The University of Cambridge's Museum of Zoology and its Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology are physically separated by only a city street, but the historic practices of each of their underpinning disciplines have divided their collections and institutional narratives in far more significant ways. Systems of curation, categorization and cataloging have been different, and as corollary, the way they have each been used in research is different. Beyond Cambridge, these disciplinary divisions are echoed across the natural history and world cultures museum sectors.
Largely, natural objects relating to plants, animals, and earth systems become “specimens” and are placed in natural history collections; whereas person-made objects become “artifacts” deposited in world cultures collections. But of course, natural history specimens are typically prepared by people for long-term preservation, and therefore are also artifacts; and world cultures artifacts are often made from natural materials, and so include specimens.
The nature/culture division is artificial in other ways: material in both those Cambridge museums was often collected by the same people in the same places at the same time. They were found together, packed together, and shipped together—only being divided when one set of crates was delivered to one side of the street and another to the other.
In their new homes, with systems of knowledge determined by the norms of each associated discipline, the division becomes codified by the questions that are typically asked of those objects. This, in turn, affects the kinds of data that have been prioritized relating to them, and the way they are separated and stored within their institutions. As is explored throughout this issue, the archive and the collection have become biased by those who care for them. In natural history, the circumstances of a specimen coming into being (for example, how it was collected, prepared, and studied, and by whom) are rarely emphasized. Nor is the cultural significance of the organism. Instead, collections from a single time and place typically become dispersed within the museum, based on Linnean taxonomy, not geography or any other form of meaning (South American bears, for example, are stored with other bears, from India, Russia, and France, rather than with South American bees). In the ethnography or anthropology collection, by contrast, the place and culture that objects come from is privileged as the primary unifying factor. Who made them, why, how, where, and when are central.
But with their shared histories, it is possible—and desirable—to conceptually reunite the collections. The questions being asked on each side of the street can fruitfully be applied to their counterparts. They share both human and environmental stories, and any investigation into either would draw profound parallels. Work to dissolve the cultural/natural divide opens each discipline to massive potential to create richer narratives and better science and to increase the relevance of museums. For example, one of the collectors who contributed to both those Cambridge museums—and collections elsewhere—is A. C. Haddon (1855–1940). Working in Australia on material Haddon collected in the Torres Strait, Leah Lui-Chivizhe and Jude Philp are endeavoring “to understand what is involved by collapsing the nature/culture organizing frame of museums.” Their work reintegrates Torres Strait Islander cultural knowledge into the interpretation of invertebrate specimens that have had their meaning constrained by being curated solely from a Western taxonomic standpoint (Lui-Chivizhe and Philp 2024). Such work can be a two-way process. For example, the Entangled Knowledges project led by Tiffany Shellam in partnership with knowledge-holders from Menang Nyungar communities of Western Australia seeks to locate Indigenous knowledge captured in specimens and artworks held at National Museums Scotland and the Natural History Museum, London, and return this embedded knowledge to the Menang stakeholders, thereby enhancing the collections’ value to their communities-of-origin (Shellam et al. 2023).
The divide also removed the natural constituents of objects in world cultures collections from being accessed in environmental research. Nonetheless, they have extraordinary potential to contribute in very similar ways to those described for natural history collections below (see, for example, Wayne Modest and Claudia Augustat [2023] on the potential for ethnographic museums to contribute to environmental justice). The inclusion of shark teeth in a Kiribati sword held in an ethnographic collection, for example, if datable and identifiable to species-level, provides the same evidence that the species lived in a given place at a given time as a preserved shark specimen would in a natural history museum.
Likewise, applying decolonial practice to natural history collections increases the research potential and global relevance of these collections. Following the current surge in attention to colonial legacies using humanities research methods on scientific collections, natural history museums are now actively tackling two key issues of fundamental societal relevance: environmental breakdown and social justice. As shall be explored below, these two topics are deeply entwined.
In this article, I refer to “decolonial practice” as it has come to be frequently used in the United Kingdom museum sector: work that seeks to identify, research, and address imbalances in the history of museum formation that result from colonial structures of power and exploitation, and the narratives used to interpret them, as well as consider the ongoing impacts of these imbalances for audiences today. However, I recognize the flaws of this terminology, given, for example, the argument that the underlying histories and existence of Western museum collections will always be embedded within these colonial hierarchies. In this vein, Sumaya Kassim (2017) articulated that “The museum will not be decolonized”; and Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang urged readers to remember that decolonization specifically “brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to ‘decolonize our schools,’ or use ‘decolonizing methods,’ or ‘decolonize student thinking,’ turns decolonization into a metaphor.” (Tuck and Yang 2012). While “decolonial practice” is arguably subtly different from “decolonization,” most of the examples given here relate to researching, highlighting, and ideally addressing the colonial legacies enmeshed in museum collections.
