ABSTRACT
The previous chapter introduced the eighteenth-century systematizing of nature as a European knowledge-building project that created a new kind of Eurocentered planetary consciousness. Blanketing the surface of the globe, it specified plants and animals in visual terms as discrete entities, subsuming and reassembling them in a finite, totalizing order of European making. Perhaps one should be more specific about the terms: “European” in this instance refers above all to a network of literate Northern Europeans, mainly men from the lower levels of the aristocracy and the middle and upper levels of the bourgeoisie. “Nature” meant above all regions and ecosystems which were not dominated by “Europeans,” while including many regions of the geographical entity known as Europe.
