ABSTRACT
In the late eighteenth century, the world became simultaneously smaller and larger. Smaller, in the sense that European (and particularly British) imperial expansion encompassed ever more remote and unexplored parts of the globe, establishing tentative connections between metropolitan cores and colonial peripheries that would be strengthened in the century to follow; and larger, in the sense that this process of exploration revealed cultures, species and other phenomena that had, hitherto, lain beyond the bounds of ‘western’ knowledge. In short, as attention was turned to the opportunities that existed in regions unexplored by Europeans and the world became, in geographical terms, terra cognita, it became clear that there was much more, in scientific and ethnographic terms, to know. 1