This article explores these potentials from a perspective within natural history museums, and it is important to recognize that it is written from a non-Indigenous perspective. Specific focus is given to the growth of researching colonial legacies within natural history collections, particularly through archival research; and the opportunities of utilizing the biodiversity data inherent in world cultures collections in similar ways as natural history museums do with their collections. By bringing these subjects together, it allows for the consideration of how they are related: colonialism and enslavement elicited profound costs for both people and the natural world. There is value in considering these entwined narratives—what was done to people and the environment were often parts of the same historical processes. Examples that are explored below include the vast scale at which wild foods—particularly turtles—were extracted in the Caribbean to feed enslaved peoples, which would have had enormous—and ongoing—effects on the reef ecosystem; and species were deliberately taken alongside people aboard slave ships, which now have enormous economic impact on Caribbean agriculture and wild habitats alike.
The article begins by tracing the recent emergence of researching colonial legacies in natural history museums. A key aim is that a greater diversity of people feels better represented by these museums, and that their collections can continue to help tackle important societal issues. Several possible approaches are summarized with examples of how natural history museums can explore the provenances of their collections as legacies of historic colonialist events and practices, tying their histories to the broad circumstances in which they were formed. These are based partly on my own research—particularly on the colonial histories of collections of Australian mammals (a group that has suffered heavily as a consequence of colonialism)—but also with broader examples. Much of this work explores how practices of natural history developed concomitantly with colonial expansion, how Western science was shaped by colonial attitudes, and the extent to which many people have been anonymized in the history of natural history. (Among the more obvious ongoing colonial imbalances is the extent to which different kinds of people are commemorated, represented, and acknowledged within these museums). Whether repatriation in natural history is being approached as a question of accessing natural heritage rather than cultural heritage is then raised.
The environmental impact of colonialism over the past five hundred years is incalculable, but one power of historic collections is that they have a long memory. The final section will explain how both natural history and world cultures museums provide an enormous record of environmental change over two or more centuries, offering a remedy to what is known as “shifting baseline syndrome” (Pauly 1995).
A Sector-Wide Blind Spot
To historians of science, it has long been evident that practices of natural history were deeply entangled with colonial agendas. Knowledge of a region's natural resources—embodied by museum collections—was a powerful tool for planning expansion, extraction, and exploitation. Consequently, where Western museums’ collections come from is a non-random reflection of their host countries’ previous imperial relations (Ashby 2022). And Sujit Sivasundaram, for example, suggested that specimen collecting in colonial contexts was entangled with the imperial fascination with classifying human races (Sivasundaram 2015).
Equally, over recent decades, natural history museum professionals have been aware that other museum disciplines—particularly world cultures—were actively grappling with the colonial legacies of their collections. And yet, neither of these parallel discourses—that being investigated by historians of natural history nor that taking place in world cultures museums—prompted natural history museum professionals to prioritize similar programs of research at a noticeable scale. It appears that the discipline had convinced itself that, as their collections were scientific in nature, they were apolitical. But of course, science has always been part of culture and is exposed to the same biases and prejudices of the societies in which it is embedded.
This sector-wide blind spot disappeared in 2018 with the seminal article, “Nature Read in Black and White: Decolonial Approaches to Interpreting Natural History Collections” (Das and Lowe 2018)—the publication of Subhadra Das and Miranda Lowe's presentation at the 2017 conference of the Natural Sciences Collections Association (NatSCA, the United Kingdom's professional body for people who work with natural history collections), held in Cambridge, United Kingdom. As it was published in NatSCA's own journal (The Journal of Natural Sciences Collections), rather than an academically focused platform, it reached museum professionals. Das and Lowe argued that omitting cultural histories relating to natural history collecting perpetuates structural racism; that such misrepresentation of the past alienates non-white audiences; and that publicly acknowledging difficult histories is an important step in creating less racist museum interpretation in natural history museums. The argument was explicit that natural history museums could not justify their lack of engagement. It acted as an urgent call-to-action to reconcile troubling historical practices with contemporary social justice concerns, to which many museum professionals across the sector have proved eager to respond.
