Human Taxonomies: Carl Linnaeus, Swedish Travel in Asia and the Classification of Man

Itinerario ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (02) ◽  
pp. 218-242
Author(s):  
Christina Skott
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Species ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Carl Linnaeus ◽  
Eyewitness Reports

AbstractThis article looks at ways in which Swedish travel to Asia informed the classification of man in the work of Carl Linnaeus. In the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae (1758), Linnaeus made substantial changes to his earlier taxonomy of humans. Through two case studies, it is argued that these changes to a great extent were prompted by fresh Swedish eyewitness reports from China and Southeast Asia. The informants for the Homo asiaticus, a variety of Homo sapiens, and a proposed new species of humans, Homo nocturnus (or troglodytes), were all associated with the Swedish East India Company. The botanical contribution by men trained in the Linnaean method travelling on the company's ships has long been acknowledged. In contrast to the systematic collecting of botanical material, Swedish descriptions of Asia's human inhabitants were often inconclusive, reflecting the circumstances of the trade encounter. Linnaeus also relied on older observations made by countrymen, and his human taxonomies also highlight the role of travel literature in eighteenth-century anthropology.

Taxonomies of Yellow

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Keevak
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Comparative Anatomy ◽  
Far East ◽  
East Asians ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Far East ◽  
The People ◽  
Carl Linnaeus ◽  
French Physician

This chapter focuses on the emergence of new sorts of human taxonomies as well as new claims about the color of all human groups, including East Asians, during the course of the eighteenth century, as well as their racial implications. It first considers the theory advanced in 1684 by the French physician and traveler François Bernier, who proposed a “new division of the Earth, according to the different species or races of man which inhabit it.” One of these races, he suggested, was yellow. Then in 1735, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus published Systema naturae, in which he categorized homo sapiens into four different skin colors. Finally, at the end of the eighteenth century, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, also a physician and the founder of comparative anatomy, declared that the people of the Far East were a yellow race, as distinct from the white “Caucasian” one.

Banias and the British: the Role of Indigenous Credit in the Process of Imperial Expansion in Western India in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

1987 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lakshmi Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
State Building ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Western India ◽  
Senior Member ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Trade And Exchange ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Service Groups

The pressing preoccupation of the British administration in the early decades of the nineteenth century to clip the wings of the malicious Indian shroffs (Bankers) and their manoeuvres and secret dealings was in sharp and in a sense valid contrast to their earlierperceptions of the Indian shroffs and their Hundi empire. By 1807, Mr Rickards, senior member of the Bombay establishment, was urging the Governor-General in Council to establisha General Bank whose operations would extend throughout India, facilitate remittances andcredit transfers from one part of the country to another, and above all ‘free the mercantile body from losses and inconveniences suffered in the exchange and from the artifices of shroffs’. Their ‘undue and pernicious influence over the course of trade and exchange’ could no longer be treated with forbearance, and the urgency of remedy was stressed. It was both strange and ironical that such advice should stem from a quarter where in the crucial years of political change and transition in the second half of the eighteenth century, the cooperation and intervention of the indigenous banking fraternity and their credit support had proved vital to the success of the Imperial strategy. The experience was admittedly not unique to Bombay and the English East India Company (hence-forth E.E.I.C) and in a sense the guarantee of local credit and the support of service groups for a variety of reasons, was clearly envisagedas a basic ingredient to state building in the eighteenth century.

On the milliped family Heterochordeumatidae, with comments on the higher classification of the order Chordeumatida (Diplopoda)

2000 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 363 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Shear
Keyword(s):  
New Species ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
New Genus ◽  
New Genus And Species ◽  
A New Species

A new genus and species, Infulathrix siam, gen. et sp. nov. and a new species, Heterochordeuma petarberoni, sp. nov. are described from southeast Asia, and the previously known members of the Heterochordeumatidae are reviewed. The genusSumatreuma Hoffman is placed in the synonymy of Heterochordeuma Pocock. Heterochordeumatid gonopod structure is not primitive, as previously supposed, but apomorphic within the superfamily Heterochordeumatoidea and the Diplopoda in general. The families of the order Chordeumatida are grouped into four suborders: Chordeumatidea, Heterochordeumatidea, Craspedosomatidea and Striariidea.

Securing and Developing the Southwestern Region: The Role of the Cham and Malay Colonies in Vietnam (18th-19th centuries)

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (5) ◽  
pp. 739-772
Author(s):  
Nicolas Weber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
State Building ◽  
Southern Vietnam ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ethnic Associations

Abstract This article traces the history of the Cham and Malay military colonies in the southwestern provinces of Vietnam, from their creation in the eighteenth century to their dismantling during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The colonies were meant to protect the Khmero-Vietnamese border and secure Vietnamese positions in the southwestern regions (formerly part of Cambodia), as well as in eastern Cambodia. The study of the Chams and Malays in southern Vietnam sheds new light on the dynamics of power, the struggles for supremacy, and inter-ethnic associations during the process of state-building in Southeast Asia.

Lyric Population and the Prospects of Police

2021 ◽  
pp. 116-160
Author(s):  
Sal Nicolazzo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Police Reform ◽  
Mary Robinson ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
Legal Subjectivity ◽  
Global War

This chapter offers a new reading of vagrancy in early Romantic poetry. By reading the poetry of Mary Robinson against the backdrop of police reform and vagrancy law at the end of the eighteenth century, it proposes a turn away from lyric or legal subjectivity in order to see other crucial poetic valences of what can be termed “Romantic vagrancy.” Robinson not only pushes one to reconsider a literary-historical narrative that has long been dominated by William Wordsworth, but also offers an engagement with vagrancy that theorizes law and lyric as intersecting precisely where legal persons and lyric subjects disappear. Tracing how Robinson's collection brings rural English poverty into the same frame as global war, the scandal of destitute Asian sailors stranded in London by the East India Company, the Sierra Leone colonization project, and the role of police reformers in reshaping dockside labor in London, the chapter argues that poetic vagrancy allows one to understand its most iconic recurring image — the dispossession of the rural English poor — as an optic for invoking vast scales and distant populations. Vagrancy's relation to police, especially as a mode of governmentality that spanned scales from local to global, is in fact crucial to its poetic redeployment.

