Reclaimed Land
Natural History and Seventeenth-Century Projecting, with Particular Attention to Ireland
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55283/jhk.19171Keywords:
natural history, projecting, land, trade, empireAbstract
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.
Downloads
References
Primary Sources
Acosta, José de. Natural and Moral History of the Indies, edited by Jane E. Mangan and translated by Frances López-Morillas. Duke University Press, 2002.
Bacon, Francis, The New Organon, edited and translated by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Barry, Peter. “The Journeys of Samuel Molyneux in Ireland, 1708–1709.” Analecta Hibernica 46 (2015): 1–83.
Boate, Gerard. Irelands Naturall History. London: Imprinted for John Wright, 1652.
Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Ormonde, K.P., Preserved at Kilkenny Castle, New Series, vol. III. London: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1895.
Campion, Edmund. Tvvo histories of Ireland. The one written by Edmund Campion, the other by Meredith Hanmer Dr of Divinity. London: s.n., 1633.
Gerald of Wales [Giraldus Cambrensis]. Expugnatio hibernica: The Conquest of Ireland, translated by A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin. Royal Irish Academy, 1978.
Gerald of Wales [Giraldus Cambrensis]. The History and Topography of Ireland, translated by John J. O’Meara. Penguin, 1982.
Greengrass, M., M. Leslie, and M. Hannon, eds. The Hartlib Papers. The Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield, 2013. https://www.dhi.ac.uk/hartlib/.
Hoppen, K. Theodore, ed. Papers of the Dublin Philosophical Society, 2 vols. Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2008.
Hunter, Michael, Antonio Clericuzio, and Lawrence M. Principe, eds. The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 6 vols. Routledge, 2001.
Knox, Robert. An Historical Relation of Ceylon [London, 1681], 3rd ed., edited by S. D. Saparamadu. Tisara Prakasayako, 1981.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados [London, 1657], edited by Karen Ordahl Kupperman. Hackett, 2011.
National Library of Jamaica: MS 105 (John Taylor, “Multum in Parvo”).
O’Sullivan Beare, Philip. The Natural History of Ireland: included in Book One of the Zoilomastix of Don Philip O’Sullivan Beare, translated and edited by Denis C. O’Sullivan. Cork University Press, 2009.
Petty, William. A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions. London: Printed for N. Brooke, 1662.
Physiologus: A Medieval Book of Nature Lore. Translated by Michal J. Curley. University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Sharpe, Richard, ed. Roderic O’Flaherty’s Letters to William Molyneux, Edward Lhwyd, and Samuel Molyneux, 1696–1709. Royal Irish Academy, 2013.
Sloane, Hans. A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, vol. I. London: Printed by B. M. for the Author, 1707.
Stanihurst, Richard. Great Deeds in Ireland: Richard Stanihurst’s De rebus in Hibernia gestis [Leiden, 1584], edited by John Barry and Hiram Morgan. Cork University Press, 2013.
Taylor, John. Jamaica in 1687: The Taylor Manuscript at the National Library of Jamaica, edited by David Buisseret. University of the West Indies Press, 2008.
Trinity College Library, Dublin: MSS 884–885 (Samuel Molyneux travel diaries), 888 (William Molyneux Papers).
Secondary Sources
Armitage, David. “The Political Economy of Britain and Ireland After the Glorious Revolution.” In Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Kingdom or Colony, edited by Jane H. Ohlmeyer. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Ashworth, William B., Jr. “Emblematic Natural History of the Renaissance.” In Cultures of Natural History, edited by N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Avramov, Iordan. “Letters and Questionnaires: The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg and the Early Royal Society of London’s Inquiries for Natural History.” In Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World, edited by Paula Findlen. Routledge, 2018.
Barnard, Toby. “The Hartlib Circle and the Origins of the Dublin Philosophical Society.” Irish Historical Studies 19, no. 73 (1974): 56–71.
Barnard, Toby. “The Hartlib Circle and the Cult and Culture of Improvement in Ireland.” In Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication, edited by Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Barnard, Toby. Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland 1649–1660. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Barrera-Osorio, Antonio. Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution. University of Texas Press, 2006.
Bauer, Ralph. The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World. University of Virginia Press, 2019.
Bigelow, Allison Margaret. Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World. University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
Bredekamp, Horst. The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology. Markus Wiener, 1995.
Brockway, Lucile H. Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens. Yale University Press, 2002.
Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World. Stanford University Press, 2006.
Canny, Nicholas. Making Ireland British, 1580–1650. Oxford University Press, 2001.
Cook, Harold J. “Physicians and natural history.” In Cultures of Natural History, edited by N. Jardine, J.A. Secord, and E.C. Spary. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Cook, Harold J. Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. Yale University Press, 2007.
Cooley, Mackenzie, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yıldırım, eds. Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds. Routledge, 2023.
Cooper, Alix. Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge Unversity Press, 2007.
Coughlan, Patricia. “Natural History and Historical Nature: The Project for a Natural History of Ireland.” In Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication, edited by Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Cunningham, John. Conquest and Land in Ireland: The Transplantation to Connacht, 1649–1680. Boydell Press, 2011.
Eamon, William. Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Princeton University Press, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Random House, 1994.
Fox, Adam. “Printed Questionnaires, Research Networks, and the Discovery of the British Isles.” Historical Journal 53, no. 3 (2010): 593–621.
Fahmy, Rana. “Re-Settling Woes and Rebellions: The Role of Irelands Naturall History in the Cromwellian Era.” MA thesis, Concordia University, 2019.
Fradkin, Jeremy. “Protestant Unity and Anti-Catholicism: The Irenicism and Philo-Semitism of John Dury in Context.” Journal of British Studies 56, no. 2 (2017): 273–94.
