scholarly journals Corners, Tables, Lines

Nuncius ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 517-531
Author(s):  
Staffan Müller-Wille
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Combinatorial Analysis ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Human Diversity ◽  
Administrative Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
Diagrammatic Representations ◽  
History Of Race

Abstract The modern concept of race is usually traced back to proponents of a “natural history of mankind” in the European Enlightenment. Starting from allegorical representations of the four continents in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the eighteenth-century visual genre of castas paintings, I suggest that modern conceptions of race were significantly shaped by diagrammatic representations of human diversity that allowed for tabulation of data, combinatorial analysis, and quantification, and hence functioned as “tools to think with.” Accounting for racial ancestry in terms of “proportions of blood” not only became a preoccupation of scholars as a consequence, but also came to underwrite administrative practices and popular discourses. To contribute to a better understanding of the history of race relations, historians of the race concept need to pay more attention to these diagrammatic aspects of the concept.

scholarly journals ‘Constitutions selection’: Darwin, race and medicine

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
Race Science ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Race ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.

‘Promiscuous’ Planting

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Angma Dey Jhala
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Soil Quality ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Border Region ◽  
Swidden Agriculture ◽  
Chittagong Hill Tracts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hill Tribes

During the eighteenth century, the travelogue flourished as a genre and was used to describe peoples both familiar and unfamiliar to the western observer. Chapter 1 examines one such account, the 1798 travelogue of the Scottish doctor Francis Buchanan in the CHT. In his tour diary, he deployed the language of natural history to describe not only the region’s unusual soil quality, topography, and local jhum or swidden agriculture, but also the religious, cultural, and linguistic practices of the various hill tribes he encountered. In the process, he exposed the tumultuous history of this border region, which found itself at the crossroads of imperial ambition by both the East India Company and the kingdom of Burma. He is also an intriguing example of an Enlightenment era man of science and reason in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.

History of Religion as Critique of Religion?

2021 ◽  
pp. 10-30
Author(s):  
Hans Joas
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Universal History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Literary Character ◽  
History Of

The Scottish eighteenth-century philosopher and historian David Hume can be considered a pioneer of the “natural history of religion” in the sense of a universal history of religion that is not based on theological presuppositions. This chapter offers a characterization of his methodological achievements and a reevaluation of his empirical claims concerning monotheism, polytheism, religion and tolerance. It also interprets the German reception of Hume in Herder and other eighteenth-century thinkers as a serious critical continuation that is free from Hume’s anti-Christian motives. This continuation opens the perspective of a serious study of the literary character of religious texts, in this case of the Bible. All simple contrasts between Enlightenment and religion are overcome as soon as we take this interaction of thinkers into account.

Three Eighteenth-Century Attempts to Map the Natural Order: Johann Herrmann – Georg Christoph Würtz – Paul Dietrich Giseke

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kees van Putten
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Chain

Abstract By the second half of the eighteenth century, the age-old concept of nature as a chain of being had been superseded by the idea that the order of nature was a two-dimensional whole. Carolus Linnaeus, for instance, stated that vegetal nature was ordered like a geographical map. Paul Dietrich Giseke, one of his followers, rendered this metaphor concrete by making a “genealogic-geographical map of the natural orders of plants.” Could mapping nature in this way help to produce a true image of it and thereby achieve a better understanding of nature’s order? I intend to answer this question by analyzing Giseke’s map along with two closely connected images of the order of nature, Johann Herrmann’s “Table of affinities between animals” and the hitherto unnoticed “geographical map” of medicines, designed by Georg Christoph Würtz. The article deals with the relation between these images, examines the respective advantages and drawbacks of their maps and situates them with respect to the models of the natural history of the time.

Schweigger’s (1812) chelonian types from the extinct eighteenth century Portuguese “Royal cabinet of natural history of Ajuda”: some contributions for their identification and nomenclatural implications

Zootaxa ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 3395 (1) ◽  
pp. 18 ◽  
Author(s):  
LUIS M. P. CERÍACO ◽  
ROGER BOUR
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Zoological Nomenclature ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Intense Debate

The work Prodromus Monographiae Cheloniorum, published by Schweigger in 1812, has recently been the subject ofseveral studies. One result of these studies—the rediscovery of the Testudo gigantea Schweigger, 1812holotype—triggered an intense debate in The Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature, where, among other issues in dispute,the identity and nature of the specimen indicated as the holotype for the species is put in question. Using historical sources,mostly unpublished, and analysis and comparison of taxidermic characteristics of the specimen with other specimens ofthe same nature, we can clearly trace its origin to the extinct Royal Cabinet of Natural History of Ajuda in Lisbon, fromthe “philosophical journey” of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira to the specimens transported to Paris by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1808, thus helping dispel any doubts regarding the identity and nature of what is being identified as the Testudogigantea holotype, along with other chelonian specimens. This information is of great importance in the current taxonomicdebate as well as in recognizing the historic importance of the Royal Cabinet of Natural History of Ajuda and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s 1808 mission to Lisbon.

‘Just put it online’: The Taylor White Project as a digitization case study

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Zinger
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Interactive Visualizations ◽  
Digital Collection ◽  
History Of ◽  
Source Materials

Creating access to digital surrogates of primary source materials has spurred the growth of history of science as a field. Enabling and supporting virtual access requires an understanding of the behind-the-scenes requirements of a digitization project. Using McGill's Taylor White Project as a case study, this article reveals how such a project is managed, to result in a unique digital collection that supports research in both the humanities and the sciences. The workflows described transformed a collection of 938 eighteenth-century natural history drawings from a relatively inaccessible archive to a searchable and browsable digital collection, complete with contextualizing interactive visualizations. Understanding this process reveals some of the ways in which digitized data can create new avenues for questioning and examining information.

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