Colonialism and Scientific Collecting
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Colonialism and Scientific Collecting
Scientific collecting played an important role in the expansion of colonial power and the development of modern natural history. European empires gathered plants, animals, fossils, minerals, human remains, cultural objects, maps, illustrations, and environmental knowledge from territories around the world. These materials were transported to museums, universities, botanical gardens, laboratories, private collections, and commercial institutions, where they were classified and transformed into scientific knowledge.
Colonial scientific collections were not produced by European naturalists alone. They depended on Indigenous experts, enslaved people, local collectors, guides, hunters, gardeners, translators, porters, sailors, missionaries, soldiers, merchants, colonial officials, and other intermediaries. Their knowledge and labor were frequently omitted from catalogues, publications, specimen labels, and institutional histories.
Modern research into colonial collections examines how specimens were acquired, who contributed to their collection, how they circulated, and who benefited from their scientific and commercial use. It also raises questions about ownership, restitution, repatriation, access, harmful terminology, environmental destruction, and the continuing concentration of scientific resources in institutions located in former colonial powers.
Natural-History Collections and Colonial Power
Natural-history collecting was closely connected to imperial exploration, administration, commerce, and territorial expansion. Colonial governments and scientific institutions sponsored expeditions to identify useful plants, animals, minerals, and other natural resources. Specimens helped imperial authorities map territories, evaluate resources, control agriculture, develop export industries, and establish claims to scientific authority.
Museums presented collected nature as evidence of an empire’s geographic reach and intellectual power. Animals, plants, fossils, minerals, and cultural objects were removed from their original environments and reorganized according to European systems of classification. This process often separated specimens from the communities, ecological relationships, and knowledge systems that gave them meaning.
Scientific collecting could involve purchase, exchange, gift giving, diplomacy, coercion, military violence, grave robbery, forced labor, unequal contracts, or the use of colonial laws that favored foreign collectors. Even specimens obtained through apparently voluntary exchanges were frequently collected within political and economic systems defined by unequal power.
Natural-history collections therefore preserve more than biological or geological information. They also contain evidence of colonial administration, racial hierarchy, commercial extraction, environmental exploitation, and the global networks through which imperial science operated.
Botany, Herbaria, and Economic Plants
Botanical collecting was essential to colonial economic expansion. Botanical gardens, herbaria, agricultural stations, and museums gathered plants that could be used for food, medicine, timber, dyes, fibers, spices, oils, plantation agriculture, and commercial export.
Institutions such as the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew became centers of imperial plant transfer. Seeds, dried specimens, illustrations, reports, and living plants circulated between colonies and metropolitan institutions. Botanical networks helped move commercially valuable crops across regions, often transforming local environments and economies.
Colonial botanists relied heavily on Indigenous and local knowledge. Local experts identified useful plants, explained medicinal and agricultural practices, guided expeditions, collected specimens, prepared materials, and maintained botanical gardens. Women, enslaved people, servants, gardeners, missionaries, merchants, and ship crews also contributed to botanical knowledge, although their work was often credited to European collectors.
Herbaria continue to reflect these historical inequalities. Large quantities of plant material collected in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Australia, and the Pacific remain concentrated in European and North American institutions. This affects who can access specimens, conduct research, control data, and receive recognition for scientific discoveries.
Decolonizing botanical collections involves reconstructing collecting histories, identifying overlooked contributors, revising catalogue descriptions, sharing digital and physical access, recognizing Indigenous classifications, and reconsidering institutional claims of ownership.
Zoology, Taxidermy, Hunting, and the Animal Trade
Colonial zoological collections were assembled through hunting, trapping, animal trading, military expeditions, scientific voyages, missionary networks, and exchanges between museums. Birds, mammals, insects, shells, fish, reptiles, and other animals were killed, preserved, classified, and displayed as examples of distant environments.
Taxidermy turned animal bodies into transportable scientific and exhibition objects. Mounted animals and hunting trophies communicated ideas about imperial conquest, masculine authority, racial hierarchy, wilderness, and control over nature. Trophy hunting frequently developed alongside colonial land policies that restricted Indigenous hunting while granting privileges to colonial officials, settlers, and wealthy visitors.
Commercial specimen dealers supplied museums, universities, schools, and private collectors. Animals and plants became commodities whose prices were determined by rarity, condition, geographic origin, scientific usefulness, and demand among collectors.
Zoological collecting also depended on extensive hidden labor. Local hunters, guides, preparators, translators, animal catchers, porters, and community experts often made expeditions possible. Museum records commonly credited the expedition leader while reducing these contributors to unnamed assistants or omitting them entirely.
Research into colonial zoological collections now examines specimen provenance, hunting practices, commercial networks, environmental damage, Indigenous knowledge, and the relationship between scientific collecting and the decline or extinction of animal populations.
Human Remains, Anatomy, and Racial Science
The collection of human remains represents one of the most violent aspects of colonial science. Skulls, skeletons, organs, preserved bodies, hair samples, and other human materials were taken from graves, hospitals, prisons, battlefields, execution sites, Indigenous communities, and colonial territories.
Many remains were collected without the consent of individuals, families, or communities. Soldiers, doctors, anthropologists, missionaries, government officials, and museum collectors participated in their removal and transportation.
Anatomical and anthropological collections were used to construct racial classifications. Researchers measured skulls and bodies in attempts to establish biological differences among populations. These practices helped naturalize racial hierarchy, justify colonial domination, and support theories associated with scientific racism and eugenics.
Museum catalogues frequently obscured the identities and experiences of the people whose remains were collected. Individuals were transformed into specimen numbers, racial categories, geographic labels, or anatomical examples. Violent acquisition histories were often replaced by neutral scientific descriptions.
Contemporary research seeks to restore individual identities, document acquisition circumstances, consult descendant communities, and return ancestors to their places of origin. Repatriation is not simply the transfer of museum property. It can involve rehumanization, mourning, reburial, historical recognition, and efforts to repair relationships damaged by colonial violence.
Fossils, Geology, Meteorites, and Mineral Knowledge
Colonial scientific collecting extended beneath the surface of the earth. Fossils, minerals, meteorites, geological maps, excavation records, and mining surveys were removed from colonized territories and deposited in foreign institutions.
Geological research often served colonial economic interests. Surveys identified deposits of gold, diamonds, coal, copper, oil, and other resources. Geological documents could therefore provide both scientific information and knowledge essential to commercial extraction and territorial control.
Paleontological expeditions relied on local workers who excavated, prepared, carried, and transported fossils. Their contributions were frequently absent from publications and museum displays. Famous fossil collections attributed to European expedition leaders may have depended on hundreds of African, Asian, or Latin American laborers.
