Lydia Barnett, After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe (Johns Hopkins; Baltimore, MD, 2019).
Pratik Chakrabarti, Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity (Johns Hopkins; Baltimore, MD, 2020).
In the epoch of the Anthropocene, geology has acquired new standing. Its practitioners not only unearth our planet’s past, they also supply historical analogies for the earth’s future and offer a vocabulary for the cultural imagination of deep time. Rampant climate change forces scientists to seek parallels for today’s developments on timescales far beyond those of human history. Environmental transformations, long considered from a local perspective, are increasingly imagined as global. Historians have begun to add historical depth to these shifts and the abundant theoretical reflections on the Anthropocene. Among the recent contributions are Lydia Barnett’s After the Flood and Pratik Chakrabarti’s Inscriptions of Nature. Both books are rich and complex studies that push the boundaries of the history of geology and other fields. They explore the cultural histories of global imagination, environmental change, and deep time—the geological timescale beyond the confines of human history. Whereas we generally think of the deep past as the prehuman, prehistorical domain of nature, these studies show the human and the natural thoroughly entangled in early modern and nineteenth-century thought.
The Deluge and the global change
A historian of science and the environment, Lydia
Barnett traces Noah’s Flood as “a popular though controversial topic of
long-distance intellectual exchange” (7) among early modern scholars. In five
chapters, the author ranges from sixteenth-century Padua to early
eighteenth-century Switzerland. Along the way she encounters familiar thinkers
as well as new ones, such as the Peruvian scholar Antonio de la Calancha.
Across continents and religious divides, the Deluge served as “the centerpiece
of a unified history of humanity and nature” (8). Barnett draws on printed and
manuscript sources, treatises and correspondences to demonstrate the appeal of
the Flood, both to conceptualize “man-made environmental change on a global
scale” (19) and to forge epistolary relationships in the Republic of Letters,
with the Deluge as “a topic of collective philosophical inquiry” (132). The
Flood “promised that everyone, everywhere on earth was part of the same human
story, living on the same ruined earth” (5). Tracing the connections between
theological, natural, and historical inquiry, Barnett offers yet another
important case in which “religious faith spurred and shaped the pursuit of
natural knowledge” (16). From the seventeenth-century physico-theology of John
Ray to the nineteenth-century geology of William Buckland, biblical narratives
framed ideas about the natural world and the earth’s history.
Barnett’s book builds on earlier scholarship by Paolo Rossi, Rhoda Rappaport, and William Poole, exploring the diversity of early modern thought about the earth’s and humanity’s intertwined histories. Yet by drawing on a wealth of recent historiography, Barnett greatly deepens our understanding of the cultural contexts for “the early modern earth sciences” (16). The first chapter dissects the newly-discovered Lettere di philosophia naturale (1584) by the Paduan apothecary Camilla Erculiani, a rare and perhaps unique woman in the male world of early modern natural philosophers. Erculiani introduced naturalistic explanations for the Flood, fusing biblical interpretation and natural philosophy in a way that would flourish in seventeenth-century Mosaic natural philosophy and physico-theology. The third chapter offers fresh readings of canonical texts by Thomas Burnet and John Woodward, highlighting their theological reflections, informed by medical and agricultural discourse. Burnet proposed that the ruined state of the postdiluvian earth should be attributed to the agency of human sin in bringing about the Deluge. Woodward theorized “a sharp decline in soil fertility after the Flood” (119), forcing humans to till the land and atone for past sins through labor. The focus on the Flood allows Barnett to draw insightful connections between disparate histories, from sixteenth-century debates over the origins of Amerindians and polygenesis, to accounts of the Flood and the Apocalypse, to eighteenth-century networks for fossil collection. Her readings of Antonio Vallisneri and Louis Bourguet show the savants involved in religious politics alongside their well-known work on the earth’s history.
