Continuing European rivalries, particularly between the French and English, ushered in an era of state-sponsored ''scientific'' exploration designed to establish geographical knowledge in the service of imperial ambition. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville's 1766-1769 exploratory surveys of the South Pacific were a model followed by Captain James Cook's 1768 voyage to the South Pacific where he discovered and claimed the eastern coast of Australia and several islands, including New Zealand, for Britain. Rationalized programs to compile economic and strategic inventories of geographical, botanical, and anthropological information were sponsored by learned societies--most notably the Royal Society in London--which not only pressed for exploration of the South Pacific, but also the Arctic and Africa. Despite the high casualty rate of early African explorers owing to disease, from the 1790s African exploration engaged many British, French, and German adventurers. Exploration spurred new interest among secular intellectuals to examine the nature of humanity. Prominent philosophes in France, like Denis Diderot and Jean- Jacques Rousseau, as well as Scottish realist philosophers, employed visions of the ''savage'' that were gleaned from reports of South Seas explorations and the rediscovery of the writings of many earlier Spaniards to criticize European social and political structures.

Additionally, attempts were made to identify attributes that distinguished ''civilized'' social organization. These invariably favored Mediterranean cultures, followed by the Chinese, Indians and Arabs, pastoral peoples such as Mongols and Turks, and the hunter-gatherers of North America, Africa, and Australia. By the late eighteenth century these classifications were increasingly associated with presumed biological differences of race; by the mid-nineteenth century, the catalog of races was largely fixed along a color line, with the capacity for civilization descending through white, yellow, brown, red, and black. This catalog remained contested, however, particularly by missionaries, who, despite tendencies to ethnocentrism, were disposed to argue that all peoples could be raised to a common level of civilization. One important arena for the contest lay in the widely publicized exploration of Africa where the paternalistic evangelical argument for development articulated by missionary and explorer David Livingstone was implicitly pitted against the ''scientific'' racism characteristic of many secular explorers, like the scholar and adventurer Richard Burton, though all European travelers constructed African exploration as a narrative of ''manly'' European actions and ''native'' inferiority.

By the nineteenth century many European explorers and missionaries, although profoundly convinced of the superiority of Western civilization, were also deeply influenced by anxieties connected to emerging industrial and urban conditions at home. The growth of the factory system, crowded cities, the social challenges of poverty and class, and new standards of ''respectable'' conformity could all encourage individuals to seek independence and a sense of usefulness or adventure in colonial exploits. Over the course of the century increasing numbers of missionaries found contact with ''primitivism'' and the challenge of native conversion preferable to growing secularism in Europe itself.

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