For the October 2019 issue of History of the Human Sciences, the editors are delighted to present a special issue edited by Bruce Buchan (Griffith University) and Linda Andersson Burnett (Linnaeus University) – “Knowing Savagery: Humanity in the Circuits of Colonial Knowledge.” Here, Chris Renwick speaks to to Bruce and Linda about what the stakes of the issue – and draws out some of its central contributions.

Chris Renwick (CR): “Knowing Savagery” is a brilliant special issue for History of the Human Sciences. It brings together a wide range of topics that have a bearing on questions about how our understanding of the human has been shaped. I wondered whether there was a particular spur for the special issue on the topic and you see as the main points you think a HHS audience will take away from it? 

Bruce Buchan and Linda Andersson Burnett (BB & LAB): Our special issue is the product of a long collaboration. We are both intellectual historians whose work explores the connections between European traditions of thought and the experience of colonisation, both within Europe and beyond. Though we have different fields of specialisation (Linda on the history of travel, natural history and Nordic colonialism, and Bruce on political ideas with a focus on Australia’s colonial history) what we share is an interest in uncovering the colonial burden wrapped up in concepts, and the words we use to convey them. Thanks to the generosity of the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond in Sweden, we’ve been able to pursue this idea through a joint research project entitled ‘The Borders of Humanity: Linnaean Natural Historians and the Colonial Legacies of Enlightenment’. Our special issue forms part of this project and gives a more formal shape to what we’ve learned by working collaboratively with so many wonderful scholars. 

We hope that readers of History of the Human Sciences will take away from our special issue a greater appreciation for the sometimes unpredictable ways in which European concepts facilitated colonisation globally. We also hope that readers will see how the very processes of colonisation around the world shaped the development of European thought on humanity. Our aim was not to attempt a comprehensive global coverage, but a series of targeted case studies examining various dimensions of this conceptual change in relation to one main concept: savagery.

CR: The articles in the special issue are indeed focused on the topic of “savagery”. One of the main conclusions I took away from them – your own article in particular – was that, as a non-specialist, I’d probably assumed much more continuity between “savagery” and “race” than there actually was between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That seems a particularly significant point, with quite far reaching historiographic implications. Are there issues or questions that you think are the next step in taking these conclusions forwards? 

BB & LAB: Savagery was an old concept long before the period covered by most of the papers in our special issue, namely the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Antonella Romano’s paper in particular demonstrates this by considering how Iberian missionaries began to refer to savagery in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Yet for all its antiquity the term ‘savagery’ has often been misunderstood. It is frequently confined to eighteenth century debates over supposedly ‘noble’ versus ‘ignoble’ savages. What we wanted to accomplish with this special issue was to branch out beyond such debates and to consider savagery in a wider set of contexts: by means of intellectual, emotional, religious, sensory, cross-cultural histories and the history of science. We hoped that by doing so, we could show how savagery became so deeply embedded in the ways that Europeans interpreted and evaluated other peoples, that it also shaped how Europeans understood themselves. 

In part, this is an exercise in excavating savagery from the layers of European thought in the era of Enlightenment. Silvia Sebastiani’s paper accomplishes this by examining the history of anatomy. Hanna Hodacs and Matthias Persson’s joint paper explores savagery in relation to political economy and evangelism. Jacqueline Van Gent’s paper considers savagery in missionary discourses. Having excavated savagery however, we were intent on showing the role it played in conceptual change and development, as Sarah Irving-Stonebreaker and Gunlög Fur do in their papers.

In our own paper we wanted to explore the way in which savagery was integrated into the way in which ‘Enligthened’ natural historians and colonial travellers understood the very concept of ‘humanity’. Here is where we see the need for more research, following the lead of scholars such as Emmanuel Eze, Roxann Wheeler, Silvia Sebastiani and others who have drawn our attention to the intimate connections between race, humanity and Enlightenment. What we argue in our paper is that Enlightenment ascriptions of a universal humanity were gradated by ascriptions of savagery, but also by terms such as race and variety. These were still ambiguous terms in the late eighteenth century, but they were coming to be defined by a growing focus on alleged anatomical differences between human populations, suggesting a more static or fixed set of attributes to each variety or race. What is particularly interesting for us is that those attributes included not only physical characteristics (such as skin colour), but what might be termed moral or social qualities as well (such as language, religion or forms of government). It was these latter qualities that the term ‘savagery’ had previously been used to delineate, but in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a discursive change took place that was to have dramatic consequences in the centuries to follow. This was not a clear transition from a discourse of savagery to one centred on race. The change was messy but its effect were that race subsumed rather than replaced savagery. We feel very strongly that the time is right for further research on this discursive change – both on the historical moment and its antecedents, and on the important consequences, the effects of which still linger. Not only are we witnessing a distressing resurgence of spurious claims about the ‘science’ of racial differences, the troubling legacies of Europe’s Enlightenment are also being debated with renewed vigour around the world. At the forefront of these legacies are the long-term consequences of our inherited language of race and savagery.