Part of the strength of Barnett’s study lies in her poignant theoretical reflections. The book’s introduction situates this particular history in a series of twenty-first-century debates, from the relationship between science and religion to modern environmental thought and theories of the Anthropocene. Beyond the case studies, she offers much food for thought. She casts Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681-89) as an early global case of what Fabien Locher and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz have termed “environmental reflexivity”: an awareness of human ability to cause environmental change. The narrative of human sinfulness and the Deluge conceptualized human “geological agency” (90) on a global scale. In addition, such early modern treatises contributed to “the global imagination” (11) of early modern Europeans, assembling a planetary whole from diverse local experiences. Some readers might find the present too close for comfort in suggestions that Burnet espoused “the idea that humans could destroy the global environment and be destroyed by it in turn” (91), but overall the study uses anachronism productively, presenting early modern earth histories as both stranger and more familiar than previously thought.
By situating her book in historiographies of environmental thought and global imaginaries, Barnett also distances herself from the history of geology and the work of Martin Rudwick on the late eighteenth century. Although sensitive to the interplay of religious ideas and different knowledge traditions, and detailed in his understanding of cultural and social context, Rudwick’s concern has been with the emergence of “earth’s deep history,” the historical reconstruction of the geological past, and the establishment of geology as a discipline. This history hinges on the emergence of secularized deep time as a condition for thinking geologically. Barnett persuasively argues for another metanarrative for early modern earth histories, less dependent on the rise of modern geology: a longue durée history of environmental reflexivity that combined humanist and naturalist notions of the past.
Still, questions of disciplinarity remain. When Barnett argues that the Flood allowed savants to cross “disciplinary and professional boundaries” (16), encouraging “interdisciplinary borrowing” (17), she offers no clear definition of early modern disciplines. It is unclear if the authors of theories of the earth considered their work as defying boundaries. One notable omission in the otherwise impressive bibliography is the collection Historia (2005), edited by Nancy Siraisi and Gianna Pomata, which highlights shared descriptive practices among early modern naturalists and humanists, blurring any distinction between the two before the eighteenth century. Divisions did exist—notably between theology and natural philosophy—but modern disciplines did not. How to navigate the early modern map of knowledge remains a vexing problem.
Did the advent of deep time sever earlier links between human and natural history? As “the planet’s timescale deepened,” Barnett notes, “there was no longer a clearly defined role for humanity in earth history” (194). This conclusion is tenable for geological thought in the decades around 1800. As Georges Cuvier, Charles Lyell, and many others opened up the depths of geological history, human history was confined to the Bible’s timescale. It seemed unlikely that human sin and a Universal Deluge remolded the planet’s entire geology. Yet, as Pratik Chakrabarti shows in Inscriptions of Nature, the boundaries between human and earth history remained porous far into the nineteenth century; the new notion of deep time began to seep into the historical imagination.
Deep time and the colonial reimagination of human history
Like Barnett, Chakrabarti analyses the work of scholars and scientists whose work defies our disciplinary boundaries, crossing “between disciplines, such as history, anthropology, archaeology, mythology, and geology,” as well as “between natural and cultural landscapes” (9). Chakrabarti, a historian of science, medicine, and empire, has written an exciting and at times dauntingly complex study. It explores the interplay between geological and antiquarian imaginations of the past in the context of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial India, while also considering similar developments in Australia and South Africa. In colonial settings especially, nineteenth-century disciplinary boundaries remained permeable. The same individuals who pursued “terrestrial resources and antiquity” through geology, dug “into ancient texts and genealogies and […] the lives and bodies of indigenous populations” (1). Through such overlap, the book argues, the human past became “inscribed in deep natural history, landscape and ecology,” in consequence appearing “more authentic” (6). Going beyond the historicization of nature, as studied by historians of geology, Chakrabarti focuses on “the naturalization of history” (6). This naturalization was pervasive to the new category of prehistory as “a form of antiquity that could be traced only in the strata, fossils, and flint stones” (2).
