Unstable Ground

Projecting Natural Histories in the Seventeenth-Century

Abstract

Although natural history as a genre had classical, medieval, and Renaissance forms, seventeenth-century natural histories played a distinctive role in relation to projects – especially large-scale projects of expropriation, economic exploitation, planned mobility, and settlement. Sites targeted for such projects must be shown to be thoroughly known for the projects proposed to seem feasible or profitable and the risks involved calculable and worthwhile; at the same time, portraying these sites as vacant, waste, or unimproved – tabula rasa, white paper, terra nullius – supplied an important justification and argument for the kinds of intervention and expropriation these projects required. In this context, natural history (conceived of as embracing both works of nature and the achievements of art) became part of a larger epistemic project that predicated the assessment of a situation’s future potential on the knowledge of its present state and resources – often known through local testimony – while simultaneously downplaying past interventions, including even earlier natural histories. Such histories partook of the nature of projects while serving as important instruments for projectors. Though visible in natural histories of various parts of the early modern world, this dynamic is particularly clear in the case of natural histories in Cromwellian and later Stuart Ireland.