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Which played a greater role in early modern natural history: curiosity or commerce?

While I appreciate nuanced views, my dissertation argument requires me to take a position. For the period 1500-1750, if I must assign primary causal weight to one of these forces in explaining the scale and direction of natural history, which should it be? I need a defensible scholarly stance.

 

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By Heena Answered 7 months ago

For a firm argument, I would recommend placing greater weight on commerce. While curiosity provided the initial intellectual spark, it was the infrastructure of global commerce the trading companies, ships, and mercantile capital that scaled natural history into a sustained, systematic endeavor. The curiosity of a few elites could create a cabinet; the engine of commerce created global collection networks, funded voyages of discovery, and ultimately determined which specimens were studied, based on what was shipped in volume. Commerce provided the material and organizational substrate.

 

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