Hidden Hands in Colonial Natural Histories
Historians of science have been increasingly interested in unacknowledged contributions tonatural history, as well as other forms of scientific enquiry. These trends have included a focus on women’s work and the work of assistants and on “go-betweens” or cultural brokers, including in colonial settings. There has also been a wave of interest among scholars in using natural historical sources like pressed plants in herbaria to reconstruct past environments. At the same time, institutions holding natural history collections made during the colonial period have begun to explore new approaches to their collections. These include repatriation and digitization, renaming images and artefacts after their creators rather than their collectors, incorporating Indigenous or local names in catalogs, inviting communities from the origin places of collections to visit and add their insights to collections and displays and collaborating with contemporary artists and scholars to respond to their collections. This working group promotes the sharing and dissemination of research projects or initiatives undertaken within universities, museums
or libraries, to other institutions that hold natural history collections and with the wider scholarly and community. The focus is on the period 1750-1850, an age in which revolution, industrialization and global empires brought radical changes in human interaction with the natural world. The working group will discuss how to share ideas with other institutions interested in reconceptualizing their collections and scholars working with these collections. It grows out of a SSHRC-funded project based at McGill University entitled “Hidden hands in Colonial Natural Histories” (2022-2025) and aims to expand this project to include scholars around the world working on similar topics. The group includes scholars at a range of career stages and from different disciplinary backgrounds.
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Upcoming Meetings
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Wednesday, September 25, 2024 10:00 am to 11:30 am EDT
Victoria Dickenson and Anna Winterbottom (McGill), "Hidden hands in colonial natural histories: lessons from four case studies at McGill"
In this opening session, we will reflect on the concept of “hidden hands” and why we believe it is useful to describe people who were important to making natural history collections, but whose knowledge and skills have rarely been discussed. These include women, servants, and enslaved people as well as local and Indigenous experts and “go-betweens”. We will introduce our four case studies, which focus on Canada, Haiti, India, and Sri Lanka, and include herbarium specimens, natural historical drawings, palm-leaf manuscripts, and material belongings. Some of the practical approaches to these materials that we will discuss include, cataloguing, digitisation, and the identification of species. The theoretical approaches that we bring to the materials range from communal biographies to animal histories to a focus on material culture and the material aspects of artwork and manuscripts. We will also talk about some of the partnerships we have made during our study, including working with visual artists, inviting experts for study visits, and hosting study days within museum collections. At the end of the session, we would like to invite group members to introduce themselves and their interests and approaches to hidden hands and hidden histories of natural history.
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Wednesday, October 23, 2024 10:00 am to 11:30 am EDT
Ranee Prakash (Natural History Museum, London), "Ethnobotanical evidence from herbarium collections"
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Wednesday, November 27, 2024 10:00 am to 11:30 am EST
Caroline Cornish (Kew), "Hidden hands and the development of economic botany"
Abstract:
Economic botany as a term first appeared in print in the early 19th century and is now generally understood by historians of colonialism as that set of extractive practices whereby plants with commercial applications were mobilised from their natural habitats to plantations within colonial territories; and where cheap labour – local or imported – was an essential element in the economic formula. The role of enslaved and indentured labour in this process is well documented, as is the role played by gardens such as the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which provided the botanical and horticultural expertise required to successfully identify, transport, and acclimatise plant species in this way.
In this paper, however, I consider other forms of captive or coerced labour – including prisoners, the mentally ill, and child vagrants - who were deployed in the creation of items in Kew’s Economic Botany Collection. Taking an object-based approach I examine who was involved, and how, and what this can add to our knowledge of economic botany as it evolved over the 19th and early 20th centuries.
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Wednesday, January 22, 2025 10:00 am to 11:30 am EST
Anna Toledano (Stanford), "Black and native laborers at the Viceregal Botanical Garden in late 18th-century Mexico City"
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Wednesday, February 26, 2025 10:00 am to 11:30 am EST
Hugo Rueda (SSOM, McGill), "Taxonomical Clashes. Indigenous Material Culture in the Natural History Museum of Chile during the 19th century"
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Wednesday, March 26, 2025 10:00 am to 11:30 am EDT
Akosua Paries-Osei (Royal Holloway, University of London), "Seditious Seed of Forbidden Flowers: The legacy of Okra in the Reproductive Resistance of Enslaved women"
The utilisation of African medicinal knowledge during slavery has historically been overlooked and often dismissed, but contemporaneously, it disrupted the business of slavery and the authority of Western doctors and slave owners. This was particularly pertinent regarding African women's knowledge of herbal abortifacients and contraceptives. This paper examines the use of African botanical abortifacients and contraceptives by enslaved women as sites of reproductive resistance in Jamaica.
Botanical knowledge of abortifacients and contraceptives was transferred from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean with the enslaved. Slavery rendered the enslaved female's body the legal possession of her owner; her womb and her reproductive capacity became a site of contestation and control. The ability to bear children was, for her owner, the ability to reproduce wealth in the form of human stock. The ability to control her fertility, for the enslaved woman, was often an act of political defiance, in the face of overwhelming violence and coercion.
This paper highlights the use African plants enslaved women used in African and Jamaica Abelmoschus esculentus. L, to manage and control their fertility. The abortifacient and contraceptive qualities of Okra was utilised during slavery and beyond. It has been incorporated into modern Western contraceptive treatments; the enduring legacy of enslaved women’s reproductive resistance and knowledge has continued to shape and control women’s fertility, now as it did then.
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Wednesday, April 23, 2025 10:00 am to 11:30 am EDT
Jovita Yesilyurt (Natural History Museum London) and Christina Welch (University of Winchester) "Unearthing the contribution of Indigenous and enslaved African knowledge systems to the Saint Vincent Botanical Garden under Dr Anderson (1785-1811)"
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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 10:00 am to 11:30 am EDT
Catarina Madruga (Museum für Naturkunde Berlin), Archival collections and specimens from German “Kamerun" in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin
Group Conveners
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Victoria Dickenson
Victoria Dickenson PhD FCMA FLS is Professor of Practice, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill Library. She has a PhD in the history of science (Carleton 1995) and has published extensively in the history of natural history. A former museum curator and director, she also writes in the areas of museum studies and material culture. Since 2017, Dickenson has been Principal Investigator on three research projects funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and based on materials held at the Blacker Wood Natural History Collection, founded by Casey Wood.
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Ranee Om Prakash
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Anna Winterbottom
Anna Winterbottom works on the history of medicine, science, and environment with a focus on the early modern Indian Ocean region and the European colonial presence there. She is the author of Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World (2016) and co-editor of Histories of Medicine in the Indian Ocean World (2015), The East India Company and the Natural World (2014), and Women, Environment and Networks of Empire (2023). Anna is a Research Associate at McGill University, where she is currently working on the collaborative project "Hidden hands in colonial natural histories."
28 Members