A Last Generation of Naturalist Projectors? : Saint-Barthélemy, Sierra Leone, and Projecting Within, Between, and Beyond Empires in the Age of Revolutions, ca. 1785-1815

Sammanfattning

This study aims to shine a light on how naturalists navigated political change 1785–1815 by analysing the strategies of two naturalist projectors in the Atlantic: The Swedish physician Samuel Fahlberg in Saint-Barthélemy and the Swedish botanist Adam Afzelius in Sierra Leone. The study constructs a »projector logic« as a theoretical framework by combining Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory with Donald Broady’s understanding of networks. The framework is applied alongside the analytical terms projector, projecting, and projects. Projectors made claims to knowledge to persuade influential people that their envisioned projects were achievable and beneficial. This framework helps to see what strategies Fahlberg and Afzelius used in and between fields and networks, and its challenges. Fahlberg and Afzelius lived and practiced projecting on opposite sides of the Atlantic and used the same claims to knowledge by way of similar strategies. The study shows that they navigated political change by changing the way in which they made claims to knowledge. The changes in how they made claims were formulated into three strategies: gaining claims to knowledge through access via mediators and status; being useful in political fields; and using neutrality to practice projecting above imperial conflicts, loyalties, and others’ interests. Their collecting of natural specimens, their travelling, and their networking changed based on the wars in the Atlantic. Afzelius and Fahlberg made themselves useful by using ideals of improvement to be able to travel in the colonies, which proved useful for them in different ways. Neutrality was also used to get access to different landscapes, by emphasising their Swedish nationality. The study shows that to navigate political change, Fahlberg and Afzelius sought to gain access to knowledge in multiple ways, take part in colonial exploitation in different ways, and ultimately avoid transnational collecting and travel in the Atlantic. The study argues that their navigation of political change and their retreat from it points to them being part of a last generation of naturalist projectors in the early nineteenth-century Atlantic.