Thanks to a comment from Frau Katze (great name!), I found this article and have also stolen her title. It’s not only Newton in the crosshairs, but Carl Linnaeus, the “Father of Taxonomy.” The issue? Their connection with the slave trade, which, at least according to the Science article below, seems a bit tenuous. It’s not that they overtly supported slavery or owned slaves, but that Linnaeus used specimens that were sent to Europe on slave ships, and may have been collected by slaves. . Not only that, but many private natural history specimens were sent on slave ships, with some being collected by slaves (who were apparently paid for each specimen.
In Newton’s case, it appears his sin was just to use data on tides collected in a place that was a port for some slave ships.
This article (click headline below to read) isn’t as bad as others that seek to ruin the reputations of people because of behaviors we consider bad today, nor does it call for removal of all the specimens shipped this way. It simply asks for understanding and giving the historical context for collections. And that is fine—except that we hardly know the provenance of any of the natural history items collected so long ago. And you know how these things go: if you got specimens sent on a slave ship along with other goods shipped from South America or the Caribbean to Europe, the next thing you know you’ve called an enslvaver yourself, and then the reputation of people like Linnaeus and Newton are besmirched, and then they get erased. (I can’t imagine, however, that Newton could even be faulted for what he did.)
There seems to be a whole genre of historians who try to draw these connections, and I don’t mind their efforts so much, up to the point where they try to cancel people for what is a very tenuous connection to the slave trade.
We all recognize, of course, that slavery was horrible: one of the worst acts you can commit on a person. People were ripped away from their homes, families were separated and people were transported far away under horrible conditions. If they survived, they were turned into unpaid laborers—considered possessions of the slaveowner. There’s no doubt about the odious nature of what happened. But the less closely you were connected to this trade, the less guilt your reputation should bear. Linnaeus and Newton, it seems, are relatively guiltless, at least compared to those who captured slaves, transported them, or took possession of them.
Click to read an article about this in Science:
The problem is provenance. One of the big purveyors of natural history specimens was James Petiver, a London apothecary described this way by Wikipedia:
James Petiver (c. 1665 – c. 2 April 1718) was a London apothecary, a fellow of the Royal Society as well as London’s informal Temple Coffee House Botany Club, famous for his specimen collections in which he traded and study of botany and entomology. He corresponded with John Ray and Maria Sibylla Merian. Some of his notes and specimens were used by Carolus Linnaeus in descriptions of new species. The genus Petiveria was named in his honour by Charles Plumier. His collections were bought by Sir Hans Sloane and became a part of the Natural History Museum.
The issue, as the Science article notes, is how the specimens were transported:
Although he rarely left London, Petiver ran a global network of dozens of ship surgeons and captains who collected animal and plant specimens for him in far-flung colonies. Petiver set up a museum and research center with those specimens, and he and visiting scientists wrote papers that other naturalists (including Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy) drew on. Between one-quarter and one-third of Petiver’s collectors worked in the slave trade, largely because he had no other options: Few ships outside the slave trade traveled to key points in Africa and Latin America. Petiver eventually amassed the largest natural history collection in the world, and it never would have happened without slavery.
One quarter and one-third of the collections “worked in the slave trade,” mostly, it appears, as ship’s surgeons who were tasked with collecting specimens. This already makes much of the provenance of the specimens slave-ship free, yet there’s no way of knowing which specimens are “good” and which are “bad.” Specimens of both types are in London’s Museum of Natural History and are apparently still being used. (The collections were mostly ferried on British slave ships, though some Spanish ones were used as well.)
That’s the gist of the story, and here’s how Linnaeus and Newton were involved. I quote from the story:
Linnaeus (already mentioned in the excerpt above).
[Petiver] and visiting scientists wrote papers that other naturalists (including Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy) drew on.
Some historians now refer to those private and institutional collections as the “big science” of their day. Scholars studied those centralized repositories and then circulated accounts of their research to other scientists. Linnaeus drew on such accounts when putting together Systema Naturae in 1735, the book that introduced his famous binomial naming system for flora and fauna.
And that’s it for Linnaeus: he wrote paper and did analysis of specimens that were described by other scientists, specimens transported on slave ships (with some specimens possibly connected by slaves). This is quite a tenuous connection between Linnaeus and slavery, and in itself seems something that shouldn’t tar his reputation.
Newton
Even a field as rarefied as celestial mechanics benefited from slavery. When developing his theory of gravity, Newton studied ocean tides, knowing that the gravitational tug of the moon causes them. Newton needed tide readings from all over the globe, and one crucial set of readings came from French slave ports in Martinique. Delbourgo says, “Newton himself, who’s really the paradigm figure of an isolated, nontraveling, sitting-at-his-desk genius, had access to numbers he wouldn’t have had access to without the Atlantic slave trade.”