In the years following, research projects, exhibitions and public programs were quickly established. Already by November 2020, NatSCA was able to hold a dedicated conference titled Decolonising Natural Science Collections, sharing the progress that had been made so far.1 And each of their annual conferences and publications since have had significant content relating to colonial legacies. It has effectively become embedded in the sector's work. Decolonial practice is developing across different areas of natural history museums, going beyond provenance research, programming, exhibitions, and interpretation, but is also being addressed with regards to collections management practices. Katja Kaiser and colleagues (2023), for instance, flag concerns and offer solutions for mass-digitization projects perpetuating unequal power relationships and historic injustices.
As such, it is reasonable to describe Das and Lowe's 2018 article as foundational to the development of decolonial practice within natural history museums. In the five years since its publication, it has been cited by seemingly every article on the topic (and so few predate it). According to Google Scholar, by December 2023, it had been cited by 108 articles (and this will be an underestimate, as this omits certain publication types, including books).
Colonial Legacies Research in Natural History Collections
Work to trace the colonial legacies of natural history collections is to a great extent about questions of provenance, embedded in archives. With broad objectives to identify and erode systemic hierarchies through which European narratives in museums have typically been considered superior to others, much of this research focuses on how collections may have originated from uneven power-balances in colonial contexts, often through violent and oppressive circumstances, and that colonized and other minoritized peoples’ contributions have been minimized while European achievements were elevated. Also placed in view are the broader historical contexts in which natural history was being practiced; and how museums have communicated their own histories. Déborah Dubald and Catarina Madruga argued that the sites where natural history collectors undertook field work were spaces “co-produced from entangled interactions between society and environment.” This is no doubt also true of the museums themselves (Dubald and Madruga 2022).
As such, the kinds of social–historical questions that could be asked of natural history collections through such work include:
People. How did colonial collectors work in amassing natural historical collections? With whom did they work? What was the nature of these relationships? How have these contributors been credited and rewarded? To what extent were local and Indigenous knowledge, skills, labor, and expertise extracted and exploited? Does this allow a greater diversity of people to be acknowledged as having made major contributions to the history of science, medicine, and culture?
Practices. What are the links between practices of natural history and troubling or violent colonial histories?
Impacts. What can be learned about the entwined human and environmental costs of the colonial project?
Contexts. To what extent did colonial narratives shape how the collections came together—what are the broader historical circumstances behind the collections?
Epistemologies. How were new theories, new disciplinary structures and new modes of knowledge shaped by these collecting practices?
Several different approaches have been deployed to explore such questions, some of which are summarized below. An underlying theme running across them is an aim to recognize how colonialism and its framings have shaped the way events in natural history took place—from major historical moments to discreet individual acts—and how such events have subsequently been described (Ashby 2023a).
Historical Contexts of Collecting
Focusing on a Place
Researching collections that originate from specific sites of colonization, invasion, or trade allows narratives to be developed with a geographic focus. These are likely to lead on to other approaches discussed below. For example, this approach would identify which collectors were working in the area; or specific locations within the region that may have been key trading factories, ports, or points on historic expeditions. These more narrow themes can then be investigated through initial surface-level research on each person or location on the list, searching for signs of under-acknowledged contributors, power imbalances, or violence in their practice; or considering whether they were working with particular species or at particular historical moments that could open up an important narrative; or what was taking place in those locations at the time the collections were formed. An example of this approach was taken by the Manchester Museum, which mapped its mineral collection geographically to determine the extent to which it originated from former British colonies, allowing for conclusions about economic motives behind collecting efforts (Gelsthorpe 2021).
Focusing on a Person
Individual collectors or other actors, such as curators, expedition leaders or funders, or scientists provide ample opportunity for tracing colonial legacies as they often left significant archival and published sources that can evidence how they worked and with whom. For example, by accessing several hundred letters of Hobart-based solicitor Morton Allport (1830–1878), who donated a significant collection of Tasmanian birds and mammals to the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge (UMZC, Figure 1), I was able to trace the entwined story of the deliberate extinction of the thylacine and the extreme violence enacted against Tasmanian Aboriginal people by British settler-colonists. Allport actively worked to enhance his scientific reputation by trading Aboriginal people's skeletons and thylacine specimens in exchange for honors from elite European scientific organizations.
Skins of the extinct thylacine, sent by Morton Allport to the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge. Thylacines were considered a hindrance to colonial development and were hunted under a bounty system. As their numbers diminished, demand for museum collecting escalated. The genocide against Tasmanian Aboriginal people followed the same pattern. © University of Cambridge / Chris Green.
