Reviewed by James Delbourgo | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.4

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Reviewed by James Delbourgo | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

James Delbourgo, McGill University

American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World. By Susan Scott Parrish. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 341 pages. $49.95 (cloth), $22.50 (paper).
In 1743 Pennsylvania botanist John Bartram received a silver cup from Sir Hans Sloane, recently retired president of the Royal Society in London, with some large writing on it. The engraved letters modestly spelled out Sloane's name. This pleased Bartram because "when my friends drink out of it they may see who was my benefactor" (172 n. 41). Susan Scott Parrish's marvelous, meticulous, and original American Curiosity emphasizes that colonial America was as much a center of early modern scientific production as the cities of metropolitan Europe. But Sloane's gift and Bartram's delight—the embodiment of an entire culture of transatlantic scientific exchange—seem to suggest how even metropolitan acknowledgments of colonial labor and their reception in the periphery reinforced awareness of Eurocentric Atlantic hierarchies.	1
In Parrish's vivid and precise telling, America was no longer a theater of jaw-dropping wonders by the later seventeenth century but a collection of curiosities. Having shed much of its former association with a sinful lusting after knowledge, curiosity became synonymous with the minute observation of particular facts, the objectification of a pastoral and feminized nature, and the perception of the universe's divine rational structure (though curiosities often retained a more prodigious sense of the utterly weird). Because the Americas were the colonial theater with which early modern Britain enjoyed the most sustained interaction, grappling with American curiosities played a decisive role in fostering a new empiricism in British science. The desire among London's virtuosos for trustworthy accounts of faraway American nature empowered Americans as in situ observers. "Empiricism, in this regard, gave authority where political empire took it away" (22). The curieux of the Royal Society needed good relations with their colonial informants. Realizing this, American savants sought to advance "claims for their own legitimacy as knowledge makers" (76) and reject opprobrious discourses of New World degeneracy. Naturalists such as William Byrd II and Alexander Garden typically traveled to Europe by proxy, through their letters and specimens, rather than in person and often bristled at the paltry recognition granted their labors. On their own shores and on their own terms, however, they comprised an ad hoc community of creole cognoscenti in a curious sphere—ostensibly set apart from war, trade, politics, and heterosexual desire—defined by sentimental pastoral devotion and modest empirical curiosity.	2
In addition to challenging the Eurocentric structure of standard accounts of colonial science, Parrish broadens readers' views of early modern knowledge making to include women, servants, Amerindians, and African slaves. Steven Shapin's foundational A Social History of Truth has long focused attention on the construction of the Christian gentleman as a uniquely credible spokesman for nature.¹ But Parrish demonstrates how many different kinds of informants and assistants the virtuoso needed to be able to speak at all. Curiosity, licit for men, was repeatedly declared illicit for women, a dangerous if not fatal passion. Yet in reality colonial women including Jane Colden, Eliza Lucas Pinckney, and others could be active botanizers and collectors for metropolitan patrons. Amerindians and slaves—often presumed absent from the sources that document colonial American knowledge—were, in fact, pivotal mediators between colonizers and the natural world. Amerindians were "naturals," their senses almost preternaturally attuned to their environment. Indian "sagacity" (239) was akin to animal instinct in European eyes, associated with a tendency to swampy skulking treachery rather than philosophical wisdom. Native knowledge, however, was a tool for the conquest of the American environment to be ignored at the invaders' peril. Settlers grabbed what knowledge they could from natives: geographic, botanical, medical. But they rejected the heathen beliefs that went with them and ultimately poured scorn on what they later hypocritically blasted as the feeble superstitions of decimated Amerindian populations.	. . .

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