The purpose of this project is to generate and communicate a new understanding of how natural history developed through engagement between universities, museums and the lay public in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We focus on a transnational tradition of instructed collecting that developed out of the instructions of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. Existing scholarship has discussed these instructions in relation to Linnaeus’s travelling students but it has not examined their wider social and international impact. We extend this research by focusing on the wide circulation and uptake of Linnaean instructions in Britain and its Empire, in the Netherlands and its colonies and in the Habsburg Empire. Here we chart how a wide range of informants adopted and transformed Linnaean instructions. These included merchants, landowners, Indigenous peoples, soldiers, maritime personnel, and ministers who operated both domestically and in European Empires. We aim for our findings to contribute both to the history of science and to contemporary debates about citizen science. The project is generously funded by the Knut & Alice Wallenberg Foundation and Uppsala University. 

Image: John Ellis, Directions for Bringing over Seeds and Plants, from the East Indies and Other Distant Countries, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.