Colonial laws and unequal permit systems allowed foreign expeditions to export important fossils and geological specimens. These removals continue to influence access to scientific heritage, research opportunities, tourism, education, and national control over paleontological resources.
Debates over the return of fossils, geological records, and meteorites raise questions about whether natural objects can also constitute cultural heritage. They also challenge the assumption that scientifically important materials should remain permanently in institutions that acquired them through colonial privilege.
Indigenous Knowledge and Hidden Labor
Scientific expeditions depended on knowledge that already existed within local communities. Indigenous experts understood regional plants, animals, seasons, landscapes, medicines, cultivation methods, migration routes, weather patterns, and ecological relationships.
Collectors relied on local people to find specimens, identify species, negotiate access, translate names, preserve materials, navigate unfamiliar environments, and survive difficult conditions. Enslaved people and people connected to slave-trading networks also supplied specimens and knowledge to European naturalists.
Museum catalogues commonly recorded the name of the European recipient rather than the person who located or prepared the specimen. Scientific publications often described knowledge as a European discovery even when it had long been understood and used by local communities.
Women’s labor was similarly marginalized. Women collected plants, maintained correspondence, prepared specimens, created illustrations, managed households that functioned as scientific workplaces, and contributed horticultural knowledge. Social conventions frequently caused their work to be credited to male relatives or institutional leaders.
Recovering hidden contributors requires examining letters, field notebooks, shipping records, specimen labels, financial accounts, oral histories, community knowledge, and colonial archives. Decolonial research treats these contributors as participants in knowledge production rather than as anonymous labor supporting European science.
Museums, Classification, and Scientific Authority
Colonial museums did not merely store specimens. They created systems for organizing and interpreting the natural and human world. Classification determined which differences were considered scientifically important, how objects were named, and where people and species were placed within hierarchical systems.
Museums transformed locally collected materials into institutional authority. Once specimens reached metropolitan collections, they could be renamed, compared, published, exchanged, or used to describe new species. Scientific credit generally went to the institution or researcher who classified the specimen rather than to those who originally found and understood it.
Museum displays also shaped public perceptions of colonized territories. Exhibitions often presented distant peoples and environments as primitive, exotic, empty, endangered, or available for European exploration. Natural-history specimens appeared alongside ethnographic objects, human remains, maps, commodities, and imperial propaganda.
Colonial museums were established not only in Europe but also throughout Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and Latin America. These institutions could support colonial government, settler identity, missionary activity, national development, or local scientific ambitions. Their histories reveal complex relationships among imperial power, emerging nations, Indigenous communities, and international science.
Modern museums are reassessing exhibition labels, collection terminology, acquisition histories, human-remains policies, and relationships with communities of origin. These reforms challenge the claim that museum classification and interpretation are politically neutral.
Commerce, Networks, and Specimen Circulation
Scientific collecting operated through global networks of ships, railways, ports, colonial offices, military posts, trading companies, missions, universities, museums, gardens, and private collectors.
Specimens passed through many hands before reaching their final destination. Collectors needed containers, chemicals, paper, tools, weapons, preservation materials, transportation, storage facilities, and correspondence networks. Specimens could be damaged, lost, stolen, sold, exchanged, duplicated, or redirected during their journeys.
Commercial markets played a major role in the growth of natural-history collections. Dealers sold animals, plants, shells, fossils, ethnographic objects, and human remains to institutions and private buyers. Museums exchanged duplicate specimens to expand their collections and strengthen institutional relationships.
The scientific value assigned to a specimen was influenced by its rarity, location, documentation, condition, and relationship to existing collections. Commercial value and scientific value often reinforced one another.
Following specimens from the field to the museum reveals how knowledge was shaped by transportation, preservation, finance, institutional competition, and colonial infrastructure. It also shows that scientific collections were produced through economic and political systems rather than through observation alone.
Provenance Research and Digitization
Provenance research investigates where a specimen came from, who collected it, how it changed hands, and under what political and economic circumstances it entered an institution.
For colonial collections, provenance research may reveal coercion, military seizure, grave robbery, exploitative labor, fraudulent exchange, unequal permits, or the deliberate removal of information about local contributors. It may also uncover community relationships and forms of cooperation that were ignored by older museum records.
Digitization can make catalogues, photographs, field notes, and specimen information available to a wider audience. Digital projects can reconnect dispersed records, identify collectors and workers, map collecting locations, and support collaboration with communities of origin.
Digitization does not automatically decolonize a collection. Databases may reproduce racist terminology, incorrect names, colonial geographic categories, incomplete provenance, and institutional claims of ownership. Communities may also have concerns about unrestricted online access to sacred objects, ancestral remains, culturally sensitive knowledge, or endangered species locations.
Responsible digitization requires consultation, contextual information, transparent acknowledgement of harmful records, correction of historical errors, recognition of contributors, and meaningful access for institutions and communities in the places where specimens originated.
Restitution, Repatriation, and Shared Stewardship
Restitution and repatriation debates question whether museums have the moral or legal right to retain collections acquired through colonial rule.
Human remains are among the most urgent subjects of repatriation. Many Indigenous peoples and formerly colonized communities regard ancestral remains as relatives rather than museum property. Returning them may require community consultation, historical research, diplomatic negotiation, ceremonial care, and support for reburial.
Claims can also involve cultural objects, fossils, botanical specimens, zoological collections, archives, photographs, geological documents, and associated data. Legal ownership may be difficult to determine because colonial governments created laws that authorized removals benefiting imperial institutions.
Some museums favor permanent return, while others propose long-term loans, shared custody, traveling exhibitions, digital access, or collaborative research. Critics argue that arrangements described as shared stewardship can preserve unequal ownership unless communities of origin possess genuine decision-making authority.
Meaningful restitution requires more than transferring selected objects. It may involve funding provenance research, building museum and conservation capacity, sharing data, supporting community access, correcting institutional narratives, and changing the structures through which scientific authority is distributed.
Decolonizing Scientific Collections
Decolonizing a scientific collection means examining how colonial power shaped its acquisition, classification, interpretation, accessibility, and use. It does not mean rejecting science or destroying collections. It means making the history and politics of scientific knowledge visible.
Important practices include identifying overlooked collectors and workers, recording Indigenous names and knowledge, revising harmful terminology, acknowledging violence, researching provenance, consulting communities, returning ancestors and contested materials, and sharing control over research and interpretation.
Decolonization also requires institutions to reconsider who is permitted to study collections, whose questions receive funding, where specimens are physically located, who controls digital data, and who receives credit in publications.