CR: Your special issue engages with a range of different approaches to savagery, as we’d probably expect, given its interest in the circulation of knowledge.  Over all, though, you seem most concerned with the intellectual dimensions of savagery. Was there a reason for that? Especially as historians of science have been more enamoured with material and ethnographic dimensions of such problems in the recent past.    

BB & LAB: That’s right, but we wanted to add a different dimension to this important research by paying greater attention to the language used by natural historians, missionaries, and colonists who travelled around the world, as well as the intellectuals who taught them and often never left Europe. The guiding principle of our collaboration is that the terms we use to convey thought have complicated histories, and that recovering those histories requires an acknowledgement that language is not innocent. Savagery was a term of great use in the task of state formation in Europe, and was just as useful in the process of imperial expansion. It conveyed a knowledge about human groups and their amenability to colonisation, and so we wanted our special issue to focus on how the term, and the knowledge it implied, circulated within and between imperial and colonial domains. That circulation involved some unpredictable confrontations and reversals of meaning (notably when Indigenous people rebuked Europeans as savages, or missionaries expressed horror at the savagery of colonial violence). But even here, in tracing the intellectual history of savagery the material element is crucial. Savagery subsisted in the pages of the journals that natural historians wrote, it lived within the pages of the books they read and carried with them on their journeys, and it was inscribed on the artefacts that they collected and sent back to Europe, which was in effect a physical curation of humanity.

CR: Your special issue deals with savagery in the context of empires, rather than any single empire. One of the great things about the issue you’ve put together is that it involves bringing together a number of different histories that make it a global history of its topic, which in the process brings things to the attention of an English-reading audience work that they might not be familiar with. This is the kind of thing HHS likes to encourage. Could say a little more about the challenges and opportunities that editors face in doing it? 

BB & LAB: One of the problems that scholars in the English-speaking world face is the predominance of an Anglo-centric perspective. This predominance takes many forms, but one of its effects has been a tendency to consider the history of colonisation through the lens of the British Empire. The presumption is quaint of course. Scholars of the Iberian empires (such as Antonella Romano in our special issue) can point to global influences at least as extensive as that of Britain’s. The point though is not about the extent or duration of imperial influence, but the degree to which we fall under the spell of ’empire’ itself. Scholars can tend to speak of various empires (British, Spanish, Dutch, etc) as if they were monolithic entities that acted rather like international relations scholars sometimes think states act today: moved by a centre of power, devoted to the pursuit of particular interests, and so on. 

As we see it, intellectual history offers us a way to complicate these presumptions about empire by showing how profoundly the language of colonisation flowed across imperial and colonial frontiers, and was of course decisively shaped by confrontations and engagements with non-European and Indigenous peoples across the globe. By working with the team of scholars represented in this special issue of History of the Human Sciences we’ve been able to highlight at least some of these dimensions of complication: where for example Swedish missionaries were confronted by Lenape interlocutors in colonial North America; or how knowledge of the orangutan circulated through and across Dutch and British empires, brokered by a range of intellectuals and intermediaries spanning the globe; or why the confusion of both French and British colonial natural historians about how to describe (and to picture) Indigenous Australians illustrated the ambiguities of race and savagery.

This is the opportunity that working with a trans-national team of researchers makes possible, but it is matched by challenges of translation and interpretation. In part this is a question of how to make wonderful scholarship in one language available in another. The broader point however, is one of integrating knowledge and making it comprehensible. Our collaborators combine diverse expertise in histories of cross-cultural encounter, histories of science or the emotions, histories of trade and travel, or the history of ideas and concepts across a broad sweep of time from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century. It is here that our thematic focus on savagery provides an avenue for meaningful communication across these divides. In the process we open up more possibilities to challenge the continuing presumption of scholarship that remains both Anglo-centric and bound to empire. 

Bruce Buchan is an intellectual historian at Griffith University, whose work traces the entanglement of European political thought with the experience of empire and colonisation, focussing on the Early Modern and Enlightenment periods.

Linda Andersson Burnett is a historian of the Enlightenment and Linnaean natural history at Linnaeus University, with a research focus on the exchange of scientific, economic and cultural thought between British and Scandinavian intellectuals in the Enlightenment period, and the importance of colonial and nation-building encounters with marginalised and indigenous social groups in the development of these thought exchanges.

Chris Renwick is senior lecturer in modern history at the University of York and an editor of HHS.