Andrea Wulf on George Forster

This unabridged, Substack edition of the episode includes an epilogue about George Forster’s Parisian exile during the tumult of the French Revolution. The lightly abridged, free version is available here and wherever you get your podcasts.

“He’s an intuitive ethnographer,” Andrea Wulf says of George Forster, the subject of her new book, on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “As they travel across the South Pacific and stop at all these different islands, he records the islanders’ languages, he observes their customs, he describes their appearances, their jewelry, their tools, their houses, and brings back such detailed accounts that they, to this day, are regarded as the best accounts of Polynesian culture before and around first European contact. He doesn’t demonize, but he also doesn’t romanticize. He very clearly says: Good and evil are in all societies. We find a…