UC Berkeley

My dissertation explores the global dimensions of France’s engagement with the natural world during its transition to modernity. By integrating archival research and computational network and textual analyses, I highlight the critical role of diverse historical actors in constructing how modern people engage with nature.My dissertation examines why and how in the second half of the eighteenth century birds moved to the forefront of natural history and the broader cultural imaginary, as manifested in scientific journals, poems, newspapers, paintings, porcelain dishes, and collections exhibiting hundreds of specimens. It argues that this phenomenon emerged at the apogee of the high Enlightenment, after the Seven Years War, and waned with the collapse of the Empire in 1815. In this period of global transformation, a firm apprehension of nature in both its totality and minutiae seemed within reach. That birds traveled between localities and had relatives in remote parts of the globe resonated with contemporaries, who were trying to grapple with a globe that was becoming more tightly connected and a social world that was becoming increasingly mobile. Moreover, birds’ moderate size and variety promised what other organisms could not offer: the possibility of enabling comprehensive collection, preservation and classification on the one hand, and detailed description, on the other. This ambitious engagement with the expansive natural world ended with the disintegration of the Empire. Confronted with regional and colonial resistance, and overwhelmed by an influx of specimens, naturalists began to produce ornithological projects that were more modest in thematic and geographical scope. Moreover, as a new discipline within zoology, Ornithology became more rigidly defined and methodologically homogeneous. While nature has occupied a prominent place in scholarship on the Enlightenment and the nexus of science and empire, historians have paid scant attention to naturalist communities outside a few urban centers and to actors beyond renowned naturalists. This oversight has circumscribed our perception of how Europeans experienced nature in a moment of transition into modernity. My dissertation complicates the elite- and metropole-centered perspectives of historical change by utilizing archival materials and artifacts from 16 localities, along with computational textual and network analyses, to explore the connections among approximately 1,200 people and hundreds of specimens involved in the production of knowledge about birds.