pennsylvania’ (Rush, 1787).

Rush’s essay outlined the social and economic development of Pennsylvania’s European immigrant population, who were primarily Scots-Irish and Germans. The first settlers, Rush argued, were solitary farmers, who lived in many ways like the indigenous inhabitants. Unfortunately, in his eyes, their moral development matched their rudimentary economic state. Rush mentioned that they paid no taxes, failed to attend church, were idle, and drank too much. The Irishmen had ‘little knowledge of civilisation among them’, and needed to learn modern living and farming (Rush, quoted in McCoy, 2012: 151). The more recent wave of German immigration was faring slightly better. According to Rush, Pennsylvania’s was a society in the highest stage of civilization, yet still in need of moral improvement. Rush’s vision for the development of polite culture in Pennsylvania was premised on the role of education; colleges would engage in ‘softening the tempers of our turbulent [Irish and German] brethren’ (Rush, 1787: 63).

In his conjectural history of Pennsylvania, Rush concerned himself primarily with the European immigrant society, but he was also deeply aware that the process of colonization brought those peoples into contact with First Nations and African slave populations. The articles by Sebastiani, Hodacs and Persson, and Van Gent in this issue amply demonstrate the centrality of colonization and slavery to the development of natural history. For Rush, a medical practitioner, a key problem for natural historians was to understand the diseases of both native peoples and black slaves. Their bodies were peculiarly susceptible, it seemed, to certain types of disease. How could the colonial societies manage these different bodies? How were slave and Native American bodies different to white and European bodies? In short, one necessity was an explanation of disease and contagion that drew upon the type of analytical categories that could account for natural factors and their influence on the human body: climate, customs and manners, and the historical development of civilizations (Chaplin, 2003: 36–78).

In 1774, Rush gave an anniversary oration to the American Philosophical Society entitled ‘An Inquiry into the Natural History of Medicine Among the Indians of North America, and a Comparative View of Their Diseases and Remedies, With Those of Civilized Nations’ (Rush: 1789). The particular types of diseases that affected peoples he called ‘Indians’ were directly related to the fact that they existed in the ‘savage’ stage of civilization. Closely related to the need to explain the relationship between disease and culture was the need to explain that between societies and their practices of medicine, for it was obvious to the Europeans that their own practices were quite different to the ways in which indigenous and slave societies treated disease. Scots-born Peter Middleton (d. 1781), who graduated from Edinburgh and practiced in New York after migrating to America, wrote an enquiry into the history of medicine, and made observations about the savage and barbarous nations of the day, which included Native Americans and Africans. He noted the increasing esteem and status accorded to practitioners of medicine as societies became more civilized. ‘In short’, he observed, ‘all Nations, as they emerged from Barbarism and Ignorance, and improved in civil Polity and Knowledge, have encouraged and respected the Learned in the Healing Art’ (Middleton, 1769: 40).

This was the kind of writing that was stimulated by the colonial need to understand and govern indigenous, slave, and settler subjects. The nature of human societies at different stages of development was of particular interest. We see another illustration in the British exploration of the Pacific periphery. In the Pacific, surgeons and naturalists were interested in whether the peoples of Pacific societies they encountered could be made into colonial subjects, which in turn depended upon their own degree of civilization. William Anderson, the surgeon on Cook’s third voyage (and who, incidentally, also shared the Edinburgh medical training of Rush and his Atlantic friends), gave an account of the Van Diemen’s Land Aborigines encountered during the voyage of the Resolution in 1777. His first observation about their state of development was that ‘they were even ignorant of the use of fish hooks’ and other practical tools (Anderson, 1967[1777]: 787). In this respect, they compared unfavourably to ‘the inhabitants of Terra del Fuego, who have not invention sufficient to make cloathing to defend themselves from the rigour of their climate’ (ibid.).