Gascoigne, John. Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Gerbi, Antonello. Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. Translated by Jeremy Moyle. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985.
Gillespie, Raymond. The Transformation of the Irish Economy, 1550–1700. Dundalgan Press, 1998.
Glickman, Gabriel. Making the Imperial Nation: Colonization, Politics, and English Identity, 1660–1700. Yale University Press, 2023.
Gómez, Pablo F. The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic. University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
Harrison, Peter. The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Henley, Georgia, and A. Joseph McMullen, eds. Gerald of Wales: New Perspectives on a Medieval Writer and Critic. University of Wales Press, 2018.
Hill, George. An Historical Account of the MacDonnells of Antrim. Belfast: Archer and Sons, 1873.
Hoppen, K. Theodore. The Common Scientist in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: A Study of the Dublin Philosophical Society, 1683–1708. University Press of Virginia, 1970.
Horning, Audrey. Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic. University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
Houghton, Walter E., Jr. “The History of Trades: Its Relation to Seventeenth-Century Thought.” Journal of the History of Ideas 2, no. 1 (1941): 33–60.
Hunter, Michael. “Robert Boyle and the Early Royal Society: A Reciprocal Exchange in the Making of Baconian Science.” British Journal for the History of Science 40, no. 1 (2007): 1–23.
Ito, Seiichiro. English Economic Thought in the Seventeenth Century: Rejecting the Dutch Model. Routledge, 2021.
Kane, Brendan. “Did the Tudors Read Giraldus? Gerald of Wales and Early Modern Polemical Historiography.” In Gerald of Wales: New Perspectives on a Medieval Writer and Critic, edited by Georgia Henley and A. Joseph McMullen. University of Wales Press, 2018.
King, William, “Bogs and Loughs (1684).” In Papers of the Dublin Philosophical Society, edited by Theodore K. Hoppen. Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2008.
Leng, Thomas. Benjamin Worsley (1618–1677): Trade, Interest and the Spirit in Revolutionary England. Boydell, 2008.
Long, Pamela O. Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600. Oregon State University Press, 2011.
Maley, Willy. “Double Dutch: The Boate Brothers and Colonial Cosmography.” Journal of Early Modern Studies 12 (2023): 237–52.
Mancall, Peter C. Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
Marroquín Arredondo, Jaime, and Ralph Bauer, eds. Translating Nature: Cross-Cultural Histories of Early Modern Science. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
McClellan, James E., III, and François Regourd. “The Colonial Machine: French Science and Colonization in the Ancien Régime.” Osiris 15 (2000): 31–50.
McCormick, Ted. “Improvement, Projecting, and Self-Interest in the Hartlib Circle, c. 1640–1660.” In Historicizing Self-Interest in the Modern Atlantic World, edited by Christine Zabel. Routledge, 2021.
McCormick, Ted. “Between Irish Plantation and the Plantation Complex: The Down Survey (1654-58), Projecting, and the Origins of Political Arithmetic.” In Plantation Knowledge: Agricultural Colonization, Exploitation, and Exchange since 1500, edited by Nicholas B. Miller and Ulrike Lindner. SUNY Press (forthcoming).
Mendyk, S. “Gerard Boate and Irelands Naturall History.” Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 115 (1985): 5–12.
Montaño, John Patrick. “Education, the New Science, and Improvement in Seventeenth-Century Ireland.” Études irlandaises 43, no. 2 (2018): 25–36.
Norton, Marcy. “The Quetzal Takes Flight: Microhistory, Mesoamerican Knowledge, and Early Modern Natural History.” In Translating Nature: Cross-Cultural Histories of Early Modern Science, edited by Jaime Marroquín Arredondo and Ralph Bauer. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Ochs, Kathleen. “The Royal Society of London’s History of Trades Programme: An Early Episode in Applied Science.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 39, no. 2 (1985): 129–58.
Ogilvie, Brian W.. The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Ohlmeyer, Jane. “Confederation and Union, 1641-60.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History, edited by Alvin Jackson. Oxford University Press, 2014.
O’Kane, Finola, and Ciaran O’Neill, eds. Ireland, Slavery, and the Caribbean: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Manchester University Press, 2023.
Pagden, Anthony. Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500-c.1800. Yale University Press, 1995.
Pestana, Carla Gardina. The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661. Harvard University Press, 2004.
Pestana, Carla Gardina. The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire. Harvard University Press, 2017.
Pluymers, Keith. No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.
Portuondo, María M. Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World. University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Raj, Kapil. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Rubiés, Joan-Pau. “Instructions for Travellers: Teaching the Eye to See.” History and Anthropology 9, no. 2-3 (1996): 139–90.
Rynne, Colin. “The Social Archaeology of Plantation-Period Ironworks in Ireland: Immigrant Industrial Communities and Technology Transfer, c.1560–1640.” In Plantation Ireland: Settlement and Material Culture, c.1550–c.1700, edited by James Littleton and Colin Rynne, . Four Courts Press, 2009.
Schiebinger, Londa. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Harvard University Press, 2007.
Slack, Paul. The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Progress in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford University Press, 2015.
Smyth, William. “Wrestling with Petty’s Ghost: The Origins, Nature and Relevance of the So-Called ‘1659 Census.’” In A Census of Ireland, circa 1659: With Essential Materials from the Poll Money Ordinances, 1660–1661, edited by Séamus Pender. Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2002.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Macmillan, 1988.
Stagl, Justin. A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1500–1800. Routledge, 1995.
Veach, Colin. “From Kingdom to Colony: Framing the English Conquest of Ireland.” English Historical Review (2024). https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceae210.
Webster, Charles. The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660. Duckworth, 1975.
Winterbottom, Anna. Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Yale, Elizabeth. Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Ted McCormick
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Funding data
-
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
Grant numbers 435-2020-1096
