Savage Explorations: Carl Linnaeus and Eighteenth-Century Primitivism.

The purpose of this sabbatical is to complete the book manuscript Savage Explorations: Carl Linnaeus and Eighteenth-Century Primitivism. My book investigates a key cultural and scientific shift in early modern Europe: how northern regions like Sápmi and Scotland, once dismissed as remote and barren, became sites of intense national, scientific, and economic interest. I trace this transformation to Carl Linnaeus’s 1732 expedition to Sápmi, which established a model of domestic exploration whereby naturalists produced inventories of territories previously relatively unmapped by the state. His Flora Lapponica (1737), among the world’s first scientific floras, also offered primitivist portrayals of the Sámi as living simple, innocent and natural lives in a land rich in potential resources. Unlike previous studies that center Linnaeus’s primitivist writing within a Swedish context, my book takes a transnational approach. I examine how Linnaeus influenced British naturalists, clergy, and tourists to view their northern ‘periphery’ – the Scottish Highlands – in similarly primitivist terms. I contend that the seemingly romantic and benign visions of ‘noble savages’ and ‘primitive’ northern landscapes actually served hard political and economic purposes, helping emerging nation-states to justify the assimilation of marginalised peoples and territories. The book will reshape how we understand scientific exploration, primitivism, and colonial legacies within Europe itself.