Scientists Among Merchants: Linnaeus’s “Apostles” Aboard Vessels of the Swedish East India Company and the Advancement of Scientific Travels

Abstract

In its 82 years of existence, the Swedish East India Company, neither large nor powerful with regard to its economic significance, made an impact on the pursuit of scientific knowledge that lasted beyond the 18th-century maritime trade world. As the “apostles” of Carl Linnaeus traveled amidst the sailors and merchants aboard the vessels to Asia, these 18th-century naturalists reified the spirit of scientific research in its most primordial form: to collect as much material as quickly as possible, and, ideally, in a manner characterized by discipline, order, and efficiency. This type of systematized scientific travel developed in the 18th-century East Indian trade was carried over into the Swedish intellectual tradition in the 19th-century polar exploration and the early 20th-century geological-turned-archaeological expeditions in Asia, motivated by “curiosity” instead of “utility”. This was not necessarily by their own choice, but at the constraint of the historical reality that Sweden, following the Treaty of Nystad in 1721, lacked both the means and the motivation to harbor any military or colonial aspirations beyond her sovereign territory. Against the greater geopolitical scheme of things since the Age of Enlightenment, while commercial, political, and strategic motives informed the exploration of distant continents by the European powers, Sweden was forced to rely on a more modest, but certainly no less vigorous, motive — science itself.