Community partnerships can produce new interpretations that connect specimens with living cultures, environmental knowledge, historical memory, and contemporary political concerns. These collaborations can challenge older museum narratives that treated colonized peoples as subjects of study rather than as partners and authorities.
A decolonial approach recognizes that natural-history collections are simultaneously scientific resources, historical records, cultural materials, and evidence of unequal relationships. Their future should be determined through transparent research and sustained collaboration with the communities and countries connected to them.
Exhibitions, Education, and Public History
Museums and universities increasingly use exhibitions, public programs, digital resources, and revised labels to explain the colonial histories of scientific collections.
Public interpretation can reveal how specimens were collected, who performed the labor, how expeditions were financed, and how museums benefited from slavery, colonial commerce, military expansion, and environmental extraction. Individual specimen biographies can make these broad systems understandable by tracing one object from its place of origin to its current institution.
Educational programs can also introduce visitors to Indigenous environmental knowledge, overlooked collectors, women’s scientific work, debates over repatriation, and the relationship between colonialism and modern conservation.
Changes to exhibitions may include removing human remains from display, replacing racist terminology, acknowledging uncertainty, including community testimony, identifying violent acquisition histories, and explaining why older labels are incomplete or harmful.
Public history is most effective when it does not treat colonialism as a closed historical period. Colonial collecting continues to influence the geographic distribution of specimens, research funding, museum authority, biological databases, access to heritage, and the international ownership of scientific knowledge.
Conclusion
Scientific collecting contributed greatly to modern knowledge of plants, animals, fossils, geology, anatomy, and the environment. However, many collections were built within systems of colonial conquest, commercial extraction, racial classification, environmental destruction, and unequal access to knowledge.
The history of these collections cannot be understood solely through the achievements of famous explorers, scientists, and museums. It must also include the Indigenous experts, local collectors, enslaved people, workers, women, guides, hunters, translators, preparators, and communities whose knowledge and labor made scientific collecting possible.
Provenance research, repatriation, revised catalogues, collaborative exhibitions, responsible digitization, and shared authority can help institutions confront these histories. These measures cannot erase colonial violence, but they can expose how scientific knowledge was produced and create fairer relationships among museums, researchers, communities, and countries of origin.
Decolonizing scientific collections ultimately requires a shift from treating specimens as possessions of individual institutions toward understanding them as materials embedded in human relationships, environmental histories, cultural responsibilities, and continuing debates over knowledge, ownership, and justice.
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Decolonizing Natural-History Collections
Are Natural History Museums Inherently Racist?
| Josh Davis | Natural History Museum | Accessed July 15, 2026
An accessible examination of how colonialism and the slave trade shaped natural-history institutions and their specimens.
Colonial Objects of Natural History: Recommendations
| Museum für Naturkunde Berlin | arthistoricum.net | May 26, 2026
A practical framework for researching, documenting, interpreting, and addressing natural-history specimens acquired within colonial systems.
Interpreting Nature Under Empire: Stories from the Collections
| Natural History Museum | Natural History Museum | April 25, 2026
An event resource examining how colonial power shaped collections and public understandings of the natural world.
Provenance, Science and Profit: Natural History Museums and Colonial Collections
| E. Bischoff | Research Ideas and Outcomes | 2026
A research agenda connecting specimen provenance with scientific authority, commercial value, and colonial extraction.
A Tale of Two Museums: Restitution and the Genealogy of Natural History Collections
| P. P. Stewens | International Journal of Cultural Policy | 2026
A comparative study of how natural-history institutions confront restitution and the colonial genealogies of their holdings.
Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Collections
| Colonial Collections Consortium | Colonial Collections Consortium | April 29, 2025
A presentation of research on how museums can identify, interpret, and respond to colonial legacies in their collections.
Digitisation as the Key to Processing Colonial Natural History Collections
| Museum für Naturkunde Berlin | Informationsdienst Wissenschaft | March 3, 2025
A report on how digitization can reveal provenance, collecting networks, and colonial histories embedded in specimen databases.
The Practices of Care: Extinction and De-colonization in Natural History Museums
| Katrina Schlunke | Continuum | 2025
An exploration of care, extinction, and decolonial responsibility in museums built around collected and preserved nature.
Specimens of Settler Colonialism: Collecting and Displaying Natural History at St Andrews
| C. P. Treen | University of St Andrews Research Repository | 2025
A study of how a university natural-science collection participated in settler-colonial knowledge making and display.
The Entwined Human and Environmental Costs of Colonial Legacies in Natural History Museums
| Jack Ashby | Museum Worlds | 2024
A synthesis showing how violence toward colonized peoples and the extraction of animals and plants were mutually reinforcing.
Taking Nature: Collecting and the Exercise of Colonial Power
| Ina Heumann | Science in Context | 2024
A theoretical account of scientific collecting as a form of taking enabled by colonial power and institutional demand.
Herbaria Heritage: Visualising Colonial Bias in Natural History Collections
| S. M. Furuta et al. | University of Twente Research Information | 2024
A visualization project that maps geographic and institutional biases created by colonial-era botanical collecting.
How Do You Do Decolonial Research in Natural History Museums?
| Jack Ashby | NatSCA Blog | October 26, 2023
A practical guide to finding hidden collectors, coercive contexts, violence, and unequal credit in specimen histories.
The Colonial Legacy of Herbaria
| Daniel S. Park et al. | Nature Human Behaviour | 2023
A global analysis showing how colonial relationships continue to shape the location, accessibility, and use of herbarium specimens.
Promises of Mass Digitisation and Colonial Realities of Natural History Collections
| Katja Kaiser et al. | Journal of Natural Science Collections | 2023
A critical assessment of whether large-scale digitization corrects or reproduces colonial inequalities in collection access and description.
Legacies of Colonial Violence in Natural History Collections
| Jack Ashby and Rebecca Machin | Journal of Natural Science Collections | 2021
Two specimen biographies reveal how military violence, concentration camps, and exploitative collecting entered museum collections.
Natural History Collections and Empire
| Andreas Weber | ResearchGate | 2020
An overview of collections as products of local expertise, global trade, imperial administration, and colonial violence.
Collecting Colonial Nature
| Andreas Weber | BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review | 2019
A study of how colonial committees, officials, and local intermediaries supplied natural-history institutions with specimens.
Nature Read in Black and White: Decolonial Approaches to Interpreting Natural History Collections
| Subhadra Das and Miranda Lowe | Journal of Natural Science Collections | 2018
A foundational argument that omitting colonial collecting histories from interpretation perpetuates structural racism.
Botany, Herbaria, and Economic Botany
The Botanical Collections of Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753)
| B. Scott et al. | Systematics and Biodiversity | 2025
A reassessment of Sloane’s botanical holdings and the global commercial and colonial networks through which they were assembled.
