Captivity's Collections
Kathleen S. Murphy
The University of North Carolina Press 
Geisteswissenschaften, Kunst, Musik / Geschichte
Beschreibung
Cashews from Africa’s Gold Coast, butterflies from Sierra Leone, jalap root from Veracruz, shells from Jamaica—in the eighteenth century, these specimens from faraway corners of the Atlantic were tucked away onboard inhumane British slaving vessels. Kathleen S. Murphy argues that the era’s explosion of new natural knowledge was deeply connected to the circulation of individuals, objects, and ideas through the networks of the British transatlantic slave trade. Plants, seeds, preserved animals and insects, and other specimens were gathered by British slave ship surgeons, mariners, and traders at slaving factories in West Africa, in ports where captive Africans disembarked, and near the British South Sea Company’s trading factories in Spanish America. The specimens were displayed in British museums and herbaria, depicted in published natural histories, and discussed in the halls of scientific societies.
Grounded in extensive archival research on both sides of the Atlantic,
Captivity’s Collections mines scientific treatises, slaving companies' records, naturalists' correspondence, and museum catalogs to recover in rich detail the scope of the slave trade’s collecting operations. The book reveals the scientific and natural historical profit derived from these activities and the crucial role of specimens gathered along the routes of the slave trade on emerging ideas in natural history.
Kundenbewertungen
imperialism and colonialism, maritime history, natural historical collecting, history of collecting, slavery studies, Atlantic slavery, Atlantic History, natural history museums, museum studies, natural knowledge production, Eighteenth-century British slave trade, slave ship surgeons, science and empire, West and West Central Africa, enslaved collectors, Colonial British America and the Caribbean, slave ships, early modern Atlantic World, legacies of slavery and the slave trade, history of science and medicine, collectors and collecting, history of natural history and biological sciences, scientific profits of the slave trade, history of museums, natural history, science and commerce, transatlantic slave trade, British colonialism and science