Newton’s connection to the slave trade is even more tenuous, as it consists of his using “one crucial set of readings” from a French slave port. Were the data collected by slaves? I doubt it. Is it just that it was a slave port that indicts him? I have no idea. This is really the only mention of Newton beyond saying later that Petiver “he succeeded Newton as president of the Royal Society (which itself invested in slaving companies),” which is not a serious indictment—unless you want to make every member of the Royal Society culpable.
So the accusations against Linnaeus and Newton, at least, bear little weight. At the piece’s end, Kean ponders what we should do about the connection between collecting data and specimens and the slave trade. He cites historians urging mention of how specimens were gathered, which is absolutely fine with me. If they were gathered illegally, as apparently some of them were, that should also be mentioned, for now collectors must have permission to remove specimens from a country. But it goes a bit further:
The connections between science and the slave trade could also feed into ongoing debates about reparations and the historical legacies of slavery. Like some U.K. organizations, U.S. universities such as Yale, Georgetown, and Brown have acknowledged how they benefited from slavery. For the most part, Murphy says, those conversations are framed “in terms of just dollars and cents, pounds and pence. Yet [the profits] can also clearly be measured in specimens collected and papers published.”
It’s not clear how the data, especially since we don’t know which specimens were transported on slave ships or collected by slaves, are to feed into these debates. Of course we can and should acknowledge this fact somewhjere, but I’m not sure about what sort of “reparations” are to be made. Who would get them? Readers may wish to weigh in here.
This seems to be going a long way to make a point. Perhaps they are concerned less with the individuals than they are with somehow invalidating the collections and the data themselves, as part of the general Post Modern assault on objectivity. It would be easier to castigate Newton and Linné for both being from countries involved in the slave trade. (Yes, Sweden engaged in the slave trade in its Caribbean colony of Saint-Barthélemy, also known as St. Barts.)
How ’bout getting a land acknowledgement from Newton .. or, whatever… while they’re at it. He got to cozy up at Woolsthorpe while the masses suffered The Plague.
Also the Left must credit Newton for the latest Pride flag.
#Aufheben der Newton
#Dialectic is alchemy
I just realized the plague/black death was in the 14th c. – or well before Newton.
And I can’t find what I thought was Newton in quarantine in Woolsthorpe. Maybe that fire.
You’re thinking of the Plague of … 1665-6, wasn’t it? Whether the Black Death was another strain of the same disease, or a different one, I forget. Bodies have been exhumed from “plague pits” ; bugs have been cultured ; I just forget the results.
But the thing to remember about these times is that in early 1665, when the first reported plague deaths occurred, people recognised the symptoms, recognised the importance of the event, and recognised the effect of weather on transmission rates early in the year because they had lived through another outbreak of plague in recent years.
Checking … from Wiki
Those latter two would have been in both living, and administrative memory.
Plus, of course, the administrations had information from abroad. So they’d have known of the “Great Plague of Seville (between 1647 and 1652)”, and “plague epidemics within Constantinople [in]: 1603, 1611 to 1613, 1647 to 1649, 1653 to 1656, 1659 to 1688”, “Algiers [] outbreaks returning in 1654 to 1657, 1665”. My memory was telling me that Marseilles had an outbreak too, but not according to Wiki. Meh – if it was rattling around the Med, Marseilles would have had cases, even if they managed to avoid a notable outbreak.
Anti-vaxxers seem to forget what life was like before modern, science-based medicine. “Nasty, brutish and short”, quoth Hobbes.
I think it’s fair to say that, without the slave trade, none of us here today would exist. If we’re going to play Six Degrees of Separation with a long-standing and widespread historical phenomenon, it’s a dead certainty that removing it means that there are multiple points where our direct ancestors would never have met and procreated the line which lead to ourselves.
I benefited then from the slave trade. I’m no longer having any dealings with me, out of solidarity with people I shouldn’t be dealing with either.
In the interview with Don Lemon, Elon Musk said everyone is descended from a slave, it’s just a matter of when. Don was applying typical dialectical wizardry on Musk to discredit him any way that works.
I haven’t sat down to plot it, but seems to me there is something to that claim. I have a great old math problem that looks at relationships. WEIT would be the perfect place to analyze the “matter of when” claim.