The concept of savagery was central to this emerging genre of natural history writing, which took the variety among humanity as its subject (Buchan, 2008: 17–33). Savagery served as an explanatory principle, locating human societies on a universal trajectory of historical development. One effect of its salience was the degree to which the concept was employed by missionaries in the early 19th century, who produced their own, explicitly Christian, natural histories. John Williams provides one illustration. After a dramatic conversion to Christianity in his late teens, Williams volunteered as a missionary with the London Missionary Society. Ordained in 1816, he travelled to Raiatea where, together with his wife and colleagues, he established schools for the local children, and translated the New Testament into the local language. Williams and his wife travelled extensively in Polynesia, and then to the Cook Islands and Samoa, where they introduced Christianity in 1830. After a return to Britain in the mid-1830s, Williams then undertook another mission to the New Hebrides, where he was killed by islanders on Erromango in November 1838.

While in Britain, Williams oversaw the printing of his translation of the New Testament into the language of Rarotonga. He also published an account of his travels, in which he pursued a natural historical and ethnographic description of the islanders, particularly those of Tahiti. The subtitle of Williams’ Narrative of Missionary Enterprises (1837) was Remarks Upon the Natural History of the Islands, Origin, Languages, Traditions, and Usages of the Inhabitants. Williams’ work was part of a surge of missionary publications relished by British audiences. Before Williams, another missionary, William Ellis (1794–1872), published a three-volume natural history of the South Pacific entitled Polynesian Researches. Ellis provided a detailed and comprehensive account of the islands’ histories, natural and human, including that of the native flora and fauna, topography, and geography, as well as a history of European presence in the region. He also gave an extensive description of the inhabitants of various islands, their polytheism and idolatry, their tribal structure, and their manners and customs. (See Ellis, 1831, 1832a, 1832b.)

Williams’ and Ellis’ fascination with the Pacific islanders’ manners and customs occurred in the context of the intellectual shift sketched in this paper, in which natural history became the chief means for locating humanity within nature. While Williams and Ellis were not yet at the point of taking religion per se as the subject of systematic knowledge, their ethnographic comparisons of religion focused on the way it was deeply enmeshed in the habits and customs of human society.

To Williams’ mind, there was no conflict between his work as a missionary and his work as a natural historian and ethnographer. Indeed, this is a good illustration of the way in which natural history existed at the intersection of overlapping domains of knowledge, such as natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and ethnography. Williams paid careful attention to recording detailed facts, endeavouring to provide an accurate account of the nature of islander life. Referring to himself in the third person, Williams (1837: iv) wrote:

It would have been comparatively easy to have filled the volume with general statements, instead of descending to minute particulars; but mere outlines and sketches could convey a very inadequate impression of the state of society.…He has therefore endeavoured as exactly as possible to describe the scenes he has witness of as they appeared.

It is important to note here the long history of British uses of savagery since at least the early 17th century. The business of governing Gaels in Scotland, and Catholic Celts in Ireland, was linked to their construction as savage subjects. The cultural, economic, and social practices of what were essentially frontier societies in the highlands meant that they were scorned and frequently referred to as barbarous and uncivilized (Ohlmeyer, 2001: 130–1; see also Canny, 2001: 24). Indeed, as Colin Calloway has shown, missionaries, including the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), employed policies ‘to promote moral, educational and spiritual rehabilitation of Indians and Highlanders’ (Calloway, 2008: 67). Williams’ use of the term savagery, therefore, continued a well-established tradition, infused by Scottish Enlightenment stadial or conjectural explanations of human progress.

In common with the luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment, and especially William Robertson (1759: 3–51), Williams perceived an intimate connection between Christianity and historical progress. Christianity and civilization accompanied each other, and yet Williams also maintained that Christianity could act as something of a driving force to expedite the processes of civilization. As he explained,

whether you find them on the pinnacle of civilization or in the vortex of barbarism; inhabiting the densely-populated cities of the east, or roaming the wilds of an African wilderness; whether on the wide continent, or the fertile islands of the sea…all need the Gospel; and nothing but the Gospel can elevate them from the degradation into which they have been sunk by superstition and sin. (Williams, 1837: 568–9)

Williams maintained that the transformation effected by Christianity occurred not only on a societal level but also on an individual level, improving men and women’s demeanour and character. This is illustrated in Williams’ reflections on the epidemic of infanticide, which he saw as characteristic of savagery. Williams recounted an interaction he had with several islander women and a visitor to the islands, whom he refers to as Mr G. Bennett. According to Williams, the women admitted that they had, before converting to Christianity, killed several of their own infants. The extract is worth quoting at length, because it reveals the way in which Williams maintained that the conversion of the islander women to Christianity had transformed their character such that they were now ‘respectable’, and no longer capable of committing infanticide:

