This course examines the history of European overseas exploration and colonisation through the lens of the natural world. Drawing on scholarship in the history of disease, environmental history, and the history of science and medicine, it focuses on so-called contact zones between European and Indigenous cultures, outlining how nature as well as concepts of nature have been remade and re-framed through such contact – whether via acculturation, adaptation, or assimilation. The course thereby also analyses ‘nature’ historically, outlining how natural environments have changed over time as well as how theories of what is natural – and how nature should be interpreted – have changed across time and place. It begins with first contact between Europe and the Americas, moves across oceanic and cartographic histories, and ends with analysis of Pacific Island plantation ecologies. Throughout, it makes use of global and imperial history approaches to the study of nature from the early modern to the modern period, while also encouraging comparisons and connections between Atlantic and Pacific histories.
Key themes include: histories of a natural order, including the history of racial thought; colonial science and medicine; histories of climate; the relationship between locality and scientific knowledge; indigenous knowledge and debates over its relationship to medical and scientific knowledge; history of islands.
