Starting in the mid-eighteenth century, dozens of French, British, and Spanish expeditions fanned out across the globe in search of new plants and animal species and to record observations regarding human diversity. Part of the Enlightenment project to chart the natural world, the growth of scientific travel also formed part of the drive by Europe's imperial powers to lay claim to new territories and control natural and human resources for colonial and capitalist exploitation. Traditionally concerned with the achievements of European traveller-naturalists such as Joseph Banks and Alexander von Humboldt, recent scholarship has re-oriented its focus towards a consideration of cross-cultural encounters and the roles played by Polynesian, Asian, African, or South American interlocutors in the co-production of scientific knowledge.

Core Readings (pick two)

Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), Ch. 6: ‘Alexander von Humboldt and the reinvention of América’, pp. 111-140. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Daniela Bleichmar, 'Exploration in Print: Books and Botanical Travel from Spain to the Americas in the Late Eighteenth Century', Huntington Library Quarterly 70.1 (2007), pp. 129-151. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Susan Scott Parrish, 'Diasporic African Sources of Enlightenment Knowledge', in: James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (eds.), Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2008). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Vanessa Smith, 'Joseph Banks’s Intermediaries: Rethinking Global Cultural Exchange', in: Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (eds.), Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 81-109. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Primary sources

Read about the collections generated by the HMS Endeavour voyage at the Natural History MuseumLink opens in a new window and study at least one chapter from the project on Slavery and the Natural WorldLink opens in a new window. Be prepared in the seminar to talk about the history behind one of the objects in the NHM collection.

Further Reading

Anderson, Katherine, 'Natural History and the Scientific Voyage', in: Helen Anne Curry, Nicholas Jardine, and Emma Spary (eds.), Worlds of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 304-318. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Anderson, Katherine, 'Reading and Writing the Scientific Voyage: FitzRoy, Darwin and John Clunies Ross', British Journal for the History of Science 51.1 (2018), pp. 369-394. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Arnold, David, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800-1856 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). LibraryLink opens in a new window.

Barnes, Geraldine, and Adrian Mitchell, 'Measuring the Marvelous: Science and the Exotic in William Dampier, Eighteenth-Century Life 26.3 (2002), pp. 45-57. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Beinart, William, 'Men, Science, Travel and Nature in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Cape', Journal of Southern African Studies 24.4 (1998), pp. 775-799. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Bell, Leonard, 'Not Quite Darwin’s Artist: the Travel Art of Augustus Earle', Journal of Historical Geography 43 (2014), pp. 60-70. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Bleichmar, Daniela, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Bourget, Marie Noëlle, Christian Licoppe, and H. Otto Sibum (eds.), Instruments, Travel and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2002). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Byrne, Angela, 'The Scientific Traveller', in: Alisdair Pettinger and Tim Youngs (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 17-29. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Craciun, Adriana, and Mary Terrall (eds.), Curious Encounters: Voyaging, Collecting, and Making Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Das, Nandini, and Tim Youngs (eds.), Cambridge History of Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), Chapters on Travel and DesertsLink opens in a new window, Rivers, MountainsLink opens in a new window, the Polar regionLink opens in a new window, and WildernessLink opens in a new window.

Das, Subhadra, and Miranda Lowe, 'Nature Read in Black and White: Decolonial Approaches to Interpreting Natural History Collections', Journal of Natural Science Collections 6 (2018), pp. 4-14. Link.

Delbourgo, James, and Nicholas Dew (eds.), Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2008). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Dew, Nicholas, 'Scientific Travel in the Atlantic world: the French Expedition to Gorée and the Antilles, 1681–1683', British Journal for the History of Science 43.1 (2009), pp. 1-17. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Douglas, Bronwen, Science, Voyages, and Encounters in Oceania, 1511–1850 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Driver, Felix, 'Distance and Disturbance: Travel, Exploration and Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 14 (2004), pp. 73-92. LinkLink opens in a new window.

