ABSTRACT
This essay argues that as the capacious field of natural science coalesced into disciplines, British practitioners who both conformed to and resisted the Royal Society’s newly established norms espoused an epistemology of colonization that imagined not just mastery over nature, but also scientists’ generative capacity to re-create nature itself. Looking at publications from the Royal Society, Abraham Cowley, Nehemiah Grew, and Margaret Cavendish, this essay outlines how such acts of “creation” yielded new technologies that improved life for some, while they instigated acts of violence and erasure against historically marginalized groups in service of Western science’s inherent tendency toward empire.
