Science in early North America

Abstract

This essay brings a continental perspective to the history of science and empire in early North America. Focusing on inter-imperial rivalry and encounters with Native peoples, continental history offers opportunities to bring the various imperial and regional—Atlantic, interior, Pacific, and Arctic—histories that usually divide North American historiography into a single frame of analysis. Imperial competitions and peaceful and violent interactions with Indigenous groups were constants that contextualised the production of knowledge from the 1500s to the mid-1800s and throughout North America’s Spanish, French, British, Dutch, Russian, and US territories. More specifically, scientific practitioners in all of these regions had comparable concerns like exploring and charting lands, justifying imperialism through science, interpreting human difference, and building and manipulating knowledge networks. This essay examines these and other themes to help specialists embedded in North America’s various regional and imperial historiographies recognise connections, commonalities, and, perhaps, exceptional differences across an uncomfortably shared continent.