| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World. By Susan Scott Parrish. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xvi + 321 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. Cloth $49.95, paper $22.50.

Curiosity, Susan Scott Parrish reminds us, is the territory of both the subject and the object. "Both people and things," she writes, "were curious and depended on each other to evince this quality" (p. 59). The relations among men, women, the English, Africans, and indigenous Americans in the early modern Atlantic were similarly interdependent, and knowledge originating in the colonies enjoyed significant power in London's coffee houses and scientific societies. Parrish reframes how we understand not just science, but empire itself: "The centrally controlled mercantilist economy of empire did not provide the logic and structure for transatlantic science. Empiricism, theoretically and practically, entailed a more diffuse recognition of authority" (p. 314). Parrish's approach is to temper colonial rhetoric with embodied experience; nature, she argues, "was more than a trope (of wilderness or Canaan) ... nature was intricately tied to settler identity in a physically experienced and detectable way" (p. 89). This is a literary scholar who works like a historian.

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