The book pursues naturalization in specific landscapes. The first chapter explores the Doab canal between the Ganga and Yamuna rivers, which became “the site of simultaneous explorations of Indo-Islamic history, classical archaeology, and prehistoric geology” (53). Its excavation exposed canal systems of Indian antiquity, fossils, and geological features of the land’s rivers; it ignited debates over the ancient courses of the mythological river Saraswati and the origins of humans in the Indian subcontinent. The second chapter traces the entangled imagination of geological and human antiquity in the foothills of the Himalayas. According to geologists, the mountains were so young that “human life” in the region preceded their formation and “retained signs of that geological and ecological transformation” (56). The fourth chapter documents how such notions stimulated the study of “aboriginal populations in India, Australia, South America, and Africa as remnants of prehistoric humans,” their past discussed in relation to “habitat, nature, and landscape” (123). The naturalization of antiquity enabled anthropologists, as one source puts it, to use “the study of existing savages … to realise the condition of primeval man” (127). The fifth and last chapter shows how such imagined prehistories reverberated in the present, shaping the colonial understanding of Indian tribes like the Gonds. Their homeland of Gondwana became a reference for both a “primitive” southern supercontinent in geological history—Gondwanaland—and the “primitivism” of the tribes believed to have inhabited the country before the advent of the Aryan Hindu race. Such references are still relevant today, informing struggles between Hindu nationalists and tribal peoples over land claims.
Chakrabarti also stresses that ”the intellectual quest for deep time” cannot be separated from “the industrial search for minerals” (188) and colonial exploitation. With vast coal reserves, diamonds and gold, the wealth of the southern continents seemed far beyond that of the northern ones. The confrontation between romantic imaginations of the deep past and the colonial experience created contradictions. While “the geology and the aboriginal inhabitants of central India presented a primeval purity … they also generated mineral wealth and agricultural riches” (190).
Chakrabarti’s book, originally intended as a “conventional history of geology” (193), has morphed into a many-layered study challenging “the assumption that deep history is beyond politics” (192). The sheer complexity of Chakrabarti’s historical exercise might deter some readers, as they struggle to connect historiographies of various scientific disciplines and colonialism, theoretical literature on the Anthropocene, and tribal politics in today’s India. It should be well worth their effort, however, as there is much to learn and think about in this rich and groundbreaking study.
Beyond the history of geology
After the Flood and Inscriptions of Nature both manage to squeeze complex arguments into relatively slim volumes, both handsomely published by Johns Hopkins University Press (although I find it inconceivable that any reader would prefer endnotes over footnotes in such scholarly work). Everyone interested in the history of the earth sciences, deep time, environmental history, or the Anthropocene should read both. Converging on similar themes from different directions, these studies successfully imagine new histories of geological thought. Informed by early modern histories of knowledge and religion on the one hand, and nineteenth-century histories of science and empire on the other, they abandon established narratives of discipline formation or “the discovery of deep time”. Instead they foreground how biblical narratives or colonial experiences defined the politics of global imagination or deep time—from debates over the nature of human sinfulness and the Deluge to the extractive industries of Gondwana. In their different temporal and geographical settings, these two books extend the range of questions that can be addressed in the history of geology.
Deep history is often imagined as a vast realm of primeval nature, unspoiled by human intervention. It separates the deep past, understood as nature, from the human past, understood historically. Such epistemological and disciplinary distinctions define modern disciplines like geology and history. Increasingly, historians and other scholars have begun to question the concepts of deep time and deep history—their cultural roots and connections, their histories. How did early modern narratives of global catastrophe shape narratives of the geological past? How did humans emerge as despoilers of a primeval nature, rather than cultivating laborers in a ruined postdiluvial landscape? How have the European origins of deep time defined it conceptually? How have traditions in the global south molded new narratives of earth history? Barnett and Chakrabarti have only begun to answer such questions. Beyond the history of geology, exciting new stories await us.
Mathijs Boom, University of Amsterdam