Northern Designs: British Science, Imperialism, and Improvement at the Dawn of the Anthropocene

Northern DesignsBritish Science, Imperialism, and Improvement at the Dawn of the Anthropocene Michael B. Guenther (bio) In late October, Captain James Cook and the naturalist Joseph Banks arrived to study the curious features of an island they would inhabit over the coming weeks. Banks spent much of his time examining the exotic plants and animals while Cook turned his sights to astronomical matters, recording an important eclipse to send back to colleagues at the Royal Society in London. Both men found the island an ideal setting in which to work on their larger mission of expanding the frontiers of knowledge and empire through scientific exploration. By diligently cataloguing the precise location and resources of these distant lands, figures like Captain Cook and Joseph Banks were helping to launch a second age of European discovery, commercial expansion, and colonization that would fundamentally shape the course of the nineteenth century.1 Yet this episode did not take place in Tahiti or some other Pacific island, as one might expect, during the famed voyage of the Endeavor (1768–1771), rather it occurred earlier, in Newfoundland, when Cook and Banks both found themselves stationed in the maritime provinces of Canada pursuing scientific missions on behalf of the British government. Following the Seven Year’s War, Cook served as a marine surveyor in eastern Canada, producing some of the most detailed hydrographic charts that the British government had ever commissioned while Banks was travelling aboard the HMS Niger [End Page 123] with his close friend, and future arctic explorer, Constantine Phipps. These northern waters, in fact, became an important training ground for a rising generation of navigators, surveyors, and scientists working to stake out the strategic trading routes and natural resources of the North Atlantic that were increasingly central to the imperial rivalry between Britain and France.2 Indeed, at the very moment that Cook and Banks were in Newfoundland, the French were sending out some of their most talented scientists and cartographers to Iceland in hopes of developing a new base of influence, and new fishing grounds, in the North Atlantic to compensate for the loss of Canada—a prospect that led some officials in Paris to consider trading the colony of Louisiana to the Danish crown in return for Iceland.3 Such ideas reflected a broader transformation unfolding during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, as ideas about scientific exploration, enlightened improvement, and industrial expansion fueled a pointed reappraisal of the economic potential of this sub-arctic world. From the eastern reaches of the Barents Sea to the western shores of Hudson’s Bay, contemporaries began to focus on an enticing list of northern commodities, ranging from incredibly valuable fishing and whaling grounds to key supplies of naval stores, pelts, industrial chemicals, minerals, and energy sources like coal, peat, or train oil. In Britain, boosters even tried to rebrand the region as the “Northern Indies,” hoping to convince the public that the vast archipelagos of the North Atlantic—stretching from Canada’s Maritime Provinces to the North Sea and beyond—could yield the same wealth and naval power that had flowed from the tropics, which they pointed out, had also been deemed uninhabitable in the past because of misguided beliefs about the “torrid” zone.4 Nowhere was this shift in geo-political perspective more visible than in the popular maps that emerged at mid-century depicting the globe from a polar vantage point—a simple projection technique that nonetheless brought the expansionary gaze of Europeans into sharp focus (fig. 1). Unfortunately, this northern perspective, and the historical forces animating it, has been largely overshadowed by the subsequent age of Pacific exploration, associated with the epic voyages of Bougainville, Lapérouse, Willis, Cook, and Vancouver.5 Without disputing the latter’s importance, or the vibrant scholarship surrounding it, this article reconstructs the earlier intellectual and political climate that fueled European fascination with the subarctic during this turbulent period when international warfare, economic dislocations, and imperial jockeying made the north Atlantic emerge as an appealing zone of European expansion.6 These northern campaigns crystalized a new set of relationships between science and imperial power, between the culture of improvement and visions of unlimited...

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