Chapter 2 Missing Terms in English Geographical Thinking, 1550–1600

In: The State of Nature: Histories of an Idea
Author:
Mary C. Fuller
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Abstract

This essay considers what the first few decades of English maritime expansion can tell us about perceptions of pre- or extra-civil conditions in regions beyond Europe, using as its main archive the document compilations of Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations (1589, 1598–1600). The first half of the essay examines evidence from theorists and patrons of exploration on the application of natural law principles to English actions in the Americas. The second half of the essay turns to observations by travelers. In the record preserved by Hakluyt, the lists of negatives that classically marked societies as uncivil – for instance, the lack of metallurgy, fermentation, and bread-making – appear most frequently in accounts of Arctic societies, across a band stretching from present-day Nunavut to Arctic Russia. The Arctic case makes evident the degree to which ideas of ‘civility’ were environmentally specific. At the same time, observations of indigenous technologies, the presence of real and imagined settler societies in the Arctic, and English aspirations in the North tested the possibility of thinking in different terms.

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