ABSTRACT
The European part of this story starts in the European year 1735. At least that is where the narration is going to begin – the story takes another twenty or thirty years to really get underway. In that year 1735, two rather new and deeply European events took place. One was the publication of Carl Linné’s (Linnaeus’) Systema Naturae (The System of Nature), in which the Swedish naturalist laid out a classificatory system designed to categorize all plant forms on the planet, known or unknown to Europeans. The other was the launching of Europe’s first major international scientific expedition, a joint effort intended to determine once and for all the exact shape of the earth. As I propose to argue, these two events, and their coincidence, suggest important dimensions of change in European elites’ understandings of themselves and their relations to the rest of the globe. This chapter is about the emergence of a new version of what I like to call Europe’s “planetary consciousness,” a version marked by an orientation toward interior exploration and the construction of global-scale meaning through the descriptive apparatuses of natural history. This new planetary consciousness, I will suggest, is a basic element constructing modern Eurocentrism, that hegemonic reflex that troubles westerners even as it continues to be second nature to them.
