Over the past decades, our comprehension of the structures of 18th-and 19th-century natural history has exponentially grown. Several seminal studies have been published on the quantitative practices initiated in these centuries, thus completely redrawing our image of natural history as a descriptive enterprise. Other works have called our attention to the materiality of natural history: lists, tables, papers, as well as cupboards not only enabled naturalists catalogue the world, but also influenced their perception of natural phenomena. Last, several historians have called our attention to the global dimension of natural history. Despite this positive trends, more needs to be done in order to obtain a comprehensive picture of both the transition from natural history to history of nature and biological “landscape” of the first decades of the twentieth century.
By expanding this ongoing research trend, my talk uncovers a particular approach to natural history. This made a strong use of bureaucratic practices, data, and vocabulary in order to investigate natural history phenomena. By examining the introduction of the so-called cameralistic static in late 18th-century German science of administration and its circulation in agriculture and forestry through the 19th century, this paper aims at highlighting another important facet of 19th-century natural history: Its bureaucratic feature. I will investigate how bureaucratic knowledge shaped natural history investigations as well as which kind of bureaucratic practices were adopted in natural history. As a result, I will problematize the complex and bidirectional interaction between bureaucratic and natural sciences.
