In different ways, the two volumes under review address the connections between early modern intellectual history, natural knowledge and colonial reportage in the context of the first British empire. Daniel Carey's deeply researched and finely nuanced account of British Enlightenment debates over human diversity centres on John Locke's arguments against the existence of an innate and universal human nature. In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke drew on ethnographic reporting in travel accounts to insist that ‘man’ both possessed and required his own natural history, necessitating the collection of evidence to document that variety (by means including the ethnographic queries on the questionnaires circulated by Oldenburg, Boyle and others at the early Royal Society). Active in colonial networks at a high level thanks to his involvement with bodies including the Board of Trade and the Constitutions of Carolina, Locke came to know how exploration, settlement and commerce had generated reports of radically divergent moral dispositions among the peoples of the world. Lacking a modern anthropological notion of the autonomy of ‘culture’ as productive of human diversity, early moderns perceived reports of anomalies as evidence of moral difference that prompted a rejection of Stoic conceptions of the uniformity of human nature as well as of orthodox Christian doctrine on the universality of monotheism. Carey's Locke is not a radical sceptic, though the accusation was often made, but an inductive moral philosopher, seeking evidence for diversity rather than explaining it away. Locke's provocation lay in taking difference seriously, and resisting the notion that human behaviour was governed by universal laws. He recognized that such things as worship of God, human sacrifice and cannibalism were all, so to speak, matters of taste. Opinion, fashion, custom, credit and reputation were the engines of belief and action, and made for local rather than global norms.
Carey also charts the reactions of Locke's principal critics, keen not to surrender the ideal of human uniformity to critical ethnographic doubt. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, reacted sharply to Locke's anti-essentialism, treating it as a pernicious relativism offensive to traditional Christian morals and classical aesthetic taste. Where Locke emphasized diversity, Shaftesbury aimed to see conformity in everything but religion, which he set apart as a discrete zone for freedom of conscience. According to Shaftesbury, God had implanted in human beings a ‘prolepsis’ (p. 112) or predisposition towards virtue; even if moral action varied, the innate tendency to moral virtue was a universal divine precept. Tellingly, Shaftesbury worked hard to sideline consideration of moral anomalies as lacking in taste. The Lockean ethnographer signalled his own impoverished aesthetic and moral judgement by dwelling too long on the bizarre and extreme. As a polite philosopher preoccupied with aesthetics, Shaftesbury suggested more forcefully than Locke that cultural forms shaped moral sensibilities. This may explain his insistence that foreign arts should aim to mimic the cultural productions of Europe's civil nations, as judged by the Christian virtuoso; and also his worry that we should not be seduced into gazing at the ‘crooked designs’ (p. 126) of the Chinese and the Indian, lest their barbarous Gothicism degrade our own sensibilities. Rather than resolve the issue of diversity, Shaftesbury marginalized it on grounds of taste. Then there was Francis Hutcheson's conception of a universal ‘moral sense’, which, in its notion of ethical responsiveness, carried a more democratic emphasis than Shaftesbury's moral–aesthetic hierarchy, while nonetheless renewing the attack on those who allegedly exaggerated the facts of diversity. Ambiguities over whether Hutcheson's moral sense was a natural faculty or a cultivated form of judgement left it open to question, however, whether this sense was ultimately innate or learned.
The scholarship behind Carey's book is very fine indeed. His notable achievement is not merely to recover Locke – too long held hostage by political theorists – in all his anthropological entanglement, but also to show how debates central to ‘British’ moral philosophy were in fact responses to encounters with non-European peoples, brought into view by colonization and intercultural exchange via the practice of natural history.
Irving's volume grapples with the relation between the natural sciences and the origins of the British Empire in the seventeenth century. Her methodology owes more to the historiography of political and theological doctrine than to the history of science, and is focused specifically on religious concepts of empire in the writings of natural philosophers, in particular Bacon, Hartlib, Boyle and again Locke. Colonization, she argues, was central to natural philosophers' avowed goal of restoring a prelapsarian Protestant empire over nature. Notions of divinely sanctioned dominion over nature entailed theories of empire. Epistemological attention to Atlantic colonies, from Ireland to the West Indies, was motivated as much by the desire to return to the enjoyment of divine dominion as by strategic concerns for profit and geopolitical supremacy. More specifically, in an argument developed only in the book's final chapter, she suggests that doctrines of ‘man's dominion over nature’ (p. 2) helped found Lockean conceptions of property that, in this view, were eminently compatible with notions of undivided sovereignty (imperium).
The subsequent discussion draws in a number of intriguing and traditionally overlooked colonial aspects of the careers of eminent philosophers such as Boyle and Locke. The world in which these thinkers experimented and reasoned was one formed by trade relations and long-distance knowledge networks. The Adamic dominion they dreamed of was always already colonially inflected. Much of the book thus returns to the theme of improvement and colonization so rewardingly explored in Richard Drayton's Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven, 2000), aiming to refine our understanding of early modern Protestant conceptions of empire in particular. Thus Bacon stands out – unconvincingly in my view – as an advocate of travel as a ‘non-colonial’ (p. 42) means of achieving dominion through information; Hartlib's pansophical empire appears as a millennial version of agrarian improvement; Boyle's colonial and commercial information sources are linked to the experimental philosophy of the Christian virtuoso as an instrument for apprehending New World natures, in combination with husbandry, the manual arts and the propagation of the faith; the Royal Society's Repository under Oldenburg is ‘a tangible microcosm of an empire of knowledge’ (p. 94); and Locke's labour theory of property emerges as an inherently imperial language of agricultural improvement.
There is much interesting material in these discussions. Irving's methodological orientation within the history of political thought, however, does not lend itself to developing a full account of the mutually constitutive relation between colonization and the actual practices of the natural sciences. Instead, such tantalizing connections tend to remain in the form of suggestive contextualization. Both volumes considered here nevertheless attest to a deepening interest in the relations between science and empire, broadly understood, in late seventeenth-century English worlds, and it is to be hoped more will follow.
