Within this context, the humanization of the orang-utan went hand in hand with the animalization of the ›savage‹ – a category embracing the Africans and the Amerindians, but also, at the very heart of Europe, the wild boys and girls found in the forests, or the poor. My enquiry will focus on two cases that emphasize the historical and epistemological relationship between apes and slaves: the Scottish judge James Burnet, Lord Monboddo (1714-99), who saw the orang-utan as exemplifying primordial man, and the English planter Edward Long, who stressed the resemblance between the orang-utan and the African. I shall argue that the uses to which comparative anatomy – appropriated in different disciplinary frameworks, such as natural and philosophical histories – was put had a deep impact on the British debate about slavery. My chapter explores this question from a specific and situated context – that of Britain in the 1770s and 1780s – and by dealing with a particular object: the orang-utan. Defining the boundaries between the animal and the human is a recurrent concern for the Enlightenment science of man.
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