Neil Safier

Global Knowledge on the Move: Itineraries, Amerindian Narratives, and Deep Histories of Science

Since Bruno Latours discussion of a Sakhalin island map used by La Pérouse as part of a global network of “immutable mobiles,” the commensurability of European and non-European knowledge has become an important issue for historians of science. But recent studies have challenged these dichotomous categories as reductive and inadequate for understanding the fluid nature of identities, their relational origins, and their historically constituted character. Itineraries of knowledge transfer, traced in the wake of objects and individuals, offer a powerful heuristic alternative, bypassing artificial epistemological divides and avoiding the limited scale of national or monolingual frames. Approaches that place undue emphasis either on the omnipotence of the imperial center or the centrality of the colonial periphery see only half the picture. Instead, practices of knowledge collection, codification, elaboration, and dissemination—in European, indigenous, and mixed or hybrid contexts—can be better understood by following their moveable parts, with a keen sensitivity toward non-normative epistemologies and more profound temporal frameworks.

The Tenacious Travels of the Torrid Zone and the Global Dimensions of Geographical Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century

AbstractThis article sets out to explore the longevity and tenacity of the torrid zone as an explanatory mechanism for describing the cultural characteristics of those populations living between the tropics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By examining a series of colonizing missions and scientific expeditions to the New World, it argues that long before the iconic voyage of Alexander von Humboldt, which is thought to inaugurate a modern conception of the tropics, European travelers and natural philosophers were molding earlier geographical theories in ways that extended the life of certain pejorative stereotypes about non-European peoples. As such, it represents an important example of how geographical knowledge traveled across imperial lines and, more importantly, challenges scholars to use more expansive temporal ranges that normally separate the pre-European history of the Americas from its post-conquest phase.

Itineraries of Atlantic science: New questions, new approaches, new directions

In the spring of 1788 not far from Buenos Aires, the village of Lujan woke up to an astonishing archaeological discovery. Local residents had found an extraordinary set of monstrous bones along the...

Como era ardiloso o meu francês: Charles-Marie de la Condamine e a Amazônia das Luzes

This paper explores the bibliographical and ethnographic tools used by Charles-Marie de La Condamine (1701-1774) to represent the Amazon River to the European reading public in the mid-eighteenth century. By carefully analyzing La Condamine’s descriptions of native populations and the sources upon which he relied as he descended the river, the author emphasizes the narrative strategies he employed to portray his observations as first-person eyewitness accounts. The article goes on to examine contemporary reactions to La Condamine’s Relation abregee d’un voyage fait dans l’interieur de l’Amerique meridionale (1745), especially the manner in which the text recounted the cultural characteristics of Amerindian populations and the persistent myth of female warriors living apart from men who were thought to populate the region from early in the sixteenth century, if not earlier.

Thinking Atlantically: a conversation with Philip D. Morgan

Although he may never have set out to become an expert in the field of Atlantic history, Philip D. Morgan, Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, is today one of the leading specialists on the history of the Atlantic world. His most recent edited collections – Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2009; co-edited with Jack P. Greene) and The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World (Oxford University Press, 2011; co-edited with Nicholas Canny) – are incisive contributions toward bringing cohesion and definition to a historical subdiscipline whose contours have been in dispute ever since Jacques Godechot and Robert Roswell Palmer staked a claim to the field more than nearly 60 years ago, if not long before. A prize for his article on Caribbean slavery and livestock in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1995 was a meek harbinger for the veritable cascade of prizes and honors he won after publishing his magnum opus several years later: Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), a thorough and painstakingly researched study of plantation life that compared the Chesapeake region with its Carolinian counterpart, was awarded the coveted Bancroft Prize, Frederick Douglass Prize, and two other prizes from the American Historical Association, amongst other national and international recognition. Since then he has co-edited numerous volumes with the fields leading scholars and has continued to deal with central questions related to the Atlantic, including labor, slavery and the economics of plantation life, resistance and power, migration, and geography. His current project on the contours of the Caribbean and its historical formation as a distinct oceanic space will continue to probe many of the themes Morgan has grappled with since these earlier works, expanding no doubt on others. Over a series of conversations between Vancouver and Baltimore, Paris and New Orleans, Phil Morgan and I discussed his early interest in Atlantic history, his ideas about future directions for the field, and the rationale behind his most recent publications, certain to affect the course of the discipline in the short, medium, and long terms.

Of mosquitoes and men: A conversation with J.R. McNeill

Abstract In April of 2011, John McNeill accepted my invitation to speak at the University of British Columbia as part of the history departments year-long thematic series entitled “Disasters and Diasporas: Entangled Histories of Empire and Environment.” No one better, I thought, to close out a year of reflections on this topic than Professor McNeill, whose recent book Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge, 2010) had just been anointed with the American Historical Associations prestigious Albert J. Beveridge Award (it has since then also garnered the 2011 PROSE Award in the European and World History category and heaps of praise in academic journals across an array of fields). A native of Chicago and graduate of Swarthmore College (BA) and Duke University (MA and PhD), McNeill currently holds the post of University Professor in the School of Foreign Service and member of the History Department at Georgetown University, where he has taught since 1985, and where he previously held the Cinco Hermanos Chair in Environmental and International Affairs. But it is not his numerous titles and academic accolades that will be most familiar to readers of Atlantic Studies. Rather, it is his wide-ranging and paradigm-breaking scholarship. From the Mediterranean to the Pacific worlds, and spanning the Atlantic and Caribbean waters in between, McNeill has written and edited a number of challenging and ambitious books, each of which has tenaciously sought to expand the conceptual and geographic boundaries by which scholars have analyzed imperial engagements in both the early modern and modern periods. His first book, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain: Louisbourg and Havana, 1700–1763 (North Carolina, 1985), was a sustained comparison between two colonial seaports that played strikingly similar roles for the empires that sought to protect them, France and Spain, respectively. He went on to write about that most iconic of ecological landscapes, the Mediterranean, choosing to focus on the mountainous regions as “marginal environments” that revealed important human strategies in response to the particular challenges of living in such fragile ecosystems. But his latest scholarly endeavor, on the important role the mosquito has played in shaping imperial strategy and military engagements in the Caribbean from the early-seventeenth through the early-twentieth centuries, took a new tack by focusing not on cities or landscapes but rather on a single, humble, yet utterly potent insect: the Aedes aegypti. To get a sense of how Atlantic studies as a field and Atlantic history as a discipline may have shaped some of Professor McNeills concerns in his most recent research project, we sat down to discuss the broad arc of what has already been an extraordinarily ambitious career, and which shows little sign of abating anytime soon.

The 19th international conference on the history of cartography: Report

Espafia. The 19th International Conference on the History of Cartography gathered roughly two hundred participants from some thirty-one countries to examine, among other things, the cartographical legacy of peninsular Spain and its overseas colonial empire. Notwithstanding this thematic focus, paper topics ranged from desert surveys of Libya and medieval maps of England to mapping projects of Japanese colonies and prose cartographies. The recently renovated conference facilities provided a modern and elegant setting for the talks and discussions, while the night-life of the Spanish capital, with its flowing fountains, marble monuments, shaded sidewalk cafes and infamous nocturnal marcha (the equivalent of a very late night out-on-the-town), gave the conferencees an ample array of divertimiento from which to choose once the librarys doors had closed at the end of the days official events.