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culture on the German people, 41 nineteenth-century constitutionalists and national-liberalists alike
saw the country as an archetype of social development, and perceived a definite kinship with the
English, ranging from ‘familial’ or ‘blood-related’ comparisons to the virtual interchangeableness
of ‘English’, ‘Anglo-Saxon’, ‘Saxon’ and ‘German’ (i.e. ‘Germane’). 42 Therefore to say that he is
simply using common stereotypes and images for the benefit of his British readers or even
supporting immigration on behalf of the New Zealand Company would be grossly unfair and
inaccurate. If anything, it is the threat, if not reality, of censorship which impacted most on his
observations and undoubtedly prevented open criticisms of the Company’s actions from
appearing in the text.
Dieffenbach was brought up within the philosophical context of ‘environmental
determinism’, following in the tradition of the eighteenth-century thinkers Charles de
Montesquieu, Georges Buffon, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and both Forsters, which attributed
the foreseeable differences in human appearance, skin colour, temperament and character to the
natural effects of the environment and climate. Various competing theories were put forward,
particularly by prominent German racial theorists, to account for the diversity of non-European
peoples encountered in early explorations into the South Pacific, including the popular belief in
‘monogenesis’ (i.e. that all peoples originated from a universal pool of humankind but some had
degenerated to their present state), ‘polygenesis’ (i.e. that humanity was in fact made up of
different races with Europeans at the outright top and everyone else subordinate to them), and the
doctrine that specific races of man could only live in specific geographical locations, in which it
was believed that the transportation of Europeans to other parts of the world could lead to
physiological complaints from the new environment or worse, biological, mental, physical and
moral degeneracy when outside temperate climes. Thus, the order of the day for British colonisers
was the confirmation of the belief that a temperate climate, much like that of Great Britain, would
not only ensure the best possible standards of health that could be managed at home, but more
than likely provide a near perfect environment for reinvigorating one’s health without the high
level of industrialisation. 43
41
Ibid., 11; see also Michael Maurer, Aufklärung und Anglophilie in Deutschland. Göttingen; Zürich: Vandenhoeck
u. Ruprecht, 1987.
42
McClelland, German Historians, 64f., 102-4, 229.
43
See, for example, Howe, Nature, Culture, and History, 31-42; Nicholas Thomas, “ ‘On the Varieties of the Human
Species’: Forster’s Comparative Ethnology”, in: Observations, xxiii-xl; Gonthier-Louis Fink, “Klima- und
Kulturtheorien der Aufklärung”, in: Georg-Forster-Studien 2 (1998): 25-55; Tanya van Hoorn, Dem Leibe abgelesen,
esp. 21-83; Tanya van Hoorn, “Physische Anthropologie und normative Ästhetik. Georg Forsters kritische Rezeption
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