Mohamed Haniff (1872–1930) and Colonial Ethnobotany in the Malay Peninsula
| Archives of Natural History | Archives of Natural History | 2025
A study recovering the expertise of a Malay plant collector whose knowledge supported colonial botanical research.
Charles Ford and the Hong Kong Botanical Gardens, 1871–1902
| V. Ho | Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History | 2025
An account of a colonial garden’s role in plant transfer, imperial administration, and scientific exchange.
Science ‘Subservient to Profit’? William Jackson Hooker and the First Glasgow Botanic Gardens
| M. Cournil | British Journal for the History of Science | 2025
A history of a botanic garden situated at the intersection of Caribbean commerce, imperial interests, and botanical science.
‘Best Presents for England!’: A New Zealand Fern Album in Victorian Britain
| A. Clark | Journal of the History of Collections | 2025
A fern album is used to examine colonial resource promotion, botanical collecting, and imperial gift exchange.
Surinamese Maroon and Indigenous Knowledge in the Hendrik Charles Focke Expeditions
| I. de Ruiter | Archives of Natural History | 2025
A recovery of Maroon and Indigenous knowledge that enabled nineteenth-century botanical expeditions in Suriname.
‘We Need Other Logics for Our Approach to Nature’: Uprooting Colonialism in Botany
| Phoebe Weston | The Guardian | June 2, 2024
An interview with Banu Subramaniam on botanical classification, empire, migration, and alternative ways of knowing plants.
Botany, Informal Empire and the Colonial Roots of British Plant Collecting in China
| F. O’Morchoe | Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique | 2024
A study of how diplomats, merchants, missionaries, and collectors extended British botanical influence in China.
The Uprooting of Indigenous Women’s Horticultural Practices in Colonial Brazil
| J. O’Leary | Past & Present | 2024
An analysis of how colonization disrupted Indigenous women’s cultivation systems while appropriating their environmental knowledge.
Legacies of Empire in the Botanic Gardens of Oxford and Kew
| V. Nielsen | Museum Management and Curatorship | 2023
A comparison of how two major British gardens interpret imperial histories embedded in their plants, buildings, and archives.
‘His Utter Unfitness for a Commercial Collector’
| K. Alcorn | Journal of the History of Collections | 2023
A history of the financing, commodification, and patronage systems behind eighteenth-century transatlantic plant collecting.
Duplicate Networks: Berlin Botanical Institutions as a Clearing House for Colonial Plant Material, 1891–1920
| Katja Kaiser | British Journal for the History of Science | 2022
A study of herbarium duplicates as scientific currency within German and trans-imperial exchange networks.
Cultivating ‘Care’: Colonial Botany and the Moral Lives of Oil Palm
| A. Rudge | Comparative Studies in Society and History | 2022
An examination of how colonial botanists framed plantation oil palms through moral language, labor discipline, and economic development.
Planting the Seeds of Empire: Botanical Gardens and Colonial Power
| A. DeMaio | Garden History | 2022
A survey of botanical gardens as institutions for acclimatization, extraction, classification, and imperial expansion.
Angel in the House, Angel in the Scientific Empire: Women and Colonial Botany
| J. Hong | Notes and Records of the Royal Society | 2021
A study of women’s collecting, correspondence, and domestic labor within British colonial botanical networks.
It’s Time to Re-examine the History of Botanical Collections
| Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew | Kew | June 25, 2020
A public introduction to the links among botanical collections, empire, enslavement, trade, and overlooked contributors.
Kew and Colonialism: A History of Entanglement
| Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew | Kew | March 10, 2020
A case study using an indigo factory model to explore Kew’s relationship with colonial extraction and plantation economies.
Specimens Distributed: Kew’s Museum of Economic Botany and the Dispersal of Objects
| Caroline Cornish | Journal of the History of Collections | 2020
An analysis of Kew as a conduit that circulated colonial plant specimens and manufactured objects through imperial institutions.
Botany, Trade and Empire
| Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew | Kew | May 15, 2019
An overview of how economically valuable plants moved through imperial botanical networks centered on Kew.
Recalcitrant Seeds: Material Culture and the Global History of Science
| Sarah Easterby-Smith | Past & Present | 2019
A material history of seed transfer that complicates simple models of European control over colonial botanical circulation.
From the South Seas to Soho Square: Joseph Banks’s Library and Herbarium
| Edwin D. Rose | Notes and Records of the Royal Society | 2019
An account of how Banks’s collections transformed voyages and imperial correspondence into metropolitan scientific authority.
Natural History Values and Meanings in Nineteenth-Century Chile
| Patience A. Schell | Notes and Records of the Royal Society | 2019
A history of Chilean museum collecting that includes war loot, national science, and contested uses of specimens.
A Hard Nut to Crack: Nutmeg Cultivation and Natural History between the Maluku Islands and Isle de France
| Dorothee Brixius | British Journal for the History of Science | 2018
A study of the practical and Indigenous knowledge required to transfer nutmeg within competing colonial empires.
Mapping the History of Botanical Collectors
| M. G. Penn et al. | Systematics and Biodiversity | 2018
A data-driven study mapping who collected plant specimens, where they worked, and how collection geography changed over time.
The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens in Colonial Expansion
| Lucile H. Brockway | Economic Botany | 1979
A classic analysis of Kew’s role in transferring crops, expertise, and economic plants across the British Empire.
The Rijksherbarium and Scientific and Social Conditions in the Netherlands
A historical survey linking Dutch natural-history institutions to state policy, overseas collecting, and colonial scientific infrastructure.
Zoology, Entomology, Taxidermy, and Animal Trade
Mozambique’s Colonial-Era Non-Human Primate Collection
| M. Osório et al. | Primate Conservation | 2025
A provenance study of primate specimens assembled during Portuguese colonial rule and preserved in Mozambican institutions.
Value, Knowledge and Reputation: Zoological Exchange by Australian Museums, 1870–1900
| H. Reese | British Journal for the History of Science | 2025
An analysis of specimen exchange as a means of building civic prestige, scientific authority, and colonial museum collections.
‘Pioneers of Culture’: Australian Natural History Museums and German Settler Colonialism
| A. Schwarz | Continuum | 2025
A study of German naturalists and museums participating materially and imaginatively in Australian settler colonialism.
Lhotsky, the Impostor? Negotiating Natural History in Colonial Australia
| A. Schwarz | Australian Historical Studies | 2025
A reconsideration of John Lhotsky’s collecting career and the unstable social authority of colonial naturalists.
