ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceeding chapters of this book. The book focuses on the "gentlemanly natural philosopher", and on the development of European knowledge. It exposes the "dependencies and limits" of that knowledge, especially as it was constructed about and at the cost of "the radically different peoples" discussed above. The Secretary of the Royal Society in 1707 provides a glimpse of a different kind of science which might have developed if non-Europeans and European women had been credited by the Royal Society as producers of scientific knowledge. John Atkins's narrative provides evidence that Swift's satire failed at one of its most important goals uncovering the self-interested pride of polygenesis. Atkins turns the "rational faculties" so celebrated by Robert Boyle and his sister as the key to "the Empire of Man over the inferior Creatures" into a weapon against the people that Atkins studies. Atkins's writing demonstrates that gentlemanly naturalist travelers took on the goals of the study of skin color in the Royal Society as their own.
