British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (review)

Fa-ti Fan pursues two mutually supporting goals in this meticulously researched, clearly written, and historiographically sophisticated examination of British naturalists' experiences in nineteenth-century China. The first is to reevaluate the broader formation of natural history. The second is to examine Britain's wider entanglement in China. By combining these objectives under the rubric of "scientific imperialism," he injects life and wider relevance into his vivid exploration of "the symbiotic, even integral, relationship between scientific and imperialist enterprises" (4). The book has much to offer even to those with no particular interest in natural history.

Before the First Opium War (1839–42), British naturalists in China relied almost exclusively on specimens and information acquired in drugstores, food stalls, fish markets, curio shops, and, most importantly, plant nurseries. They had little choice. The British were rarely allowed beyond the port city of Canton. While these restrictions crimped research, naturalists still found a bounty of domesticated animals, zoological curiosities, and cultivated plants to study and assimilate into the body of Western science. Chinese flowers were introduced steadily and enthusiastically into British gardens, despite the extreme difficulties of transporting live plants. Access to specimens and data depended on commerce, for "every aspect of the enterprise—the men, the ships, the networks, with all their opportunities and limitations—were inextricably linked to the China trade" (39).

Defeat in the First Opium War forced the Chinese to open other treaty ports to Westerners and restrictions on travel in the interior diminished during the following decades. Opportunities for natural history expanded with the apparatus of "informal empire." Research depended greatly on part-time naturalists who worked for nonscientific organizations like the British Consular Service and the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs. Henry Hance, for example, became one of the most productive British botanists in China during twenty years as a vice-consul. The scientific activities of men like him— collecting, corresponding, mapping, naming, classifying, describing—might appear from the outside as dusty and largely irrelevant to the vast contemporary currents of diplomacy and trade. In fact, Fan shows, their science represented an aggressive expansion of cognitive and cultural territory that not only mirrored but also reinforced the political and economic interests that they pursued for Britain in their day jobs.

The second half of the century also witnessed the fertile intersection of natural history and sinology, frequently pursued without sharp distinction. The sinologist-naturalists routinely treated Chinese works on nature as immature and faltering steps towards real knowledge (much as they would have medieval European herbals and bestiaries), and showed little sympathy for their logic and history. The Chinese did not then have a coherent scholarly tradition equivalent to Western natural history. The modern Chinese terms for botany (zhiwu zue) and natural history (bowu xue) were both mid-nineteenth-century neologisms introduced in translations of Western scientific texts. But they did possess a vast, varied, and rich literature devoted to animals, plants, and minerals. The British found these works invaluable for insight into both natural and human history. Albert Fauvel's identification of a species of alligator new to Western science illustrates this process concisely and effectively. In the 1870s Fauvel drew heavily on Chinese texts to transform tuo (he rendered it Tó) into Alligator sinensis. Along the way, he established the meaning of Chinese characters and traced the alligator's place in the country's life and literature.

Fan persuasively argues that something more complex and interesting was happening in such enterprises than simple cultural chauvinism, even if this was an indisputable element. He has little patience with modern scholars who see fundamental cultural incommensurability between China and the West, whether rooted in language, worldviews, or mental categories. "In this view," he protests, "each culture becomes a fixed, rigid structure, and different cultures are seen as mutually exclusive. This viewpoint assumes and essentializes culture rather than explains it. Moreover, it ignores what historical actors actually did and turns...