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When Australia was circumnavigated by Europeans in 1801-02, French and British natural historians were unsure how to describe the Indigenous peoples who inhabited the land they charted and catalogued. Ideas of race and of savagery were freely deployed by both British and French, but a discursive shift was underway. While the concept of savagery had long been understood to apply to categories of human populations deemed to be in want of more historically advanced 'civilisation', the application of this term in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was increasingly being correlated with the emerging terminology of racial characteristics. The terminology of race was still remarkably fluid, and did not always imply fixed physical or mental endowments or racial hierarchies. Nonetheless, by means of this concept, natural historians began to conceptualise humanity as subject not only to historical gradations, but also to the environmental and climatic variations thought to determine race. This in turn meant that the degree of savagery or civilisation of different peoples could be understood through new criteria that enabled physical classification, in particular by reference to skin colour, hair, facial characteristics, skull morphology, or physical stature: the archetypal criteria of race. While race did not replace the language of savagery, in the early years of the 19th century savagery was re-inscribed by race.

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Scandinavian Studies, 91(1-2): 134-162 https://doi.org/10.5406/scanstud.91.1-2.0134 Access to the published version may require subscription. N.B. When citing this work, cite the original published paper. Permanent link to this version: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-82050 1 (25) Please note that this is a Preprint Copy. The article will be published in Scandinavian Studies vol. 91 (2019) Translating Swedish colonialism: Johannes Schefferus's Lapponia in Britain c. 1674-1800.The first anthropological work by Oxford University Press was published in 1674. 1 The book, The History of Lapland, was the English translation of Johannes Schefferus's Lapponia published in Frankfurt the previous year. Although there had been scattered references to 'Lapland' in classical and medieval sources, Schefferus's text was the first attempt at compiling a comprehensive account of Sápmi and its inhabitants, the indigenous Sámi people. 2 Through its endorsement by influential brokers including the Royal Society and Oxford University, The History of Lapland was widely studied in the British Isles with references to it cropping up in numerous sources including poems, songs, newspapers, geography books and philosophical tracts. The book fueled interest in the Sámi, who frequently appeared in non-Scandinavian works on religion, historical progress, and early racial studies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and often featured in these discussions alongside other colonized and Indigenous peoples. Despite the curiosity in Britain about the Sámi prompted by Schefferus's text, the history of the Sámi and their epistemological representation in the early modern period has tended to be studied almost exclusively in relation to the Scandinavian countries and to a lesser degree Russia, with the exception being works charting how Sápmi was constructed in foreign travelogues. 3 Adopting a wider transnational perspective, I will in this article analyze howLapponia was part of an emerging pan-European interest in anthropology and a new scientific drive to map and construct both places and peoples. These processes were, as this article will show, permeated by colonial agendas. As several contributors to this special issue argue, the