There is a standard item of debunkery to the effect that “everyone in Britain” (whatever that means – the Vietnamese refugee who arrived in 1995 and runs the local “Chinese” chippie?) “is descended from about Edward 3rd” – notorious for spreading his semen around. Which has the corollary that everyone in Britain is also descended from everyone in Britain who was within a generation of alive when Edward 3rd was shagging his way through the serving wenches of the country.
Outside a country, you’re more at the vagaries of population movements. So, before Columbus there was no (well, negligible ; excepting the odd shipwreck-ee) European contribution to Central American genomes. After, within a few generations, lots of contribution. Effectively “well mixed”. Slower mixing into the North American populations, but that would have happened – even if the missionaries in the SW kept their dicks in their habits (“hah!”), their attendants, servants and muleteers certainly did not, but how fast the genomes spread … became moot within the early 1800s and the subsequent population mixing.
Crudely, if you assume every generation had 2* the number of ancestors, you’re not going to go far wrong. The bigger variable is, how long do you consider a generation to be – 20 years? 22? 25? – makes a big difference. Once you get beyond a handful of generations (3?, 4? how many generations separated Charles Darwin and … Emma(?) Wedgewood(??)) you need to reduce the ancestors-per-generation estimate because your pool of ancestors will include people who share their ancestors. In multiple ways. How much to reduce the factor by … 1.9, 1.8. Same going the other way, and I cite the same Darwin-Wedgewood (?) example.
I’d make that a variable you can adjust by time, at each generation. It helps yo to stay clear about your assumptions. It’s illuminating to play around with this sort of thing in a spreadsheet. Count the generations (keeping that as a variable) ; count the ancestors (or children, if you’re going the other way), but keep that as a variable you can adjust at each generation … fun. Your most awkward modelling problem is how to deal with step changes in the population size – Columbus’ boatload of sailors’ testicles, for example, in the “Native American” version.
How well mixed sub-populations were is another problem. Before the start of the industrial revolution, you’re not quite safe to assume that everyone “married” someone from within three hours walk (say, 15km), but the “Amesbury Archer” (buried near Stonehenge when that was a thing, with grave goods form Central Europe and isotope ratios to match) waves his willy at you from prehistory to say “there was long-term mixing too!” The distribution of “Langdale greenstone” hand axes from England’s Lake District overlaps with that of Hallstatt artefacts from the salt mining centre near Salzburg, and will have some effect on your population models too. To say nothing of the spread of Middle-Eastern agriculture practices, crops and animals at the same time.
It is definitely a more fun way of passing time than pulling the wings off flies, and you’re in a better ethical position too.
Oh Elon : he’s white, he’s from southern Africa ; regardless of his relationship with his mine-owning family, he’s at least a product of exploitation, even if he himself has been a saint. Judging from his “blanker Afrikaans” expressions of opinion, he is extremely unlikely to have been a saint – judging from the “blankers” I’ve had to work with through the decades.
Good stuff, thanks.
You spurred me to look up the problem I referred to. It is the “Too Many Ancestors” problem (no. 46) in :
101 Puzzles
(Publication date ??)
Yakov Perelman (1882-1942)
… (it’s sort of public domain, or something.) which states [excerpted] :
“You can see that 20 generations back, I had an army of direct ancestors, more than half a million. […] you can easily imagine that the number of ancestors was so huge that the Earth would not be enough for them. Can you find a way out of this predicament?”
… not exactly the same, but a classic problem.
It has been a while since I read Malthus, but I recall the same point being made there. That was published … 1820-odd? Darwin certainly read it before developing his theory of natural selection, if not before (or on) the Beagle.
1798 publication, but Malthus was noisy and controversial in the period of the Poor Law reformation, the Corn Laws, and influenced Chartism – arguably the closest Britain came to a revolution this side of the Civil War – though he died before that really kicked off.
Oh, I didn’t know (Wiki) that Malthus was buried in Bath Abbey. I’d have paid my respects if I’d known, while the wife was wandering around cooing at the architecture.
From Wikipedia’s page on Liverpool:
“Substantial growth took place in the mid-late 18th century when the town became the most heavily involved European port in the Atlantic slave trade.”
That does it! Cancel the Beatles!
Given the prevalence of slavery in the Roman Empire (up to 1/4 of the population being enslaved at some points), then anyone with European family history has the taint.
Another thought on this problematic :
There is an old idea of the species-being. It like New Age Theosophy kind of super-organism. But of course, Karl Marx in fact developed that idea used that word “species-being”. It means there is only one super-organism of “man”. Hegel thinks along similar lines, from the standpoint of the End of History. So I think that means not just individuals alive at the moment, but the trajectory through the entirety of History add to the “species-being”.
