Natural history collections and empire

Abstract

Next to providing a more general overview of the field, this chapter encourages readers to take natural history collections as the analytical starting point for their inquiry into the field of natural history and empire. In particular large-scale digitisation and the digital enrichment of collections and archives in the field of natural history provide historians with new means to understand how and with which implications millions of objects have been transferred from the Global South to the Global North over the last 300 years. Moreover, such new digital efforts will allow historians to deepen their understanding of the daily practices and polycentric networks of collection and natural historical knowledge production in former colonial areas. Taken together this chapter argues that natural history collections and archives should not only be read as “biodiversity heritage” but rather as the historical product of a process in which local expertise about nature, natural history, global trade, and often violent forms of colonialism got inextricably entangled.

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