The Economic Relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Southeast Asia in the Seventeenth Century

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. C. S. Peacock
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Economic Relationship ◽  
Spice Trade ◽  
Economic Ties

Southeast Asia was linked to the Ottoman Empire by economic ties, in particular the spice trade, but the nature of this relationship is poorly understood, especially for the seventeenth century. Its study is hampered by the lack of archival evidence, and this chapter draws on a variety of sources, both literary and archival, to investigate Southeast Asian exports to the Ottoman lands. It argues, in contrast to much existing scholarship, that direct commercial links remained important throughout the period, and that European traders such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC) remained largely excluded from this trade till the end of the seventeenth century. Ottoman exports to Southeast Asia, predominantly textiles and horses, are also examined. The chapter also considers the role of Ottoman subjects who sought to make their fortunes in Southeast Asia.

Trilobites and Linnaeus: the first fossil reconstruction from 1759

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-108
Author(s):  
Jeffrey D. Stilwell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Marine Crustaceans ◽  
Carl Linnaeus ◽  
Erroneous Interpretation

A paper by renowned eighteenth century Swedish naturalist, Carl Linnaeus, published in 1759, contained the first fossil reconstruction of what was later called a trilobite and was an early milestone in invertebrate palaeontology. The earliest work devoted solely to Palaeozoic trilobites (Arthropoda), Linnaeus' “Petrificatet Entomolithus paradoxus …” delved, in great detail, into the classification of this genus intermedium between known marine crustaceans. Linnaeus depicted on two folding, copper-engraved plates the fossil animal (comprising the cephalon, thorax and pygidium with pleural spines and furrows) from the best-preserved material in limestone thus far recovered, including an erroneous interpretation of antennae in relation to this Swedish material – however, confirmed in the latter part of the nineteenth century with well-preserved Silurian trilobites.

Mobilizing the “State Papers” of Empire: John Bruce, Early Modernity, and the Bureaucratic Archives of Britain

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 392-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asheesh Kapur Siddique
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
State Government ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Domestic Policy ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
British State

Abstract This article examines John Bruce’s vision of the bureaucratic archives of the British state and empire at the end of the eighteenth century. As Historiographer to the East India Company and Keeper of State Papers in the 1790s and early 1800s, Bruce used the archives of corporate and state government as sources of bureaucratic knowledge to justify and plan imperial and domestic policy. In this way, Bruce deployed a strategy of governance by the authority of “state papers,” rooted in early modern political practice, across imperial and domestic government. The demise of Bruce’s influence signaled the waning of this role of the archive as a technology of governance in Britain during the nineteenth century.

All about Money: Maritime Trade in Makassar and West Java, around 1775

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 482-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerrit Knaap
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Maritime Trade ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
West Java ◽  
Nous Permet

AbstractIn the last few decades the debate about the characteristics of early modern maritime trade in Southeast Asia has received extra impetus through the provision of new empirical substance. Amongst others the use of eighteenth-century shipping lists from the archives of the Dutch East India Company has brought the analysis to a higher level. For Makassar, Batavia, Banten and Cirebon this article connects the statistics on ships' volume and commodities exchanged to scattered information about prices of products in order to establish the total value of trade for these ports. By doing so, more light is shed on the leading commodities and the dominant participants in the commerce. Finally, this study addresses whether the eighteenth century in insular Southeast Asia was either a 'Chinese century' or already a 'European century.' Ces dernières décennies, la disponibilité de nouvelles données empiriques a fortement stimulé le débat sur les traits caractéristiques du commerce maritime prémoderne. C'est entre autres en utilisant des inventaires maritimes de la Compagnie hollandaise des Indes orientales du dix-huitième siècle que l'on a pu porter l'analyse à un niveau plus élevé. Pour les villes de Makassar, Batavia, Banten et Cirebon, les statistiques du volume de navigation et des produits échangés seront dans cet article mis en rapport avec des informations éparses sur les prix des produits a fin de pouvoir déterminer la valeur totale du commerce dans ces ports. Cette approche nous permet de mieux comprendre quels étaient les principaux produits échangés et qui étaient les principaux participants au commerce maritime. Finalement, nous nous poserons la question de savoir si en Asie du Sud-Est insulaire le dix-huitième siècle doit être considéré comme un 'siècle chinois' ou bien déjà comme un 'siècle européen.'

History as Self-Representation: The Recasting of a Political Tradition in Late Eighteenth-Century Eastern India

1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 913-948 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kumkum Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Eastern India ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
English East India Company

If power is mediated by knowledge, then the early decades of British colonial rule in India were indeed, as Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai, the intellectual and historian par excellence of those times wrote, a time of ‘half-knowledge’.The decades between 1757 and 1772 witnessed the implantation of this colonial regime in Eastern India through the transformation of the English East India Company from a mercantilist trading corporation into the paradoxical status of ‘merchant-sovereign and the sovereign merchant’ at the same time. The role of sovereign thrust upon the officials of the company the far from easy task of administering this society in ways that were most conducive to the extraction of the largest possible surplus from it for its new masters.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document