Kant and Cook

I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about “Captain Cook”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_James_Cook, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about “Immanuel Kant”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant. But in fact they had a lot in common. They were born four years apart, published at roughly the same time, thought a great deal about how political communities were and ought to be organized, and spoke with “George Forster”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Forster about, among other things, “race and human variation”:http://firstsearch.oclc.org/WebZ/FSFETCH?fetchtype=fullrecord:sessionid=fsapp6-56990-el2tclao-umm7jm:entitypagenum=4:0:recno=27:resultset=1:format=FI:next=html/record.html:bad=error/badfetch.html:entitytoprecno=27:entitycurrecno=27:numrecs=1. Nevertheless, I’ve rarely thought about both of them together. At least not until I read Brian Richardson’s new book “Longitude and Empire”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0774811897/qid=1142979236/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-5846516-4008032?s=books&v=glance&n=283155.

In _Longitude and Empire_ Richardson traces the way that Cook’s novel cartographic and rhetorical techniques created new ways of knowing and recording human communities which helped reconfigure how Europeans thought about both themselves and others. Thus while Benedict Anderson claims that nationalism has its origins in South American colonies rather than Europe, Richardson adds that the idea of an externally-bounded, internally homogenous territory cum state cum ethnic group owes just as much to the South Pacific whose islands serves as paradigms of just this sort of model. His book manages to be exceedingly readable while simultanously addressing topics that are usually considered seperately — Pacific history and the works of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, for instance. Although I still have a few dozen pages to go before I reach the finish line, I can already whole-heartedly reccomend the book to all and sundry.

Even better, Brian’s “website”:http://www2.hawaii.edu/~richards/ includes “his dissertation”:http://www2.hawaii.edu/%7Erichards/Pols_Dissertation/Pols_Dissertation_List.html, which the book is based on, and a smart-looking piece on “books and their titles”:http://www2.hawaii.edu/~richards/Writing/DealingWithBooks.pdf.

In this day and age it is hard to find new things to say about eighteenth-century voyages in the Pacific, and after the Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate we all suffer from Cook fatigue. But Brian’s book offers a fine example of humanistic social science which will interest many people whether they are Oceanists or not.

Alex Golub is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He studies mining and petroleum development in Papua New Guinea, as well as American culture in to the online game World of Warcraft. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org