D'Souza, Florence, 'Voyages through Empirical Common Sense: the Practice of Science in India by James Tod (1782–1835)', Studies in Travel Writing 13.3 (2009), pp. 207-218. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Eckstein, Lars, and Anja Schwarz, 'The Making of Tupaia’s Map: A Story of the Extent and Mastery of Polynesian Navigation, Competing Systems of Wayfinding on James Cook’s Endeavour, and the Invention of an Ingenious Cartographic System, Journal of Pacific History 54.1 (2019), pp. 1-95. LinkLink opens in a new window. [also see the subsequent Review ForumLink opens in a new window on Tupaia's map].

Fan, Fa-Ti, 'Victorian Naturalists in China: Science and Informal Empire', British Journal for the History of Science 36.1 (2003), pp 1-26. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Finn, Margot, 'Material Turns in British History III: Collecting. Colonial Bombay, Basra, Baghdad, and the Enlightenment Museum', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 30 (2020), pp. 1-28. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Fisk, Bethan, 'Black Knowledge on the Move: African Diasporic Healing in Caribbean and Pacific New Granada', Atlantic Studies 18.2 (2021), pp. 244-270. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Fornasiero, Jean, and John West-Sooby, 'The Narrative Interruptions of Science: The Baudin Expedition to Australia (1800–1804)', Forum for Modern Language Studies 49.4 (2013), pp. 457-471. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Gómez, Pablo F., The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Görbert, Johannes, 'James Cook and George Forster, Journals and Travel Reports from their 'Voyage Round the World' (1777)', in: Barbara Schaff (ed.), Handbook of British Travel Writing (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2020), pp. 247-266. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Grove, Richard, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). LibraryLink opens in a new window.

Guelke, Jeanne Kay, and Karin M. Morin, 'Gender, Nature, Empire: Women Naturalists in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Literature', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 26.3 (2001), pp. 306-326. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Havens, Thomas R.H., Land of Plants in Motion: Japanese Botany and the World (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2020). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Igler, David, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), Ch. 5: 'Naturalists and Natives in the Great Ocean'. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Igler, David, 'Indigenous Travelers and Knowledge Production in the Pacific: The Case of Kadu and Ludwig Choris', History Compass 15 (2017), pp. 1-16. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Johnson, Nuala C., 'Botanical Travel, Climate and David Moore's Moral Geographies of Europe', Journal of Historical Geography 44 (2014), pp. 122-132. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Konishi, Shino, Maria Nugent, Tiffany Shellam (eds.), Indigenous Intermediaries: New perspectives on Exploration Archives (Acton: ANU Press, 2015). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Liebersohn, Harry, The Travelers' World: Europe to the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Martin, Alison E., 'Outward Bound: Women Translators and Scientific Travel Writing, 1780–1800', Annals of Science 73.2 (2016), pp. 157-169. LinkLink opens in a new window.

McAleer, John, and Nigel Rigby, Captain Cook and the Pacific: Art, Exploration & Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). LibraryLink opens in a new window.

Miller, David Philip, and Hanns Reill (eds.), Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). LibraryLink opens in a new window.

Robinson, Michael F., ‘Scientific Travel’, in: Nandini Das and Tim Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 488-503. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Schaffer, Simon, Linda Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo (eds.), The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820 (Sagamore, MA: Science History Publications, 2009). LibraryLink opens in a new window.

Smethurst, Paul, Travel Writing and the Natural World, 1768–1840 (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Sprang, Felix, 'Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839)', in: Barbara Schaff (ed.), Handbook of British Travel Writing (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2020), pp. 373-396. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Skott, Christina, 'Human Taxonomies: Carl Linnaeus, Swedish Travel in Asia and the Classification of Man', Itinerario 43.2 (2019), pp. 218-242. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Turnbull, David, '(En)-Countering Knowledge Traditions: The Story of Cook and Tupaia', in: Tony Ballantyne (ed.), Science, Empire and the European Exploration of the Pacific (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 55-76. LinkLink opens in a new window.