1 - Classification and the Species Question

Summary

The Species of Man: Physiology, Language and Civilization

One expression of colonialism and imperialism was the imposition of a nomenclature and taxonomy on the newly discovered flora and fauna. This new order was no longer depicted by medieval stonemasons, gardeners and scribes, but by cartographers, explorers, travel writers, slavers and those ultimately burdened with the duty to spread enlightenment. The discovery of the New World produced a great rupture in the understanding of nature, and the European expansion brought within its sphere new plants and animals which vastly expanded the known variety of nature. If the world was already too varied for Pliny to catalogue, what was to be done now that an entire New World had to be incorporated into the map of creation? To produce a system whereby different naturalists could refer to individual examples of plant and animal varieties and be mutually understood as referring to the same object became a fundamental scientific quest. With the necessity for a standard system for naming and classification, ‘the systematic classification of the natural world emerged as one of the quintessential achievements of modern science’ and it was of course Linné's great achievement. At the very moment when our domination of nature could be cheered alongside it, ‘the paradox between the discourse of freedom and the practice of slavery marked the ascendency of a succession of Western nations within the early modern global economy’.