Collecting Empires: Dominik Bilimek and Subterranean Fauna
| Johannes Mattes | Subterranean Biology | 2024
A reconstruction of how an imperial collector’s cave specimens moved through military, clerical, and museum networks.
The Historical Power of the Natural Science Collection of Dominik Bilimek
| P. Lukeneder et al. | Notes and Records of the Royal Society | 2024
A study showing how dispersed specimens can illuminate nineteenth-century collecting, mobility, and imperial institutions.
Henry Dresser and Victorian Ornithology
| Henry McGhie | Curating Tomorrow | 2024
A collection history linking bird specimens, commercial networks, private wealth, and the global ambitions of Victorian ornithology.
Infested Empire: Architecture and Entomology in Colonial Japan
| M. Mullane | The Journal of Architecture | 2023
An examination of insect control and entomological knowledge within Japanese colonial architecture and governance.
The Economy of Rarity: Animal-Catching, Cryptozoology, and Colonial Knowledge
| History of Science Society | Isis | 2023
A study of how rarity, rumor, commerce, and capture shaped the value of unusual animals in imperial science.
The Colonial Roots of Trophy Hunting
| Faunalytics | Faunalytics | July 7, 2022
A research summary tracing modern trophy hunting to imperial conquest, racial hierarchy, and elite claims over wildlife.
Authentic Provenance: Locality and Colonial Collecting for the Lisbon Zoological Museum
| Catarina Madruga | Journal for the History of Knowledge | 2022
An analysis of locality labels and colonial relationships in zoological specimens collected for Lisbon.
Malinowski and Malacology: Global Value Systems and the Issue of Duplicates
| Dániel Margócsy | British Journal for the History of Science | 2022
A comparison of European museum exchange and Pacific systems of value through the circulation of Spondylus shells.
Colonial Provenances of Nature: The Expansion of Berlin’s Mammal Collection around 1900
| Museum für Naturkunde Berlin | Proveana | December 1, 2020
A project examining how German colonial officers, hunters, traders, and scientists expanded Berlin’s mammal holdings.
Animal Body as Medium: Taxidermy and European Expansion
| A. S. Ross | Past & Present | 2020
A history of preserved primates showing how taxidermy turned animal bodies into media of European expansion.
Macleay’s Choice: Transacting the Natural History Trade in the Nineteenth Century
| Simon Ville, Claire Wright, and Jude Philp | Journal of the History of Biology | 2020
A study of purchasing decisions, dealers, prices, and institutional priorities in the global specimen trade.
Researching the Natural History Trade of the Nineteenth Century
| Simon Ville et al. | Museum History Journal | 2020
A methodological guide to reconstructing dealers, collectors, exchanges, and commercial flows of specimens.
When Commerce, Science and Leisure Collaborated: The Global Trade Boom in Natural History Collections
| Anne Coote et al. | Journal of Global History | 2017
A global account of the nineteenth-century specimen trade linking imperial transport, museums, dealers, and private collectors.
Scientific Collecting at the Hawke’s Bay Philosophical Institute
| T. Z. Robinson | Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand | 2017
A study of collecting and museum building within a settler-colonial scientific society in New Zealand.
Lost Trophies: Hunting Animals and Imperial Souvenir
| Journal of Commonwealth Literature | Journal of Commonwealth Literature | 2016
An examination of hunting trophies as objects joining animal death, masculine identity, travel, and imperial memory.
Natural History Collecting and the Biogeographical Tradition
| Janet Browne | Historia, Ciências, Saúde—Manguinhos | 2001
A history of how specimen collecting, travel, and museum comparison helped create modern biogeography.
Human Remains, Racial Science, and Anatomy
Bodies of Africans Taken in the Colonial Era Are Coming Home
| Associated Press | Associated Press | March 23, 2026
A report on African communities seeking the return of ancestors taken for European racial science and museum collections.
Imagine: The Future of Human Remains from Colonial Contexts
| Museum Vrolik | Museum Vrolik | March 13, 2026
An exhibition resource asking how institutions should research, care for, and return human remains collected under colonial rule.
Vast Scale of Overseas Human Remains Held in UK Museums Decried
| The Guardian | The Guardian | March 7, 2026
An investigation into the large number of ancestral remains still held by British institutions and the barriers to return.
Human Remains, Material Culture and Collections
| A. Fuentes | World Archaeology | 2026
A conservator’s examination of human remains incorporated into cultural objects and the ethical challenges posed by museum care.
Strategic Silence and Colonial Violence: African Skulls in an Anatomical Museum
| D. Chamberlain | Human Remains and Violence | 2025
A study of how catalogues and institutional narratives obscure the violence through which African skulls entered European collections.
Decolonising the Present by Colonising the Past? A Case Study of Human Remains
| C. Askheim | Social History of Medicine | 2025
A critical examination of present-day decolonization claims surrounding nineteenth-century collections of human remains.
The New White Normal: Human Anatomy and the Naturalisation of Race
| R. Martin | Social History of Medicine | 2025
An analysis of how anatomical museums organized bones and bodies to naturalize racial hierarchy.
Repatriations: Changing the Legacy of Colonial Collecting
| University of Edinburgh | Edinburgh Impact | August 22, 2024
An overview of research and community partnerships addressing ancestral remains and other colonial collections.
Are Museums Entering a New Era of Repatriation of Human Remains?
| Opinio Juris | Opinio Juris | April 17, 2024
A legal analysis of changing policies and international expectations regarding the return of colonial-era human remains.
Skull Hunters on the Pampa
| Empire, Colonialism, and the Human Sciences | Cambridge University Press | 2024
A study of Indigenous remains, frontier violence, and competing anthropological practices in nineteenth-century Argentina.
Collecting Humanity: Commodification, Trophy Hunting, and Biocolonialism
| Carsten Stahn | Confronting Colonial Objects | 2023
A chapter tracing how colonized bodies became trophies, commodities, and scientific specimens within racial institutions.
The Shelf Life of Skulls: Anthropology and ‘Race’ in the Vrolik Collection
| L. de Rooy et al. | History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences | 2023
A collection history showing how skulls were repeatedly reclassified within changing theories of race and human variation.
Searching for Maura
| The Washington Post | The Washington Post | 2023
An investigation into a Filipino woman whose brain entered the Smithsonian’s racial collection after the 1904 World’s Fair.
Between Objects of Science and Lived Lives
| Liv Nilsson Stutz | International Journal of Heritage Studies | 2023
A legal and ethical discussion of treating human remains as both scientific material and once-living persons.
Repairing Historic Injustice: Returning Indigenous Peoples’ Ancestral Human Remains
| Alessandro Chechi | International Journal of Cultural Property | 2023
An argument for using transitional justice to guide meaningful repatriation and healing.
