Exploring the Use of British Slave Trade Ships to Gather Biological Specimens and Data

California Polytechnic State University Foundation, San Luis Obispo CA

Investigators

Abstract

General Audience Summary The legacy of slavery and the slave trade is an important topic for understanding modern cultures. Literature about their legacy typically focus only on social and economic impacts without considering intellectual and scientific consequences. The proposed study will examine these consequences by focusing on the transatlantic, British-dominated, slave trade in the eighteenth century. During this period, British naturalists recruited slave ship surgeons and captains to gather insects, plants, shells, and other specimens in West Africa and in American ports of slave transfer points enabling the collection of specimens from regions typically off-limits to them. This project will explore how the circulation of objects, ideas, and individuals through the networks of the slave trade engendered new scientific knowledge. To do so, it will examine scientific treatises and correspondence, institutional records of slaving companies, personal correspondence, and the records of the Royal Society to tell the stories of British slaving and science largely absent from existing scholarship. By examining the entangled histories of science and the slave trade, this project encourages broader discussions about issues of race, colonialism, science, and the ethical implications of scientific practices. The eventual outcome of this research will be a book aimed at a wide audience, including the general public and historians, as well as science and cultural studies scholars. Technical Summary Scholars all too often overlook the interdependency between science and slavery. And, most importantly, minimal research has been done on how scientists exploited the slave trade to produce new natural knowledge. This project argues that the networks of the transatlantic slave trade should be understood as a space of natural history and, like all localities of science, the social and material contexts of that space shaped and were shaped by the natural knowledge produced within it. The project also offers a new way to understand a classic question in the literature of the slave trade. For seventy years, slave trade scholars have debated the profitability of the trade and its role in Britain's economic development and industrialization. This project suggests that the debate has been too narrowly framed. To fully understand how Europeans profited from the slave trade, we must include collections of rare specimens and the scientific knowledge that resulted from their study among slaving profits.