The contradiction is brought into thought for positive transcendence of the individual (a form of private property) as the source of human self-estrangement – and preventing the attainment of the species-being.
The accusation of generational benefit from slavery is a religious manipulation of thought like one of the seven deadly sins.
This is cult thought reform.
See Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 by Karl Marx for the definition he wrote.
And just wanted to share this one going back through the book :
species-consciousness
Marx could’ve been on Oprah right next to Deepak.
Every human alive at a time when slavery was happening somewhere in the world should be canceled for the depravity of allowing slavery to exist in their light cone. All humans, everywhere, past, present and for at least some time into the future, are hereby canceled.
Mind your light cone!
Thanks Darrell! Excellent and very well put. I remember Linnaeus very well from high school biology. The teacher at one point noted his homeland and asked if any of us had Swedish ancestry. I raised my hand as three of my four grandparents were Swedish. I was rather proud then. But now, much less so. i am 75% ashamed and have 75% cancelled myself. Unfortunately my paternal grandfather was from England so thanks to Isaac’s errors, I have fullly complied. See y’all in hell I guess. What kind of world are we living in? I’ll query Saint Titania as no doubt she will be down there with the rest of us.
But … just because an event is in my past light cone, doesn’t mean it was something I was aware of.
Uggg, the “space Odyssey” extra with the thigh bone is in my past light cone. Does that make me responsible for every chicken wing consumed in a speed-eating contest in Nowheresville, Idaho?
We don’t even know what species “Uggg” was – even within the more flexible meanings of “species” bruited around here.
If tidal readings from a slave port are damning then isn’t almost anything done in the past up for erasure?
Einstein smoked a pipe. Tobacco became more accessible and grown more widely in the new world because of the slave trade which helped to make tobacco more popular, and without that popularity it might never have caught on as a widespread habit, and if not, Einstein would not have been exposed to it and thus would never have smoked in the first place. Thus, Einstein benefitted from the slave trade.
Never mind whether the counterfactual is probable or accurate, the mere fact that I can propose it is enough to send him into the dustbin of history.
And Einstein also contributed to the profits of the tobacco industry – cancel him twice, the utter bastard!
I found it so amazing to open drawer after drawer in the Museum of Comparative Zoology collections as a graduate student, reading the names on the tiny slips of paper in each specimen box. The names were a who’s who of 18th and 19th century natural history. Maybe some of them had a tangential connection to the slave trade.
However, unless scientists of the period actively and knowingly exploited the slave trade, I would be reluctant to call them out as being culpable. Since the slave trade was deeply embedded in the European and North American economies of the age, almost everyone would have had at least some connection, however tenuous.
I’ve decided I am perfectly OK with historical slavery. Honestly, couldn’t care less that it once existed. No need to balance the “bad” with the “good”. Every time someone brings it up I’ll say how thankful I am that the British Empire and later the United States abolished it wherever their influence could reach, over the objections of powerful African chieftains who had done very well by it for hundreds of years and resented British cultural imperialism snuffing their business model. Even aboriginals in America owned slaves, and not just each other. Negro slaves from Africa.
Slavery whiners are, with that, hereby canceled.
Bravo!
Indeed.
I see we have some fairly entrenched resistance here.
Not to worry, that is usually handled with just a little sīxiǎng gǎizào (思想改造, “ideological transformation/reform”).
I agree with you Leslie however Let us not forget either that slavery still goes on in many areas of the world, the middle east is just one area, Qatar is a fine example of modern slavery.
That’s only because the British Empire, with the Royal Navy and the fledgling United States Navy, was not able reach into all far corners of the world.
There’s a less tenuous connection with slavery than these which i have not seen addressed. Thanks directly to slavery, Sam Kean gets a story in the prestigious journal Science.
:o)
Agreed. I find Sam Kean’s story problematic in that aspect. If it wasn’t for slavery, he would not have profited in writing about it.
That is a better way to make a point that I’d make, which is that the point about this article is just to make a point. That is, to be pointy, to borrow a very deep dive into WEIT commentary from years past. Possibly a few here will remember that one.
It’s interesting that we never here protests about the zillion other historical uses of slavery, the great pyramids in Egypt for example. I know there is the timeline element, but the sad fact is a lot of human civilization was built on slavery. What’s important is that is was abolished.
Indeed! We need acknowledgement of this plus some perspective.
While I agree with your general statement about human slavery, archeologists/ Egyptologists do not belive the pyramids were built by slaves. Rather than whipping slaves to haul the stones, they used technology to its maximum. Much of the work involved was done by highly skilled craftsmen who were honored for their work, it is currently believed.