The Body Snatchers: Colonial Museum Collecting as Violence and Violation
| Annalisa Bolin | Social Science Research Council | May 10, 2022
A study of grave robbing and bodily appropriation as central, rather than incidental, forms of colonial museum violence.
Germany’s History of Returning Human Remains and Objects
| R. Gram and A. Schoofs | Perspectivia.net | 2022
A historical overview of German restitution debates, policies, and returns involving ancestral remains.
Anatomy Collections as ‘Modern Ruins’
| Alexandra Ion | Science in Context | 2021
A reflection on the afterlives of anatomical specimens as medical institutions reconsider display, care, and disposal.
International Repatriations of Indigenous Human Remains and Their Complexities
| Paul Turnbull | Museum and Society | 2020
A comparative review of the legal, political, scientific, and community challenges involved in international returns.
Repatriations of Human Remains from Germany, 1911 to 2019
| Andreas Winkelmann | Museum and Society | 2020
A chronology demonstrating that German repatriation has a longer and more uneven history than commonly recognized.
Uncovering the Colonial Past of Edinburgh University’s Anatomical Museum
| N. Anderson | Journal of Scottish Historical Studies | 2020
An investigation of how imperial medicine and racial collecting shaped a major university anatomy collection.
When Nothing Remains: Anatomical Collections, Ethics, and the Disposal of Skulls
| T. Claes and M. Deblon | Journal of the History of Collections | 2018
A study of destroyed and dispersed skull collections and the changing ethics of anatomical stewardship.
Authorised Histories: Human Remains and the Economies of Credibility in the Science of Race
| Ricardo Roque | Social Anthropology | 2018
An analysis of how institutions produce authoritative narratives about remains gathered for racial science.
Human Remains in Museums Today
| Katie Stringer Clary | History News | 2018
An overview of the colonial and racist origins of many museum-held remains and current ethical responses.
Skulls, Restitution and Internal Colonialism in the Netherlands
| Fenneke Sysling | Journal of the History of Collections | 2017
A case study of skull acquisition and repatriation involving marginalized communities within the Dutch state.
Skulls and Scientific Collecting in the Victorian Military
| Simon J. Harrison | Comparative Studies in Society and History | 2008
A study of British soldiers collecting enemy heads and skulls at the intersection of frontier warfare and racial science.
Fossils, Geology, Meteorites, and Deep Time
Digital Tendaguru
| Museum für Naturkunde Berlin | Digital Tendaguru | Accessed July 15, 2026
A digital project reconstructing people, places, labor, specimens, and records from the German expedition in Tanzania.
DR Congo Pushes Belgium to Release Colonial-Era Geological Documents
| Financial Times | Financial Times | June 14, 2026
A report on demands for geological records whose removal under Belgian rule still affects Congolese control over mineral knowledge.
Making the Labour Visible Behind the Tendaguru Dinosaur Collection
| S. Akhlaq et al. | Journal of Open Humanities Data | 2026
A dataset and methodology identifying African workers whose labor made the famous German dinosaur excavations possible.
The German Tendaguru Collection as Cultural Heritage and Digital Object
| V. Díez Díaz et al. | Springer | 2025
A discussion of digitizing a major colonial fossil collection while addressing its Tanzanian origins and contested ownership.
A Museum Overflowing with Prehistoric Treasures Races to Save Itself
| Michael M. Phillips | The Wall Street Journal | October 12, 2024
A report on the colonial origins, scientific importance, and preservation crisis of Kenya’s national natural-history collections.
Owning the Deep Past: Paleontological Knowledge and Colonial History
| History of Knowledge | History of Knowledge | July 25, 2023
An essay on how fossil possession, excavation rights, and scientific authority became entangled with colonial rule.
The Return of Fossils Removed under Colonial Rule
| P. P. Stewens | Santander Art and Culture Law Review | 2022
A legal study of restitution claims involving fossils exported through colonial institutions and unequal permit systems.
Digging Deeper into Colonial Palaeontological Practices in Modern-Day Mexico and Brazil
| J. C. Cisneros et al. | Royal Society Open Science | 2022
A study showing how foreign researchers removed Latin American fossils and how those histories shape present scientific inequality.
Java Man and the Politics of Natural History
| Caroline Drieënhuizen | Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde | 2021
An account of fossil collecting, Dutch colonial authority, and competing claims over the remains known as Java Man.
Meteorites as Scientific Heritage
| A. Franza et al. | Conservar Património | 2021
A discussion of meteorite collections as scientific heritage requiring attention to provenance, law, and national ownership.
Bones of Contention: The Fossil Trade
| Paige Williams | The New Yorker | January 28, 2013
An investigation of fossil commerce, smuggling, ownership disputes, and the movement of specimens from Mongolia to Western markets.
Science and the Politics of Colonial Collecting: Indian Meteorites, 1856–1870
| Savithri Preetha Nair | British Journal for the History of Science | 2006
A study of how meteorite collection in British India linked local finders, colonial officials, and metropolitan laboratories.
The Geological Collections of the Nationaal Natuurhistorisch Museum
| C. F. Winkler Prins | Scripta Geologica | 2004
A collection history tracing geological specimens, expeditions, institutional mergers, and materials from former Dutch colonies.
Colonial Pride and Metropolitan Expectations: The British Museum and Melbourne’s Meteorites
| A. M. Lucas | British Journal for the History of Science | 1994
A case study of conflict between a colonial museum seeking status and a metropolitan institution seeking specimens.
Indigenous Knowledge, Hidden Labor, and Local Collectors
Hidden Hands in Colonial Natural Histories
| Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine | CHSTM | Accessed July 15, 2026
A research forum devoted to recovering Black, Indigenous, enslaved, and local labor behind colonial natural-history collections.
Colonial Women Plant Collectors
| Sara Maroske | Sara Maroske Research | Accessed July 15, 2026
A research resource documenting women and girls in Ferdinand von Mueller’s extensive Australian plant-collecting network.
Men of Parramatta: George Caley and Daniel Moowattin
| City of Parramatta | Parramatta History and Heritage | Accessed July 15, 2026
A local-history account contrasting the recorded career of a British botanist with the overlooked work of his Darug assistant.
Silence in the Collections: Revealing Science Stories through Indigenous Partnership
| Science Museum Group Journal | Science Museum Group Journal | December 16, 2025
A case study showing how Indigenous collaboration can recover scientific and technological knowledge obscured by museum catalogues.
History of History: Anti-colonial Methods for a Project Using Natural-History Museum Samples
| CLEAR | Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research | January 3, 2025
A methodological reflection on using museum samples without reproducing the erasures and extractive habits of natural history.