Citation: Museum Worlds 12, 1; 10.3167/armw.2024.120106
The research revealed how the genocide against Tasmanian Aboriginal people and the extermination of the thylacine—while not equivalent—were part of the same historical processes. As they were both seen as a hindrance to colonial development, they were treated as pests in their own environments. Both were described as primitive and inferior, which enabled the colonists to blame them for what happened to them. However, this obscures the actual mechanism of their decline: they were being killed either directly by European settlers or by the conditions the colonial establishment forced them to live in. As populations of both thylacines and Aboriginal peoples were diminished, demand for their physical remains in museums and private collections increased, and Allport actively stoke that demand (Ashby 2023b).
Focusing on an Event
Another potential starting point is to frame questions around historical events that enabled specimen collecting. Archives related to collections amassed on scientific expeditions or during military conflicts, for example, can reveal how collectors worked and who was involved in collecting, as well as the broader narrative of the role of these events in colonial contexts, and how these relate to environmental concerns.
Museums also received collections through opportunities created by historical events that were seemingly unrelated to the development of natural history knowledge. For example, in the eighteenth century, asiento slavery (a contractual monopoly awarded by Spain to enable another country to supply enslaved African people to its colonies in the Americas) provided a backdoor by which English naturalists could procure specimens—and particularly those representing species of economic interest—from areas of the world that were otherwise closed to them due to Spain's strict trade restrictions. For example, Hans Sloane (1660–1753)—whose collections formed the founding basis for the British Museum and by extension the Natural History Museum2—acquired hundreds of botanical specimens in Spanish territories in the Americas from people employed by the South Sea Company, which held the asiento monopoly from 1713 until 1739. Similarly, the oldest known Argentinian plant collections are now in the Oxford University Herbarium, having been collected by South Sea Company surgeons stationed at their slaving factory in Buenos Aries in the 1720s for the English botanist William Sherard (Murphy 2023).
Likewise, many hundreds of South African bird, mammal, and insect specimens now held in museums in Cambridge, Cape Town, and London were collected by a soldier administering British-run concentration camps during the Second Boer War. Archival research revealed that Gerald Barrett-Hamilton (1871–1914) spent his “leisure time” collecting specimens for museums (Ashby and Machin 2021). This was a war fought in South Africa between two competing white colonial powers: the Boers, who were people of Dutch, French Huguenot, and German descent who had first invaded South Africa in the seventeenth century, and the British, who invaded and annexed parts of the country following the discovery of gold in the Transvaal. The British army and its allies deployed a scorched earth policy to depopulate the land, destroying homes and crops in order to flush out Boer fighters. The tactic removed the ability for fighters to receive shelter and provisions from family farms, effectively starving them out. However, it also rendered the land uninhabitable for any of its other residents, in this case thousands of Black Africans. This created a massive number of civilian refugees, forced from their homes and their farms into concentration camps, administrated by the British.
With thoroughly insufficient food-supplies and inadequate shelters and some even lacking fresh water, 42,081 civilians died of malnutrition and exposure in the camps—over half of them children under 16. It was in this context—while posted as one of those running the camps—that Barrett-Hamilton collected over a thousand specimens for museums (Figure 2).
A springhare at the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge, collected by Gerald Barrett-Hamilton at a British-run Boer War concentration camp where he was stationed. [UMZC E.1441]. © University of Cambridge.
Citation: Museum Worlds 12, 1; 10.3167/armw.2024.120106
Linking the human cost of this conflict to the diminished environmental conservation concerns during military operations, one note between Cambridge curators about a preserved aardvark donated by Barrett-Hamilton reads, “You know of course the beast is now vigorously protected and scheduled, but soldiers in Boer-land can and may do many things.”3
Collecting by active members of the military on assignment is not particularly unusual. Smithsonian Museum curators who were enlisted as soldiers in World War II, for instance, collected while on deployment (Rader and Cain 2014). It should not be surprising that soldiers distracted themselves by spending their free time collecting while posted abroad. And given that military expeditions provided clear opportunities to expand national collections, it is to be expected that museums welcomed the donations that resulted from them. Nonetheless, it probably is not a source most visitors would imagine that museum collections could be traced to.
