Cameron B. Strang. Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500–1850.

Abstract

Cameron B. Strang’s Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500–1850 offers a superbly researched and original history of science in early America by focusing not on the intellectual elites in Europe or in the urban northeastern centers of the British American colonies and the early American republic but on actors in the early American borderlands—Spanish bureaucrats, French Creole and Anglo plantation owners, African slaves, and Native American adepts, all of whom observed, collected, studied, described, and exchanged American natural specimens in the Floridas and in the lower Mississippi Valley, or the “Gulf South.” Despite these men’s often marginal position in the geographies of empire and nation, Strang argues that the role they played in the networks of scientific knowledge production was “far from being peripheral”; rather, they were “central to encounters that made the pursuit of knowledge in early America what it was” (5). And as these men were often motivated by personal ambition, their scientific pursuits flourished in a fluid and often violent world of imperial expansionism, interimperial rivalry, slavery, as well as Indian removal and even genocide. Attention to local knowledge, Strang shows, is key to understanding the history of science in early America.