Butterflies & Barbarians — 2007 ·

“The intellectual lives of one small group of Swiss missionaries suggest a new perspective on the dynamic relationship between Europeans and Africans involved in missions.”

Terrae Incognitae

“This is a book about Swiss missionaries, Thonga, and systems of knowledge in southeast Africa, but it is also very much about power and its limits in contested intellectual and cultural arenas. . . . This is a satisfying and detailed book. Whether on the topic of butterflies, botanizing unexplored terrains, the implications of literacy, or the politics of university appointments, Harries efforts are clearly up to Junod’s high standards.”

H-Luso-Africa

“Harries excels in describing the intellectual influences that informed the scientific endeavors of the missionaries. His focus on the Swiss missionary contribution offers a unique angle on the history of science in Africa.”

ISIS—Journal of the History of Science Society

“Butterflies and Barbarians deserves a wide audience. Students in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on African history, imperialism, and missionaries would find many insights here on the politics of knowledge in a colonial setting.”

African Studies Quarterly

“Taking apart Junod’s categorical and analytical modes of understanding and sorting through them, Harries shows us exactly how the levered interactions of knowledge, power, and negotiation worked, in the critical era of missionaries’ assemblage of ethnographic knowledge.”

American Historical Review

“Patrick Harries has put together a richly textured, subtly argued book, covering an enormous amount of ground. A brief review cannot do justice to its intricate texture.... This sophisticated book will be of interest to a variety of historians as well as to other scholars.”

International Review of History

“This book should become required reading, alongside David Maxwell on Zimbabwe, Birgit Meyer on Ghana, and John Peel on Nigeria and the Yoruba, when it comes to illuminating the missionary enterprise, and as an important text for the relation between Christianity and the sciences.”

Books & Culture

“Patrick Harries’s Butterflies & Barbarians fills an important gap...by detailing Swiss missionaries’ part in creating European knowledge about south-eastern Africa in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”

Journal of Southern African Studies