Focusing on a Taxon
The social history of different species or taxonomic groups also offers opportunities for museums to engage in discussions about how colonial framings have affected peoples’ relationships with these species. For example, taxa could have been described by a person with an important colonial history, enabling any museum to include these narratives in their interpretation of those taxa, whether or not the individual in question was directly linked to that museum's specific specimens. For instance, fossils of the largest ever marsupial, Diprotodon, were first excavated by the surveyor Thomas Mitchell (1792–1855), who led a massacre and other atrocities against Australian Aboriginal people (Testa 2020). Also, one of Australia's most spectacular parrots has been known as Major Mitchell's cockatoo in his honor. Given his problematic reputation, there have been calls to change the parrot's common name. In 2023, International Ornithologists Union and BirdLife Australia agreed to do just that—it is now the pink cockatoo (Stafford 2023).
Other approaches for taxon-based research could investigate the circumstances when taxa were first encountered by Europeans, or whether the West's relationship with them is entangled with colonial ideals. For example, the way that Australian mammals have consistently been casually described as “weird,” “odd,” or “primitive” by Western educational institutions and media is the consequence of social conditioning from two centuries of colonial descriptions of these animals being considered “inferior.” This is based on an imperial assumption that European mammals acted as a zoological standard, and in failing to live up to this standard, Australian mammals were considered inferior to it (Ashby 2022). Examples like these allow museums to widen the focus beyond individual specimens and talk about taxa as a whole.
Looking for Anonymized Collectors
In American and Western European museum interpretation, Western achievements and contributions—and particularly those of wealthy white men—have been elevated over those of other people. In reality, a far greater diversity of people has been involved in the history of natural history than has been recognized. The “big names” in Western science did not work alone, and it does nothing to lessen their accomplishments to say that the people they relied upon deserve recognition too. Decolonial research is an additive process—it enriches histories, rather than diminishes them. As Das and Lowe (2018) made plain, undertaking the work to identify the people of color upon whose knowledge, skills, and expertise Western collections thoroughly depended, is vital for ensuring that museums remain relevant and representative of the societies they serve. A failure to do so would perpetuate notions of white supremacy and racism.
The term “collector” in natural history museums has myriad meanings that render it relatively unhelpful in determining object histories. When a specimen is attributed to a given collector in museum documentation, it could mean that it was part of a collection that this person amassed by gathering items “secondhand” from multiple other sources; or it could mean they were the person in the field gathering the specimen directly.
There is further nuance, as even those “collectors” gathering specimens in the field typically relied on local and Indigenous people to supply specific knowledge of where to find living organisms, fossils or minerals, and what their economic uses might include; supply resources to assist moving through the landscape; share detailed expertise in how to catch and prepare the specimens; and supply direct labor in actually doing the physical collecting (Driver 2015).
But in the museum documentation, there is usually only one name associated with a specimen—that of the Western “collector.” Unfortunately, it can be extremely difficult to identify who truly collected any given item, specifically because of the power imbalances underpinning the colonial biases that one is hoping to unravel: it was generally the powerful white collectors—or their museum-based colleagues—who did the recording (it is not just people of color who were obscured in this way, but also white working-class assistants and laborers). The archive is biased.
As such, the name given as “collector” on museum specimen labels is not a reliable guide to who was involved in a specimen's history. For example, the over 120,000 specimens “collected” by Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) on his eight-year voyage to the Malay Archipelago are typically labeled in museums today as belonging to their “Wallace Collection.” However, this misses that Wallace relied heavily on a team of mostly Malay field assistants to find, track, catch, and prepare specimens for him. Many or most of the 8,050 birds that Wallace sent to Europe were collected and/or prepared by a 15-year-old boy from Sarawak named Ali (fl. 1840–1907, Figure 3) (Van Wyhe and Drawhorn 2015). I identified some of Ali's specimens in UMZC. They included arguably the biggest zoological prize of the voyage, a species of bird-of-paradise that was until then unknown to Western science. Not only did Ali collect the first specimen for Wallace (Figure 4), but he also described aspects of its natural history and behavior (Ashby 2020). We now know the bird as Wallace's standardwing bird-of-paradise.
Portrait of Ali in Singapore in 1862, aged around 22, from Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life (1905). Public domain.
Citation: Museum Worlds 12, 1; 10.3167/armw.2024.120106
The Wallace's standardwing bird-of-paradise at the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge—most likely the specimen that Ali first collected for Wallace. It is one of the syntypes (the specimens used to formally describe the species). [UMZC 27/Para/20/a/1] © University of Cambridge.
Citation: Museum Worlds 12, 1; 10.3167/armw.2024.120106
The label on this first specimen is pre-printed with “Collected by A. R. Wallace.” However, to Wallace's credit, he makes plain Ali's contribution in his travelogue, The Malay Archipelago (Wallace 1869). Such sharing of credit with local or Indigenous collectors in published accounts is not typical.
