The ant in Robert Hooke’s compendium and celebration of microscopy in Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses (1665) uniquely resists scientific scrutiny: moving about when alive, too-easily crushed when dead, the ant proves to be insistently difficult to study under a microscope. Through an extended allusion to Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1657), Hooke links the unruly ant to the colonial economy of enslaved Africans in Barbados, a place that Ligon understands through sugarcane, enslaved Africans, and saltwater slavery. The story of Hooke’s ant in Micrographia uncovers what Lisa Lowe calls the “intimacy” of modern, Western liberalism and the global conditions upon which it depends. In this case, Hooke’s ant reveals the intimacy of early scientific practice and the institution of transatlantic chattel slavery, exposing in the process that a small thing can reveal vast scales of geography and their networks of exploitation.

Applying a science studies approach to early American literature means focusing on how early modern settler colonialism in the Americas, with all its violence and exploitation, was a knowledge-producing machine. Enslavers and colonizers stole the skills, labor, and resources from enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples, and in the process forged many of the empirical practices, forms of measurement and categorization, and stratification between types of expertise that we typically recognize as constituting scientific work. Research in early American literature investigates the complexity of particular representations of natural phenomena and traces their circulation within or against powerful narratives that organized culture. This shows how contemporary scientific understandings of natural phenomena are historically and culturally determined and calls attention to the settler colonial work scientific expertise can continue to do in the present and contributing to the project of imagining alternative uses for it. This chapter argues for an approach to reading nature in early American literature that is modeled on acts of translation rather than processes of decoding. This difference is as subtle as it is essential for opening up the present to simultaneous scrutiny as critics confront an archive produced by the violent structures of the past.