Johann Reinhold Forster And The Making Of Natural History On Cook S Second Voyage 1772 1775

The book examines the role of German scholar Johann Reinhold Forster, who served as principal naturalist on James Cook’s second voyage of exploration to the Pacific from 1772 to 1775. It examines how Forster contributed to our knowledge of natural history on a daily basis aboard the Resolution.

This presents the previously unpublished journal of the principal naturalist on Cook's second voyage. The main pagination of this volume and the three previous volumes in the set (Second series 152-154) is continuous. Overshadowed for nearly two hundred years in European scholarship by the achievements and reputation of his eldest son George Forster, J. R. Forster - principal naturalist on James Cook’s second voyage - was nevertheless recognised by many contemporaries as one of the ’universal geniuses’ of the late 18th century. His journal of the voyage offers many new insights, expressed at times in quite unrestrained language, into the day-to-day relationships, life and thinking and theory-testing on the second, and the most scientific and the most epic of Cook’s voyages. However, the circumstances of Forster’s career and personality were such that his work was dogged by debilitating disputes and vendettas. Consequently, important works such as this journal, which would have established him as the leading comparative anthropologist, linguist, geographer and zoologist of the Pacific, have thus far remained obscure and seldom-used manuscripts. Anthropologists, ethnolinguists, geographers, botanists, zoologists and medical and literary historians will find here much new observation and theory; for the two Forsters fashioned forces to influence Alexander von Humboldt and foretell Charles Darwin. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volume first published in 1981.

This volume examines the role of League of Nations committees, particularly the Advisory Committee of Jurists (ACJ) in shaping the statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ). The authors explore the contributions of individual jurists and unofficial members in shaping the League’s international legal machinery. It is a companion book to The League of Nations and the Development of International Law: A New Intellectual History of the Advisory Committee of Jurists (Routledge, 2021). One of the guiding principles of the book is that the development of international law was a project of politics where the idea and notion of an international society must contend with the political visions of each state represented on the different legal committees in the League of Nations during the drafting of the Covenant. The book constitutes a major contribution to the literature in that it shows the inner workings of some of the legal committees of the League and how the political role of unofficial members was influential for the development of international law in the early twentieth century and how they influenced the political and legal process of the ACJ. The book will be an essential reference for those working in the areas of International Law, Legal History, International Relations, Political History, and European History.

This presents the previously unpublished journal of the principal naturalist on Cook's second voyage. The main pagination of this volume and the three previous volumes in the set (Second series 152-154) is continuous. Overshadowed for nearly two hundred years in European scholarship by the achievements and reputation of his eldest son George Forster, J. R. Forster - principal naturalist on James Cook¿s second voyage - was nevertheless recognised by many contemporaries as one of the ¿universal geniuses¿ of the late 18th century. His journal of the voyage offers many new insights, expressed at times in quite unrestrained language, into the day-to-day relationships, life and thinking and theory-testing on the second, and the most scientific and the most epic of Cook¿s voyages. However, the circumstances of Forster¿s career and personality were such that his work was dogged by debilitating disputes and vendettas. Consequently, important works such as this journal, which would have established him as the leading comparative anthropologist, linguist, geographer and zoologist of the Pacific, have thus far remained obscure and seldom-used manuscripts. Anthropologists, ethnolinguists, geographers, botanists, zoologists and medical and literary historians will find here much new observation and theory; for the two Forsters fashioned forces to influence Alexander von Humboldt and foretell Charles Darwin. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volume first published in 1981.

George Forster's A Voyage Round the World presents a wealth of geographic, scientific, and ethnographic knowledge uncovered by Cook's second journey of exploration in the Pacific (1772-1775). Accompanying his father, the ship's naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster, on the voyage, George proved a knowledgeable and adept observer. The lively, elegant prose and critical detail of his account, based loosely on his father's journal, make it one of the finest works of eighteenth-century travel literature and an account of prime importance in the history of European contact with Pacific peoples. The Forsters' publications reveal the sophistication and enthusiasm they brought to their observation of Polynesian peoples as well as a sensitivity to the moral ambiguities of contact. The two volumes of George Forster's work include substantially richer descriptions of encounters with island inhabitants than either his father's classic work (Observations Made during a Voyage round the World, UH Press, 1996) or Cook's official narrative, and its confident, even visionary, style incorporates a good deal of polemic, particularly in its criticism of the treatment of islanders by Cook's crew. In addition to the range and depth of its anthropological considerations, it provides a thrilling account of life aboard one of Cook's vessels. In its author's German translation, this work becomes a classic of natural history writing, but its original English version has long been neglected by anglophone scholars. This new scholarly edition makes this important book readily available for the first time since its initial publication more than two centuries ago. But it also presents the work in fresh terms, making it more accessible and relevant to a contemporary audience. The valuable introduction and annotations draw on the wide range of anthropological and ethnohistorical scholarship published since the 1960s and contextualize the book in relation to both the cultures of Oceania documented by the Forsters and the history of European voyaging in the Pacific. Appendixes include a translation of the introduction to the German edition and the polemical pamphlets by George Forster and the ship's astronomer William Wales, in which some of the book's more controversial claims were debated. A Voyage Round the World brings the disciplines of history and anthropology to bear on Cook's voyages in an illuminating and readable fashion. This edition will help complete the corpus of basic documents on Cook's voyages--a crucial resource for researchers in cultural, Pacific, and maritime history; archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians; and most recently for scholars engaged in revisionist interpretations of eighteenth-century exploration and colonization.

This rich, deeply researched study offers the first comprehensive exploration of cross-cultural plant knowledge in eighteenth-century Mauritius. Using the concept of creolisation – the process by which elements of different cultures are brought together to create entangled and evolving new entities – Brixius examines the production of knowledge on an island without long-established traditions of botany as understood by Europeans. Once foreign plants and knowledge arrived in Mauritius, they were adapted to new environmental circumstances and a new socio-cultural space. Brixius explores how French colonists, settlers, mediators, labourers and enslaved people experienced and shaped the island's botanical past, centring the contributions of subaltern actors. By foregrounding neglected non-European actors from both Africa and Asia, within a melting pot of cultivation traditions from around the world, she presents a truly global history of botanical knowledge.

Threatened Knowledge discusses the practices of knowing, not-knowing, and not wanting to know from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. In times of "fake news", processes of forgetting and practices of non-knowledge have sparked the interest of historical and sociological research. The common ground between all the contributions in this volume is the assumption that knowledge does not simply increase over time and thus supplant phases of not-knowing. Moreover, the contributions show that knowing and not-knowing function in very similar ways, which means they can be analysed along similar methodological lines. Given the implied juxtaposition between emotions and rational thinking, the role of emotions in the process of knowledge production has often been trivialized in more traditional approaches to the subject. Through a broad geographical and chronological approach, spanning from prognostic texts in the Carolingian period to stock market speculation in early-twentieth-century United States, this volume demonstrates the important role of emotions in the history of science. By bringing together cultural historians of knowledge, emotions, finance, and global intellectual history, Threatened Knowledge is a useful tool for all students and scholars of the history of knowledge and science on a global scale.