It was common practice to acknowledge certain people who contributed specimens or provided logistical assistance to expeditions, and there were different options to do so, but these were more typically reserved for authors’ white explorer- or settler-friends, rather than people like Ali. In published accounts of species or expeditions, there are many examples of museum-based taxonomists thanking their friends for providing the specimens, even when archival sources reveal that it was local or Indigenous people who truly did the “collecting.” Joseph Hooker (1817–1911) campaigned for governments to financially reward the work and sacrifice of “men of science” (rather than more humble contributors) (Bellon 2001). People who contributed important specimens but were not recognized as naturalists themselves were routinely rewarded through credit in scientific papers or having species named after them (Brinkman 2008). But these efforts were not routinely applied to local and Indigenous experts upon whom the scientists’ efforts relied, and so do not act as reliable hints to the reality of how collections were formed.
Instead, a far more useful guide to understanding how objects were gathered in the field comes from accessing the manuscript correspondence of “collectors,” which provide invaluable insights into the natural historical practices being employed, through reference to how specimens were found, caught, and prepared. Even then, however, references to local and Indigenous collectors are typically incidental. Rather than looking for texts that state, for example, “person X gave me specimen Y,” researchers have to read between the lines for hints about collecting habits.
With regards to specimens sent to metropolitan collectors by surgeons serving British slavers in Africa and the Americas, Kathleen Murphy (2023) commented how it was commonplace for the only references to the fact that the material was collected by enslaved or free African people were through backhanded criticisms. Letters apologized that certain items were damaged by the true collectors, rather than acknowledging the significant efforts these people made, or highlighting all the specimens they provided that were not damaged. This is also my experience from researching historical mammal-collecting in Australia, which relied heavily on First Nations’ knowledge and labor. For instance, a rare reference to the fact that Guy Shortridge (1880–1949) depended on Noongar people to collect on the 1904–1907 “Balston Expedition” to Western Australia was in one of his letters4 to Oldfield Thomas (1858–1929) at the British Museum (Natural History): “A lot of people who bring me in animals are very fond of giving them a crack across the head, breaking the skull. I have a great bother to get the natives out of it, as their first idea when they've got an animal is to kill it, no matter how.”
Similarly, Patrick Byrne (1856–1932) was stationmaster at Charlotte Waters telegraph station in Central Australia, and supplied Walter Baldwin Spencer (1860–1929) with a huge volume of zoological material over the course of decades, almost entirely thanks to the expertise and efforts of Southern Arrente people. In his letters to Spencer, Byrne offered few details of their work, except when referencing damage. For example, he explained5 why specimens of yallara (the widely used Wangkangurru word for the lesser bilby) were not perfectly preserved: “Thanks to the efforts of the blacks in spilling the spirits, they are fine, full scented beasts, and a little opoponox [a gum used in perfumery] would be handy when you interview them. Should they be of interest, I will send the blacks out after some more with a good strong vessel filled with spirits.”
It is clear from examples like these that there was generally no attempt made to hide that they were relying on Indigenous labor, knowledge, and expertise. However, the colonial framing in which this activity was taking place automatically assumed that such details were unimportant. Credit was not shared, leaving an incomplete and inaccurate picture of the practices of natural history and who contributed to the development of knowledge. By studying such archives, museum researchers have the opportunity to remedy this.
Repatriation
One possible cause of the delay in natural history museums beginning to address their colonial legacies is the fact that conversations about repatriation of natural history collections have been far less prevalent than in ethnographic and archaeological collections. Aside from considerable discourse around the return of human remains—and hominin ancestors—held by natural history collections, there have been relatively few official (state-to-state) requests for the repatriation of natural historical material. Indeed, the significant body of work on decolonial practice by Berlin's Museum für Naturkunde was catalyzed by a request from Tanzanian groups for the return of the dinosaur Brachiosaurus brancai, which had been exported from German East Africa under colonial rule (Heumann et al. 2018). (Although the Tanzanian foreign minister subsequently waived the request while praising the museum's care for the fossil [Oltermann 2018].)
In 2022, Indonesia sent what may be the world's first official large-scale claim for the return of colonial-era natural history objects that goes beyond a small number of high-value items. Their government formally requested that “Java Man”—the fossil considered to be the first known example of our ancestor Homo erectus—be returned from the Netherlands. The request also included around 40,000 fossil mammal specimens collected alongside Java Man in the 1890s by Dutch paleoanthropologist Eugène Dubois (1858–1940) (Ho 2022).
