Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History

摘要

For historians of science and environments alike, no concept provokes more hand-wringing than that of 'nature'. Whereas common usage of the term connotes static, premodern and necessarily nonhuman phenomena, recent scholarship has preferred to dismiss this rhetoric as a veil for ineluctably contingent, modern and all-too-human political and social concerns. Of course, such a bifurcation does a critical disservice both to the tangled routes by which human and non-human natures impact on each other, and to the means by which human societies create reliable knowledge about the world. These methodological concerns are especially pressing for scholars of imperial science, who must needs grapple with an imposingly one-sided archive presupposing the superiority of European cultures and natural sciences, often by analogy with the biological successes of European humans, animals and plants in colonizing non-European territories. Drawing on sophisticated readings of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts, Alan Bewell's Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History offers a compelling model for understanding this source material.