In the Footsteps of Bosman: Archibald Dalzel's Letter from Anomabo, West Africa, and the Cumulative Tradition of Eighteenth-Century Imperial Ethnography

Abstract:This article examines an unpublished ethnographic letter written in 1763 by Archibald Dalzel, a British surgeon in West Africa. In uncovering the document's connections to a popular travel book by the Dutch merchant William Bosman, it argues that Europeans in the eighteenth century participated in a "cumulative tradition" when they produced new knowledge about non-European peoples in the Atlantic World. The conventions of this tradition remind us that ethnographic texts were tools of empire, composed by travelers attempting to replicate the literary and commercial successes of their imperial predecessors. For scholars of the eighteenth century, understanding this tradition is important because its conventions shape the ways that ethnographic texts can be used as primary sources on the peoples whom their authors purported to describe.