Introduction to Special Issue: The New Natural History

The last decade or so has witnessed an upsurge in publications by early Americanists on the topic of natural history in the American colonies. Scholars such as Andrew Lewis, Ralph Bauer, Thomas Hallock, Christoph Irmscher, Christopher Iannini, Susan Scott Parrish, Monique Allewaert, Michael Ziser, Kelly Wisecup, Sari Altschuler, Michelle Currie Navakas, and Greta LaFleur—the list is nonexhaustive—have all produced valuable scholarship on various aspects of natural history in early America. Beyond the scientific treatises cataloguing fauna and flora that we conventionally associate with the domain of natural history, this includes writings as diverse as early novels and travel writing, sermons, and captivity narratives, as well as pastoral and georgic poetry, along with orally transmitted knowledge and the actual collecting of specimens and curiosa (Parrish 18–19). No doubt, the opening up of this exciting archive goes a long way in explaining the renewed interest in what once might have seemed a somewhat sterile research topic. But beyond the exploration of archival resources, there are other reasons for this resurgence of natural history research at the present moment that may be relevant to early American studies as a whole.

Most of the scholars listed above are engaged in a continuing conversation on the impact of the European Enlightenment in the Americas. If we consider this new body of scholarship in relation to the foundational work done in the 1980s and 1990s by Mary Louise Pratt and others, we may notice a marked turn away from the kind of Foucauldian readings of natural history that were still dominant at that juncture. In her foundational study Imperial Eyes (1992), Pratt argued that what she called the "Linnaean watershed" in eighteenth-century natural history resulted in a shift from composite or emblematic accounts toward more precise and scientific landscape descriptions, yielding new ways of engaging with otherness in European travel writing about the colonies. While Pratt tapped a fascinating archive then largely neglected in the field, the thesis of a Linnaean moment in the history of science was very much in line with Michel Foucault's hypothesis in The Order of Things (1966, trans. into English in 1970) of a classical episteme, irreducible to either Renaissance thinking or modern biology, that was defined by its fixation on the description of the visible. However, as Lisbet Koerner (Rausing) has indicated, Foucault's characterization of Carolus Linnaeus as first and foremost a classifier, unable or unwilling to go beyond the surface of things, in large measure reproduced views espoused by Uppsala historian of science Sten Lindroth—who in turn reacted against romanticized portraits of Linnaeus that circulated in Swedish academia at the time—and extended them to the classical age as a whole (Koerner 9). What might get lost in the Foucauldian narrative is the investment of Linnaean natural history in Lutheranism and cameralist economic theories, which were irreducible to the mercantilist doctrines entertained by the big colonial powers. It is easily forgotten that Linnaeus was profoundly skeptical of colonial expansion and regarded free trade as a threat to national self-sufficiency. Contrary to what has often been suggested, therefore, natural history in its Linnaean inflection was not a global project. Even as it was enmeshed in power politics and national competition, Linnaeus's transformational botany was irreducible to either free enterprise or mercantilism—and, in fact, he vigorously opposed both from the vantage point of his cameralist doctrine.

In significant respects, the new wave of scholarship on natural history in the American colonial era, if we may call it that, constitutes a departure from the Foucauldian line of thinking. In American Curiosity (2006), for instance, Susan Scott Parrish draws attention to America's "unique matrix of contested knowledge making" that complicates our understanding of the European Enlightenment as transmitted through the revisionist writings of, among others, Foucault (7). Likewise, in Fatal Revolutions, Christopher Iannini highlights the persistence of emblematic techniques in natural history writing throughout the eighteenth century and beyond, thus challenging Foucault's assertion of a fundamental epistemic break with prior representations of nature during the age of Linnaeus (25). Whereas earlier scholarship had still insisted that sensational...