Natural history and the representation of South Africa in the eighteenth century

Abstract

Summary In Imperial Eyes (1992), Mary Louise Pratt asserts that a “Linnaean watershed” may be identified in the eighteenth‐century discourse about South Africa. Before this watershed, a sympathetic depiction of contacts with the indigenes was to have been possible; afterwards, no longer. In this article I attempt to show, by reference to the work of Robert Jacob Gordon and Peter Kolb, that these assertions are difficult to defend, and that, in some respects, the opposite of what Pratt asserts is in fact the case.