The Age of Discovery


The Age of Discovery

The Age of Discovery is often seen as a series of  scientific breakthroughs, for the people living in the "discovered" lands, it was an era of profound trauma.

​Naturalists were not just neutral observers; they were often the intellectual scouts of empire. Their work was inextricably linked to the exploitation of people, land, and resources.

​1. The Naturalist as "Economic Scout"

​During this era, biology was big business. European monarchs and trading companies (like the East India Company) didn't just want to "understand" nature; they wanted to monopolize it.

  • ​Cash Crop Bio-prospecting: Naturalists were tasked with finding plants that could be turned into commodities. This led to the global reshuffling of species—moving rubber from Brazil to Southeast Asia, or tea from China to India—to maximize profits through plantation systems that relied on enslaved or indentured labor.
  • ​The "Empty Land" Myth: By classifying land through a European lens (as "wild" or "unclaimed"), naturalists provided a scientific veneer for Terra Nullius. This ignored Indigenous land management and paved the way for the forced removal of local populations.

​2. Scientific Racism and Taxonomy

​Perhaps the worst chapter is how the tools of the naturalist—observation and classification—were turned toward human beings.

  • ​Categorizing Humanity: As naturalists like Carl Linnaeus and later Georges Cuvier classified animals, they also created hierarchies of humans. They used physical traits to "rank" races, placing Europeans at the top and African or Indigenous peoples at the bottom.

  • ​Justifying Enslavement: These "scientific" classifications were used by politicians and enslavers to argue that certain groups of people were "naturally" suited for servitude, providing a pseudo-scientific justification for the transatlantic slave trade.

​3. The Extraction of Indigenous Knowledge

​Naturalists are often credited with "discovering" species that local populations had known about and used for millennia.

  • ​Uncredited Collaborators: Figures like Alexander von Humboldt or Charles Darwin relied heavily on Indigenous guides, hunters, and herbalists to navigate terrain and identify species. However, in the final published journals, these local experts were often reduced to "nameless helpers" or ignored entirely.
  • ​Biopiracy: Naturalists took medicinal knowledge—such as the use of Cinchona bark (Quinine) to treat malaria—back to Europe. While this saved countless European lives, the profits and credit rarely returned to the Indigenous groups who shared the knowledge.

​4. The "Naturalist-Collector" and the Museum

​The great natural history museums of London, Paris, and Berlin are, in many ways, monuments to this era of exploitation.

  • ​Looted Specimens: Many of the world’s most famous biological and anthropological collections were gathered during military campaigns or through lopsided "trades" with colonized people.
  • ​Human Remains: Shockingly, early naturalists also collected human remains (skulls and skeletons) for "comparative anatomy" studies, often taking them from sacred burial sites without consent.

The Modern Shift

​Today, the field of natural history is undergoing a "decolonization" process. Modern naturalists and museums are working to repatriate remains, credit Indigenous knowledge, and acknowledge the colonial roots of their collections.


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