And what about the Ottomans, who took slaves from Europe? Admittedly not in the same volume as the trans Atlantic trade, but it’s NEVER mentioned by the woke moralists.
The Muslim trade in subSaharan African slaves went on for over a millennium. It’s estimated, by African scholars, that at least nine million Africans were taken during this period, possibly as many as twelve million – of course, records are spotty and estimates are difficult.
And the Muslim trade in European slaves was not trivial – the Barbary pirate slave trade alone involved some one million European slaves. And that’s just one part of the Muslim trade in Europeans from south and central Europe and the Slavic lands.
They appear to get a pass on all this, however.
Thanks for information. I didn’t know that.
You’re welcome.
Is there any evidence that the Pyramids were built using slave labour?
The evidence I’ve seen is for a mixture of paid artisans working all year, and “corvee” labour during the “inundation” season between harvests and planting. Both groups being paid mainly in food (and beer, this being Egypt) not cash, but that is because coinage was not invented yet.
If you consider “corvee” (also called “conscript”) labour to be slavery, then you’re opening up the whole question of our modern “wage slave” social structure. And when the protestors get hold of that idea, boy are you going to see the sparks fly. (The argument is already looming – see discussions about “universal basic income” in many countries.)
Someone should point out the hypocrisy of these people – they all benefit from gravity.
And, as always, it focuses one *one* slave trade. Should we cancel black people because of their ancestors in Africa who sold slaves to europeans ? Should we ditch democracy because greeks didn’t allow slaves to vote ?
Don’t forget the slave trade to the East coast and up to Arabia and India. Which centuries-established routes Vasco de Gama then followed when he “discovered” the East for Portugal.
There’s a reason that recognisably Arabic-rooted words keep on turning up in my (low-intensity) study of Swahili, and the reason isn’t a Victorian gunboat.
I know nothing about the slave trade within China, or between China and Indonesia. But I’d bet a solid two beers that it existed.
Surprised no one’s mentioned that slavery still exists, with millions of people enslaved and little publicity given to this issue:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/arab-enslavement-black-africans
This reminds me of a conceptually similar discussion I used to have with my brother regarding the Nazi medical experiments on Jews and other “non-Aryan” people. I’m a pragmatic experimental scientist while my brother is more of an ethical purist (vegetarian, used to save money from his grants at university to give to charitable causes). Would I use the scientific discoveries made from these Nazi experiments if they could help people? My answer was yes which he found somewhat problematic as somehow validating evil. It’s an interesting thought experiment, which will stay that way because the Nazi scientists were crap and no valuable data was ever accrued.
Imagine how conflicted I feel (felt) pulling on my survival suit for flying to work, knowing that their design and justification is rooted in work done at Dachau KZ.
So the studies submerging inmates in freezing water did lead to something useful. I wasn’t aware of that.
The problem they addressed was that airmen dropped into the North Sea were normally fished out dead (or died shortly afterwards). So they addressed the problems of heat loss into the water as well as re-warming of casualties of immersion injury. As I recall, they identified the rather subtle problem of heart attack induced by positional œdema – when in the water, fluids redistribute from the normal erect pressure regime to scattered around the prone body ; if you haul the injured person out of the water by grabbing their shoulders and hauling them up into the boat, this can trigger a heart attack. So your lifeboat-handling course includes the advice, whenever possible, that if retrieving casualties from the water into a TEMPSC or liferaft, to bring them along side, and lift shoulders, waist, knees and feet simultaneously (so 4 rescuers).
I didn’t recognise the point until the next time I did the offshore survival course again after visiting Dachau and reading various literature I brought there. But it’s there in their reports from the late 1930s.
There was nothing wrong with “what” of the science they did – just the ethics of how they did it. Or the why – as the prototype gas chambers, also in at Dachau, point out. They were designed by a chemist, who did his job well, while having no doubt about what they were intended to do.
I thought about that example every time I donned a “6-2-2” standard survival suit for the Canadian and Norwegian industries. Those design numbers came straight out of the Dachau experiments. So … we should stop using them?
Papers published? Does he mean papers by people who want to ‘decolonise’ science?
If other countries with other cultures want do decolonise their curriculums, go ahead!
(Still I think it’s a mistake).
But decolonising science in western countries in the way they want, that is, remove the influence of white people in the story and construction of science? To put their “other ways of knowing” in its place?
I’m sorry, but to me it just seems they’re trying to colonize Western countries, and to that I say
NO THANKS!
So if receiving and using a specimen carried on a slave ship makes you a slaver, then does writing your comments on a PC or phone made in China make you a communist? Silly…but actually rather apt.