Three women were sitting in the room at the time, making European garments, under Mrs. W.’s direction; and, after replying to Mr. Bennett’s inquiries, I said ‘I have no doubt but that each of these women have destroyed some of their children’. Looking at them with an expression of surprise and incredulity, Mr. B. exclaimed ‘impossible! Such motherly, respectable women could never have been guilty of so great an atrocity’.…Addressing the first, I said to her, ‘Friend, how many children have you destroyed?’ She was startled at my question, and at first charged me with unkindness, in harrowing up her feelings by bringing the destruction of her babes to her remembrance; but, upon hearing the object of my inquiry, she replied, with a faltering voice, ‘I have destroyed nine’. The second, with eyes suffused with tears, said ‘I have destroyed seven’. (Williams, 1837: 560–1, original emphasis)

To Williams’ mind, savagery was a condition redolent of the animal world, a violation of what it meant to be human. Humanity was realized only through civilization, for which Christianity was a central force in bridling emotional sensibility, an idea central to Scottish Enlightenment understandings of humanity (Haakonssen, 2003). As Williams (1837: 568) put it, ‘the sun may shine for ages, with all its boundless beneficence, and yet fail to kindle in man a spirit of benevolence that the earth may pour forth her abundance, and not teach man kindness; that the brute creation, impelled only by instinct, may exhibit parental fondness, and man fail to learn the lesson’. Moreover, when explaining the reasons for the rise of Christianity among the South Sea islanders, Williams (ibid.: 192) attributed this progress to the light and ‘benevolent spirit’ that Christianity disseminated: ‘kindness is the key to the human heart, whether it be that of savage or civilised man’.

It is useful to observe the similarities and differences in Williams’ and Rush’s conceptions of savagery. Both men used the concept of savagery to denote a particular stage in the historical development of human societies. A deliberate contrast to civilization, savagery was a transient state, in which human relations closely resembled those in the rest of the animal world. Over time, they believed, Christianity would help to transform and ‘improve’ savage societies. In An Account of the Progress of Population, Agriculture, Manners and Government in Pennsylvania, in a Letter to a Friend in England (1798), for example, Rush noted that

from a review of the three different species of settlers, it appears, that there are certain regular stages which mark the progress from the savage to civilized life. The first settler is nearly related to an Indian in his manners—In the second, the Indian manners are more diluted: It is in the third species of settlers only, that we behold civilization completed—It is to the third species of settlers only, that it is proper to apply the term of farmers. (Rush, 1798: 221, original emphasis)

Conclusion

Williams’ and Rush’s observations are illustrative of a discursive shift in conceptions of natural history over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries. In the 17th century, natural history could be conceived as an enterprise central to the Christian endeavour to recover humanity’s lost knowledge of creation. The New World was thus, for some, the site for recovering Eden. Moreover, humanity’s elevated status above the rest of creation, deriving from the theology of the imago dei, ensured that the collection of data about human subjects was incidental rather than systematic in this period. In short, humanity was ontologically separate from the natural world. The latter was understood as God’s creation, and the proper subject matter for natural history.

By the mid-18th century, however, as the British extended and developed their colonial efforts, natural history writing was becoming an enterprise increasingly tied to the demands of colonial governance. This required that its human subjects be understood and governed accordingly. Against this colonial backdrop, the Enlightenment’s challenge to the epistemological authority of Christianity stripped humanity of its privileged ontological status above the rest of nature, locating humans instead within nature. Natural history writing came to give an increasingly naturalized account of humanity and its environment. So influential did this framework of knowledge become that by the 19th century, a missionary such as Williams could appropriate a concept of savagery imbued with the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment to the purposes of evangelical Christianity. Encounters between the British Empire and its indigenous subjects thus became a touchstone for tensions between natural and divine knowledge, because the concept of savagery imbibed both a rational account of historical progress toward civilization and a religious conviction that savage humanity needed rescue from its animal nature. The religious imperative was thus buttressed by natural historical knowledge forged in the context of global colonization.