Was George Forster the Enlightenment’s Lost Visionary? With Andrea Wulf

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**Mia Zarenti** (1:00)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Where Great Minds Meet. I'm producer Mia Zarenti. Why does some of history's most radical thinkers disappear from view? And what might we learn from a man who challenged the prejudices of his age through travel, science, and a belief in our common humanity? On today's episode, historian and writer Andrea Wulf joins philosopher and historian, Sophie Scott Brown, to discuss the extraordinary life of George Forster, an overlooked enlightenment thinker whose ideas feel strikingly relevant today.
A naturalist explorer and political radical, Forster traveled around the world with Captain Cook as a teenager, before becoming one of the most original and progressive thinkers of his age. Drawing on unpublished correspondence and Forster's journeys across Europe and the Pacific, Wulf traces how his encounters with different cultures challenged the assumptions of 18th century Europe. The conversation explores his opposition to slavery, racism and empire, his belief in universal human rights and the influence of the French Revolution on his political thought.
Let's join our host Sophie Scott Brown now with more.

**Sophie Scott Brown** (2:08)
Hello, my name is Sophie Scott Brown and this is Intelligence Squared and I'm joined today by bestselling author Andrea Wulf to discuss her new book, The Traveller, The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and His Search for Humanity. Andrea, welcome. It's such a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for having me. I hope we are going to have a really interesting discussion. Firstly, congratulations. Fantastic book. And I'm going to start off just with George Forster.
He's this epitome, the embodiment of the Enlightenment man. He's all about cosmopolitanism. He's the original citizen of the world. Really interesting. And you follow him in incredible detail, pretty much from his very early childhood, all the way through to his very untimely death at the age of 39 And this is an incredible, rich, layered story. But I'm going to start off with the obvious question.
So George Forster is a bit of a hero that we don't know about. Not really. Obviously, hopefully, your book is going to change all that. But what do you think is the value of finding these figures, these characters from history? You mentioned that you'd already stumbled across him when you've been covering, you know, other people you've written about are much more sort of better, familiar, better known, like Wilhelm Humboldt. And you uncovered him whilst telling their stories and decided, no, this guy needs to have a story of his own. So what, as a historian and biographer, what is the value of doing that, even when technically it's a little bit of a publishing risk, isn't it? I mean, that must have been some sell to a publisher.

**Andrea Wulf** (3:39)
Well, I do write very long proposals, so I think they can be sure that this is a good story. But I think, so for me, history has never been this kind of pile of dusty old ideas which have nothing to do with us. I'm not, you know, I'm interested in history because I think it opens a window into our times because we are shaped by our past.
And I think we in the Western world, we are very much shaped by what happened in the kind of long 18th century. So, you know, from the late 17th century to the very early 19th century, and in particular, the Enlightenment and then later Romanticism. So, I've, you know, a lot of my books have looked at this period. And I do also love a forgotten hero. It's much more fun to write about than someone everybody has read about. So I do find them more interesting because, you know, if you uncover these letters and diary entries, you kind of know that no one has or not, not that many people have kind of looked at this. So I find that more interesting. And with Forster, it was really, I mean, he is a naturalist, a revolutionary, a kind of passionate believer in humankind. He led a life that is, when you just look at the basic facts of his life, it was pretty, pretty adventurous. So he became a traveler at the age of 10 when he went with his very tempestuous and narcissistic father as a botanist on a wild exploration through Russia, where just before his 12th birthday, his father takes him to London, where he becomes the family's breadwinner. At 16, he attends the learned meetings of the Royal Society. At 17, he joins Captain Cook's second voyage around the world. So, you know, he's only 17 when that happens. Quite a c'est vie for a teenager. And then he, on his return, he becomes, you know, famous across Europe. He becomes this kind of public intellectual. And then he gets pulled into the vortex of the French Revolution.