Planetary Consciousness Within Display and Commodity Culture

From the earliest moments of European expansion, dominant systems of representation shaped how Europe imagined the world beyond its borders, positioning itself as the primary point of reference. As Mary Louise Pratt argues, this shift in dynamics produced what she terms as Europe’s “planetary consciousness”: a method of understanding in which Europe came to imagine itself in relation to a broader global society while reinforcing its perceived authority.[1] This perspective did not emerge through a single ideological project, but rather through a largely subconscious process shaped by the circulation of information, images, and commodities.

Educational institutions, scientific discourse, and popular visual culture all contributed to the normalization of cultural difference as something classifiable and inherently ordered. Over time, these systems influenced an internalized sense of European centrality that became embedded in everyday ways of seeing and interpreting the world. Through the development of practices such as scientific taxonomy, public exhibition, and commodity advertising, cultural difference was increasingly transformed into spectacle and consumption—presenting hierarchy as natural and inevitable. The legacies of these representational systems remain visible in later transatlantic contexts and continue to inform contemporary understandings of race, gender, and global relations.

In Pratt’s “Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation”, the emergence of planetary consciousness is situated within the context of initial European expeditions to the Americas, when firsthand observations of non-European lands were transmitted to a European public for the first time. Personal accounts of explorers were widely accepted as authoritative descriptions, despite being highly speculative and limited in scope. The circulation of these accounts quickly gained scientific legitimacy and informed how Europeans imagined unfamiliar people and places.

This process became particularly influential through the rise of natural history texts, especially as they transitioned from purely written descriptions to illustrated works that offered readers a visual sense of coherence. Carl Linnaeus’s classification of human beings into categories such as European, American, Asiatic, African, “wild man”, and “monster” exemplifies how scientific systems encoded cultural bias. While Linnaeus remains widely recognized today for his role in the history of modern scientific methods, his classifications of humanity relied on harsh generalizations positioning white Europeans as civilized and rational while reducing others to inferior categorization. As Pratt observes, “one could hardly ask for a more explicit attempt to naturalize the myth of European superiority.”[1]

Such new developments in understanding the natural and cultural world across oceans were extremely exciting for European public audiences, resulting in their swift dissemination. Presented as objective science rather than ideology, these novel classifications carried notable authority; their combination of textual description and visual order allowed information produced by a small group of proclaimed scholars to circulate widely, reinforcing assumptions regarding European dominance and situating Europe at the center of an emerging worldview.

As these classificatory systems gained cultural prominence, they began to extend beyond scientific texts into public-facing forms of display. By the nineteenth century, museums and zoological gardens had become prominent sites through which European audiences began encountering constructed representations of the world outside of Europe. Objects, animals, and people from colonized regions were arranged behind glass, placed in cages, or situated within carefully staged environments that emphasized difference while claiming educational purpose. These institutions did not merely present novel information; they actively shaped how cultural difference was encountered and understood. The spatial organization of displays reinforced a distinction between European viewers as observers and interpreters, and non-European subjects as objects of intrigue fulfilling a role.

[1] Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), chap. 2.