In all-pervasive and all-encompassing social, political and economic configurations, like colonialism, the underlying infrastructures are often hidden or obscured in the historical records. Historical actors implicitly used these infrastructures, were intrinsically entangled in their networks, or violently subjected to them. Therefore, infrastructures are rarely explicitly mentioned but their importance for European collecting practices and methods has been often stated in recent studies. Colonial or semi-colonial infrastructures, like trade routes, the East and West Indian companies, the slave trade, Christian missions, etc. were essential preconditions for successful collecting. The accumulation of non-European specimens, human remains and artefacts in European museums depended massively on colonial infrastructures and colonial actors who helped along all the processes of object displacement globally. The collecting manuals, however, largely remain silent about collectors’ dependence and involvement in these structures. Many authors of European collecting manuals or instructions addressed suppliers and naturalists, specifically those who travelled abroad. The travelers’ destinations spanned the globe, especially those locales that had already been incorporated into various empires or where about to be forced into the European colonial system. This presentation will bring these hidden or obscured contexts to the foreground again. It will suggest ways in which they can be made visible using sources from Central, Northern and Western Europe from ca. 1700-1850.

Dominik Huenniger is an environmental historian of science and collections. He works as the curator for innovation research at the German Port Museum in Hamburg. He published on human-animal-history, the history of museums and collections, as well as the material culture of the sciences in the long 18th century. He is the co-founder of the Collection Ecologies Research Collective and recently co- edited a Focus section on insects in the history of science: Lisa Onaga and Dominik Huenniger (ed.), Magnifying Insect Histories, in: Isis - The Journal of the History of Science Society, 115, 1 (2024).

The Instructing Colonial Natural History Seminar Series is organised by the Instructing Natural History Research Group, Uppsala University

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