Foreign Bodies: Travel, Empire and the Early Royal Society of London. Part 1. Englishmen on Tour

Abstract

The first part of this paper examines the experience of English travellers abroad. That many members of the Royal Society had made such trips is of great significance, although this fact has received surprisingly little attention in the historical literature on the Royal Society. The travellers tended to be young men who had just finished a university degree, although even younger individuals such as Robert Boyle were usually accompanied by their tutors. The journals and letters of a number of individuals from this period, points to the significance of learning in the context of the broader social accomplishments which made up the well-rounded gentleman or nobleman. Through their interactions with their hosts, a recognition of different cultural values served as a basis for the self-fashioning of a large number of English natural philosophers. In the second part of the paper, the often ambivalent attitude of the Fellows of the Royal Society to foreigners, relates this to the formation of a stable experimentalist “party line” in the 1660s. Prejudice formed the basis of a dynamic process of “productive exclusion” in which many practices which had once been part of a more pluralist outlook were deemed to be unacceptable. I conclude by looking at how this was also an issue of power, since the Society’s credibility was connected with the fact that it was composed of eminent men and was situated at the centre of an increasingly powerful protestant state.