Jens Amborg: Breeding the Enlightenment: Animals, Science, and Race in Eighteenth-Century France

Abstract

This dissertation examines how animal husbandry became a crucial site for the production of knowledge about nature in eighteenth-century France. It argues that this process gave rise to a distinctive “breeding Enlightenment,” a culture of animal improvement that linked natural history, agriculture, political economy, and empire. Through six empirical chapters, the dissertation investigates how this culture took shape through scientific experimentation, state intervention, and imperial extraction projects in 1745–1789. It demonstrates how the activities of animal breeders informed new scientific notions of race and reproduction, and how naturalists became agricultural improvers through their own breeding experiments. Once they had confirmed the possibility of “racial improvement” in domestic animals, French naturalists, physicians, and statesmen began to apply such visions to the human species.

The dissertation reappraises the historical contingency of the concept of race by tracing how it was first developed in horse husbandry, and then repurposed to define natural variation and human difference in natural history. It challenges the focus on time and genealogy in recent interpretations of eighteenth-century constructions of race by highlighting how naturalists, influenced by breeders, primarily defined race through frameworks of climatic degeneration. Relating developments in metropolitan France to its colonial sphere, the study further examines how livestock breeding projects evolved together with the dehumanization and enslavement of Africans in the French empire.

Drawing on printed works and extensive archival material from scientific, agricultural, administrative, and colonial collections, the dissertation uncovers how renowned naturalists developed scientific theories and agronomic projects in interaction with horse breeders, pet keepers, sheep smugglers, colonial cattle herders, and domestic animals. It traces the circulation of animals and breeding knowledge across royal horse studs, multispecies households, scientific institutions, model farms, and commercial and colonial networks in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. By doing so, Breeding the Enlightenment challenges traditional narratives of where, how, and by whom Enlightenment science was made.