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Fellow during the summer term 2019
Project: Between God and Darwin: How Climate Mattered
This book project examines how eighteenth-century British explanations of climatic difference created imperial anxieties and shaped the trajectory of empire in the Atlantic world - in the Caribbean, in West Africa, and in the British Maritimes. In an age in which the body as much as the mind were considered porous, "leaky" to outside influence or contamination – the era between unquestioning faith in God and the scientific certainties of Darwin - imperialists and their agents worried that the seepage of alien environments would result in degeneration. Their bodies, intelligence, sexuality, and morality appeared all at risk. Unwilling to abandon the colonial project, British governors, physicians, missionaries, and soldiers found surprising ways to quiet their paranoia as they ruled, healed, converted and defended British rule in alien climates. Their assumptions about the effects of these environments shaped where they settled, who they recruited into the military, how they organized their missionary enterprise, and where they considered retiring. This is the subject of "Between God and Darwin."