ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Pehr Kalm’s Linnaean Ethnography

• In Event: Scientific Travel in Colonial Contexts: Logistics, Politics and Practices

English Abstract

Late in 1747, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences sponsored a freshly-appointed economics professor named Pehr Kalm to travel to North America. His task was to collect a long list of seeds and specimens for his mentor, Carl Linnaeus. But Kalm had other ideas for his journey. Rather than merely stopping in England to secure passage to Philadelphia, he spent months touring the English countryside, conducting detailed observations of English agricultural practices and peasant life. And after he finally landed in North America, he similarly exhibited a greater interest in observing the Swedish, English, and French colonists of New England and New France than in the native flora that surrounded them.

This was less a total dereliction of duty than a shift of emphasis. As Lisbet Koerner has shown, the expeditions of the “Linnaeus apostles” were as much a matter of political economy as they were of natural history. If Linnaeus could develop a means of reacclimating valuable colonial flora to the Scandinavian climate, Sweden’s status as an economic power might be substantially increased. Kalm simply envisioned a different means of pursuing this same goal. If Sweden’s agricultural economy was to be improved, he felt, its peasantry would need to be, in essence, retrained. For Kalm, the farmers of England, New England, and New France would serve as the model for that retraining. By studying their habits and practices in great detail, Kalm was thus producing a kind of blueprint for a sweeping agricultural reeducation program.

In effect, Kalm was not doing Linnaean taxonomy of American flora, he was doing a taxonomy of farmers, along the lines of national type. Where his fellow “apostles” observed the characters of plants, he observed the characters of peasants cultivating those plants. Attention to Kalm’s travel writings thus reveals a kind of Linnaean ethnography, through which the 18th-century taxonomic program would advance Sweden’s economic aims by other means.

Author

• Jordan Thomas Mursinna, University of California, Berkeley