Among ‘Savage and Brutal Nations’: Instructing Identity and Science in the Pacific

Abstract

AbstractThis article reads the ‘hints’ provided by the President of the Royal Society Lord Morton to James Cook on his first Pacific voyage in 1768, first to show what they reveal about the contested views of technological advance as an index of progress in European thought in the later eighteenth century and, second, how that connection between technology and progress serves to entrench distinct differences between European and Indigenous identities in the colonial mind. Morton's ‘hints’ served as a kind of script that told the Europeans how to communicate their position as bearers of superior enlightened humanity. They functioned, therefore, as a technology of identity by ordering the behaviour of the European newcomers and curating their perceptions of the Indigenous people they encountered. Although the ‘hints’ were a self‐conscious expression of enlightened sensibilities, they remained a technology for the colonial projection of those sensibilities and for performance of European identity.