Unlike the repatriation requests in anthropological and archaeological museums, Indonesia's claim on the specimens is not being primarily driven by specific links with the country's cultural heritage. Instead, it is about scientific heritage—Indonesia believes that their scientists have the most right to undertake and manage the research being done on these specimens, rather than academics in Europe.
Museum professionals are starting to look at how collections of certain species are distributed around the globe. For instance, while there are many gorilla specimens in the world's museums, none can be found in any museum in the countries in which gorillas actually live. As such, although natural heritage, in the form of museum specimens, is shared, it is not evenly distributed (Ashby and Machin 2021). If collections are geographically biased, the expertise becomes geographically imbalanced too. If collections are relied upon for expert training in taxonomy, for example, and a country's natural heritage has been taken to be stored overseas by colonial powers, it becomes much harder for people in the source-country to develop expertise. Addressing this, for example, the University of Glasgow proactively repatriated specimens of the extinct Jamaican galliwasp (a lizard), while building more sustainable relationships in the region (Rutherford 2023).
Environmental Legacies of Enslavement
The yallara that Byrne mentioned are now extinct, driven out of existence by cats and red foxes introduced by British settlers, and through changes in fire-management practices associated with the dispossession of First Nations Australians by settlers (Burbidge and Woinarski 2016). These are all direct consequences of colonialism. The movement of invasive species around the world, the extraction of natural resources, clearance of habitats, and changes in land management practices that were core to the European colonial project have all had profound impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity globally since its inception. As exemplified by Allport's thylacines above, there are many stories that could be explored by considering how the impacts of colonialism and enslavement on both people and ecosystems were intertwined.
An enormous value of natural history collections—and, as argued below, world cultures collections containing natural materials—is in the data they hold about past environments and species distributions. However, the number of collections dating back to the inception of the transatlantic slave-trade is a limiting factor on the extent of their collective memory. A study by the Smithsonian Institution's Jeremy Jackson on centuries-long changes on coral reefs offers a case in point (Jackson 1997). When the English captured Jamaica in 1655, there are estimated to have been only around five thousand people living there, with no substantial agricultural base. So, as the slave-based colony exploded in its growth, it was necessary to turn to wild foods to feed the human population. The green turtles nesting on Grand Cayman became essential to the success of the colony, at a time when Jamaica was central to England's imperial machine. The turtles provided most of the meat consumed there until the 1730s. Between 1688 and 1730, 13,000 turtles were brought from the Cayman Islands to Jamaica every year. It is important to note that this is just one of the sources of turtles and just for Jamaica.
This would have had an extraordinary effect on the entire reef ecosystem, as turtles are keystone species that impact everything else that lives there. It is hard to overstate how different the reef would have been in the 1500s compared to more recent changes caused by pollution, climate change, and more recent waves of over-fishing. We do not know what “normal” reefs look like in the Caribbean because of the effects of the slave trade.
Another major environmental legacy of enslavement comes from invasive species that were deliberately transported alongside enslaved people aboard slave ships (not to mention the rats and mice that stowed away). A very visible example of this are the green monkeys now found in St. Kitts, Nevis, and Barbados. These are African monkeys, which are not native to the Caribbean, that cause massive environmental and economic damage today. Invasive species are one of the greatest threats to island ecosystems (Roy et al. 2023).
It is assumed that the monkeys were taken by slavers aboard their ships to sell to colonists as pets, and it is most likely that they reached the Caribbean by 1666, but possibly as early as 1560 (McGuire 1974). Having escaped or been released and multiplied in the wild, the monkeys were being described as pests and raiding crops by 1700. Genetic studies show that the monkeys were acquired near the ports of Senegal and Gambia, where slave ships began their journey west (van der Kuyl and Dekker 1996).
The monkeys are now believed to affect three in four farms on St. Kitts, eating crops including mangoes, cucumbers, squash, and watermelons (Handy 2019). It is estimated that 60,000 monkeys live across St. Kitts and Nevis (outnumbering people). Efforts to control them have consistently failed. Along with feral pigs—another invasive species—they are estimated to have caused the loss of 90 tons of food on St. Kitts in 2018 alone—the equivalent of one month's production (UN Environment Programme 2020). A similar story is that of village weaver birds, which are also assumed to have been transported to the Caribbean aboard slave ships from West Africa, as exotic pets for trade. Having escaped and established feral populations, they are a significant pest on grain crops (Craig and de Juana 2020).
