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1 results

  • 14 - Hooke’s Ant

  • from Part IV - Small Things on the Move
  • Edited by Chloe Wigston Smith, University of York, Beth Fowkes Tobin, Arizona State University
  • Book:
    Small Things in the Eighteenth Century
    Published online:
    29 September 2022
    Print publication:
    29 September 2022, pp 225-239

  • Summary

    The ant in Robert Hooke’s compendium and celebration of microscopy in Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses (1665) uniquely resists scientific scrutiny: moving about when alive, too-easily crushed when dead, the ant proves to be insistently difficult to study under a microscope. Through an extended allusion to Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1657), Hooke links the unruly ant to the colonial economy of enslaved Africans in Barbados, a place that Ligon understands through sugarcane, enslaved Africans, and saltwater slavery. The story of Hooke’s ant in Micrographia uncovers what Lisa Lowe calls the “intimacy” of modern, Western liberalism and the global conditions upon which it depends. In this case, Hooke’s ant reveals the intimacy of early scientific practice and the institution of transatlantic chattel slavery, exposing in the process that a small thing can reveal vast scales of geography and their networks of exploitation.