Such species reached these islands as a direct result of the slave trade, and the reef systems today are thoroughly diminished by the changes in the megaherbivore populations, such as turtles, which were used to feed the slave economy. It may seem callous or tone-deaf to concentrate on the environmental legacies of enslavement when the human costs were so profound, but these two issues were and are entwined. Like many other aspects of enslavement, people on the islands today continue to live with the consequences through the economic impacts on agriculture, and through ecological harm. Climate breakdown and the biodiversity crises are also social justice issues (Baucom 2023). The implications for the current environmental emergencies—which are rooted in colonialist and capitalist histories—are not felt evenly across the world.
Discussion: Issues of Relevance—Colonial Histories and Environmental Evidence
The ability for museums to contribute to society is a matter of their relevance and value. Different museum disciplines have been contributing in different ways. World cultures collections have been at the forefront of addressing questions of social justice and representation, whereas natural history museums have been central to questions of environmental sustainability and survivability. A key aim of this article is to make plain the potential—some of which is already being realized—that each discipline has for “crossing the street” and adding power to efforts addressing both social justice and environmental crises.
The former has been discussed above. Regarding the latter, the never-ending emergence of new research tools making use of their specimens ensures that natural history museums have only ever grown in relevance and potential. Their foundational remit to document the diversity of life remains vital, but innovation is continuously widening the range of questions that they can be employed to answer.
Critically, specimens are more than physical things. This relates to what is being called the “extended specimen concept” (Webster 2017), recognizing that the information that comes with natural history collections can be effectively limitless. Take any single specimen, and on top of what it is, where it lived and when, one can add the environmental conditions of its habitat, its parasites, its genetics, its anatomy, its stomach contents and chemical make-up, the pollutants carried on its surface, and 3D-scan data, to name a few. Together, these build much more than an idea of the individual organism, or even its species, but endless stories of the ecosystem it lived in, and its evolutionary history, with information that has massive potential for scientific research.
The analysis of natural history specimens, and the records that are associated with them, is being used on the frontline of tackling environmental issues that affect humanity profoundly: the climate and biodiversity crises (Sanders et al. 2023). This potential is being progressively unlocked by the increasing availability of these data via massive-scale aggregators that enable researchers to access collections information from multiple institutions via a single portal. The most successful of these is the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), a portal for occurrence records of where and when species were detected, which includes nearly 250 million specimens from museums and other scientific institutions around the world (GBIF Secretariat 2023). These allow for analysis into species distribution across history and research of how populations are changing in response to climate change and habitat loss, and they can be used to predict the habitat-requirements of species. This has huge implications for conservation biology and stemming the current biodiversity crisis. As such, it is one of the most significant contributions of museums to society today.
To demonstrate the scale of what portals like GBIF offer, a 2023 study looked at the data added to GBIF by just 11 United Kingdom natural history collections, and how they were used. The researchers found that records of specimens in these collections had been downloaded 39 billion times in the seven years from 2015, and over 2,700 academic publications had cited these specimens (Hardy et al. 2023). For London's Natural History Museum, it represented an average of 2.2 articles based on their specimens being published every day. The addition of species occurrence data from world cultures collections to biodiversity data portals such as GBIF would only add to their research potential, and the value of the collections themselves.
Taking practices from world cultures research into natural history collections, many members of the natural history museum sector have quickly begun work to understand and acknowledge the problematic ways collections came together as legacies of colonialism, and the imbalance of recognition of who was truly involved. This has come from an almost standing start since Das and Lowe's 2017 conference presentation and 2018 article, after a long period of inattention in United Kingdom institutions (at least). Such work can help to address the artificial nature/culture division between world cultures and natural history collections. The conventional disciplinary practices of both have much to offer each other.
Acknowledgments
This research was made possible through a Headley Fellowship with Art Fund. I am grateful to Philipp Schorch and Nicholas Thomas for their helpful guidance on this manuscript and the other contributors to this special issue for their discussions.
Notes
The British Museum's natural history collections were split to form a separate institution—the British Museum (Natural History)—in 1881, which subsequently became known as the Natural History Museum.
Hans Gadow to Sidney Harmer, 1 October 1901. University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge, Archives: UMZC 4.491.
Guy Shortridge to Oldfield Thomas, 18 May 1906. Archives of the Natural History Museum, London.
Patrick Byrne to Walter Baldwin Spencer, 6 September 1895. In Mulvaney (2008).
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