Collections from Colonial Australia in Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde
| A. Schwarz | Biodiversity Information Science and Standards | 2023
A project report recovering Aboriginal contributors and local knowledge associated with Australian specimens in Berlin.
Inventing Settler Science
| James Poskett | The Antipodean Laboratory | 2023
A chapter examining how Aboriginal guide and collector Daniel Moowattin contributed to natural history without receiving lasting recognition.
Situated Nature: Field Collecting and Local Knowledge in the History of Science
| David Dubald and Catarina Madruga | Journal for the History of Knowledge | 2022
An introduction emphasizing field labor, local expertise, and unequal power relations in the making of collections.
Science and War at the Limit of Empire: William Griffith with the Army of the Indus
| Lachlan Fleetwood | Notes and Records of the Royal Society | 2021
A study of botanical collecting conducted through military invasion and dependent on soldiers, servants, and local guides.
Building a Framework for Indigenous Astronomy Collaboration
| Annette S. Lee et al. | arXiv | 2020
A collaborative model for science museums seeking to work with Indigenous knowledge systems without appropriation.
James Petiver’s ‘Kind Friends’ and ‘Curious Persons’ in the Atlantic World
| Kathleen S. Murphy | Notes and Records of the Royal Society | 2020
A social history revealing the merchants, ship personnel, colonists, and other intermediaries behind Petiver’s collections.
‘What He Hath Gather’d Together Shall Not Be Lost’: Remembering James Petiver
| Richard Coulton | Notes and Records of the Royal Society | 2020
A study of how later institutions reconstructed the reputation of a collector whose network relied on colonial commerce.
Andrew Beveridge Curror: Collecting Natural History in Angola and Nigeria
| E. Figueiredo et al. | Phytotaxa | 2020
A biographical study of a Scottish collector whose specimens depended on West African travel, labor, and colonial access.
Botanomania and the Secret History of Women Plant Collectors
| Minneapolis Institute of Art | Minneapolis Institute of Art | April 24, 2018
A public-history essay on women’s botanical expertise and the social constraints shaping their collecting and recognition.
Snapshots of Tropical Diversity: Collecting Plants in Colonial and Imperial Brazil
| Stephen A. Harris | Oxford University Research Archive | 2018
A study of field techniques and local assistance behind foreign herbarium collecting in nineteenth-century Brazil.
Botanical Collecting in Eighteenth-Century London
| Sarah Easterby-Smith | Curtis’s Botanical Magazine | 2018
A network analysis showing that botanical knowledge circulated through families, amateurs, gardeners, and correspondents as well as elite naturalists.
A Taste for Botanic Science: Ferdinand Mueller’s Female Collectors
| Sara Maroske and Alison Vaughan | Muelleria | 2014
A quantitative and biographical study of hundreds of women who supplied specimens to colonial Australian botany.
Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History, and the British Slave Trade
| Kathleen S. Murphy | William and Mary Quarterly | 2013
A landmark study showing how enslaved people and slave-trading routes supplied British naturalists with specimens and knowledge.
Listing People: Specimen Suppliers in James Petiver’s Natural History
| James Delbourgo | Isis | 2012
An analysis of published supplier lists that exposes the social hierarchy and global labor behind a celebrated collection.
Daniel Moowattin
| Keith Vincent Smith | Australian Dictionary of Biography | 2005
A biography of the Darug guide and collector who worked with botanist George Caley in early colonial New South Wales.
Colonial Museums and Institutional Case Studies
‘Marvels and Monstrosities from All Quarters of the Globe’: Southampton’s Hartley Institution
| John McAleer | Journal of the History of Collections | 2026
A history of a provincial museum whose natural-history and ethnographic displays were filled through imperial shipping and civic networks.
The ‘Death’ and ‘Rebirth’ of Museums in Colonial Hong Kong
| Reynold K. W. Tsang | Museum History Journal | 2025
A study of museum formation, closure, and reinvention under British rule in Hong Kong.
Falling from Normalcy? Decolonisation of Museums, Science Centres, and Their Collections
| Science Centres and Museums | Oxford Academic | 2023
An argument that science institutions must address colonialism even when their exhibitions appear politically neutral.
Confronting Colonial Heritage: Introducing Entanglements and Narratives
| Carsten Stahn | Confronting Colonial Objects | 2023
An introduction connecting natural specimens, human remains, racial science, and museum display within colonial heritage.
Collecting Mania, Racial Science, and Cultural Conversion
| Carsten Stahn | Confronting Colonial Objects | 2023
A history of forcible expeditions and museum collecting justified by racial hierarchy and narratives of vanishing cultures.
The Scramble for Cultural Colonial Objects
| Carsten Stahn | Confronting Colonial Objects | 2023
A survey of acquisition through war, missions, trade, administration, and scientific expeditions under unequal colonial conditions.
Expanding Empire: Curiosity, Power, and Prestige
| Carsten Stahn | Confronting Colonial Objects | 2023
A chapter tracing how companies, courts, and museums turned overseas objects and specimens into symbols of imperial status.
Introduction: Museum Histories in Aotearoa New Zealand
| R. Crane et al. | Museum History Journal | 2020
An introduction to museums as institutions shaped by settler colonialism, Indigenous relationships, and transnational exchange.
Papua New Guinea’s Earliest Colonial Museums
| Andrew Edmundson | Journal of Pacific History | 2019
A history of museums created by missionaries and colonial officials and the local objects and specimens they accumulated.
The Colonial Museum of Marseille: Empire and Object in France’s ‘Porte de l’Orient’
| Sarah K. Griswold | Journal of the History of Collections | 2018
A study of a museum designed to promote French colonial commerce through commodities, specimens, and ethnographic objects.
The East India Company, the Company’s Museum, and the Political Economy of Natural History in British India
| Jessica Ratcliff | Isis | 2016
An analysis of how company governance, commerce, and specimen collection helped construct British knowledge of India.
Human Remains, the Disciplines of the Dead, and the South African Memorial Complex
| Ciraj Rassool | The Politics of Heritage in Africa | 2015
A study of colonial collecting, museum anthropology, memorialization, and the return of ancestral remains in South Africa.
Natural History Networks in Latin America in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
| Regina Horta Duarte | Isis | 2013
A historiographical essay on museums, collectors, expeditions, and nation building across Latin America.
Practicing Anthropology in the French Colonial Empire, circa 1880–1960
| Emmanuelle Sibeud | Isis | 2012
A reassessment of field practices, institutions, and racial classification in French colonial anthropology.
Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities
| John M. MacKenzie | Manchester University Press | 2009
A comparative history of museums across the British Empire and their roles in science, civic identity, and colonial authority.
The Royal Society, Natural History and the Peoples of the ‘New Worlds,’ 1660–1800
| John Gascoigne | British Journal for the History of Science | 2009
A study of how the Royal Society gathered information about both nature and peoples through expanding imperial contacts.
The Ethnographic Collection at the Cuming Museum
| B. Hyacinth | Journal of Museum Ethnography | 2008
A collection history showing how travel, trade, and empire shaped a London museum’s global holdings.
Travelling Objects: Two Natural History Collections in Portugal and Brazil
| Filipa Lowndes Vicente | Portuguese Studies | 2003
A comparison of collections formed through French expeditions to Portugal and Brazil and later metropolitan appropriation.
Shaping Latin American Museums of Natural History, 1850–1990
| Maria Margaret Lopes and Irina Podgorny | Osiris | 2000
A regional history of natural-history museums as scientific institutions, national projects, and participants in international exchange.
Cathedrals of Science: The Development of Colonial Natural History Museums
| Susan Sheets-Pyenson | McGill-Queen’s University Press | 1988
A foundational comparative study of natural-history museums in Canada, Australia, Argentina, India, and other colonial settings.
Provenance, Restitution, Repatriation, and Ethics
Decolonising the Database
| Collections Trust | Collections Trust | Accessed July 15, 2026
A resource on revising catalogues, terminology, authority records, and access practices inherited from colonial collecting.
Acknowledgement of Harmful Content in Collection Data
| Natural History Museum | Natural History Museum Data Portal | Accessed July 15, 2026
A statement explaining how historic specimen records may contain racist, colonial, or otherwise harmful language.
Investigation into the Origin of the Historical Anthropological Collection of Skulls
| Staatliche Museen zu Berlin | Staatliche Museen zu Berlin | Accessed July 15, 2026
A provenance project investigating thousands of skulls collected through German colonial and racial-scientific networks.
‘It’s Time for Healing’: Aboriginal Ancestors Traded as Curiosities Return Home
| The Guardian | The Guardian | January 3, 2026
A report following the return of Aboriginal ancestors whose remains circulated through colonial scientific and private collections.
The UK Museums Association and German Museumsbund: Colonial Collections and Human Remains
| T. Wojtych | Museum History Journal | 2026
A comparison of professional guidance on colonial collections, repatriation, and the care of human remains.
Bones of Injustice: Political Frictions in Restitutions of Human Remains
| Peace Research Institute Frankfurt | PRIF Blog | February 28, 2025
An analysis of the diplomatic, institutional, and community conflicts that can complicate the return of ancestors.
Provenance Research in Museums: Principles, Practices, and African Collections
| N. Chipangura | African Arts | 2025
A discussion of provenance methods that center African histories, circulation networks, and claims from communities of origin.
To Retain or Return? How British Museum Volunteers Understand Repatriation
| L. Maidment-Blundell | Cultural Trends | 2025
A study of how museum volunteers interpret decolonization, ownership, and the possible return of contested collections.
Museum Reconciliation and Reparations in the Canadian Context
| L. Feld | Collections | 2025
An examination of databases, consultation, and institutional reform as tools for reconciling stolen objects and ancestral remains.
From the Objective to the Pluriversal: Reconfiguring Care in Museums
| M. Valle Noronha | Museum Management and Curatorship | 2025
A proposal for collection care grounded in multiple knowledge systems rather than supposedly neutral institutional authority.
Restitution of Colonial Heritage Collections: Partial Norm Implementation in Belgium and the United Kingdom
| Franziska Boehme | Review of International Studies | 2024
A comparison of why emerging restitution norms produce uneven policy changes across former colonial powers.
Decolonial Futures for African Collections
| JoAnn McGregor et al. | Third Text | 2024
An introduction to collaborative and community-centered approaches for African collections held in regional European museums.
Engaging with Ethnographic Museum Objects from Northeast India
| V. Joshi | South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies | 2024
A study of renewed Naga engagement with dispersed colonial collections and the knowledge needed to reinterpret them.
Provenance Research on Collections from Colonial Contexts
| German Lost Art Foundation | arthistoricum.net | 2023
A practical handbook for tracing acquisition, transfer, coercion, and institutional responsibility in colonial collections.
Acknowledging the Past, Righting the Future
| Carsten Stahn | Confronting Colonial Objects | 2023
A review of legal reforms, museum guidelines, provenance initiatives, and restitution processes addressing colonial acquisitions.
Care of Collections from Colonial Contexts
| German Museums Association | German Museums Association | 2021
Guidelines for identifying colonial contexts, collaborating with source communities, and considering return or shared stewardship.
International Repatriation of Human Remains of Indigenous Peoples
| International Council of Museums | ICOM | August 8, 2018
An international museum statement on ethical responsibilities and cooperation in the return of Indigenous ancestors.
Recollecting Bones: German-Australian Memory and Indigenous Ancestral Remains
| Lars Eckstein | Postcolonial Studies | 2018
An analysis of competing memories and political claims surrounding the restitution of Indigenous Australian remains from Germany.
Return, Reburial and Rehumanisation in Southern Africa
| Ciraj Rassool | Museum and Society | 2015
A study of how repatriation can transform human remains from scientific objects back into ancestors and historical persons.
Museums and the Return of Human Remains: An Equitable Solution
| Steven Gallagher | International Journal of Cultural Property | 2010
A legal argument for using equitable principles to resolve claims for ancestral remains held by museums.
Networks, Commerce, Fieldwork, and Specimen Logistics
Life after Herbarium Digitisation
| A. Paton et al. | Applications in Plant Sciences | 2025
A discussion of how digital access changes specimen research while exposing gaps in metadata, geography, and historical attribution.
Locating the Central Asiatic Expedition: Epistemic Geography, Espionage, and Specimen Collecting
A study of an American natural-history expedition that combined scientific collecting, geopolitical ambition, and military intelligence.
The Troubles of Collecting: William Henry Harvey and the Practicalities of Natural-History Fieldwork
| John McAleer | British Journal for the History of Science | 2022
A close study of the people, supplies, transport, preservation, and bodily work required to collect specimens across oceans.
The Cabinet and the World
| Daniela Bleichmar | Journal of the History of Collections | 2021
An analysis of how collectors claimed to possess the world while relying on distant objects, images, and intermediaries.
George William Francis and an Early Victorian Scientific Career from Britain to South Australia
| Notes and Records of the Royal Society | Notes and Records of the Royal Society | 2021
A biography showing how colonial migration, publishing, gardening, and institutional rivalry shaped a naturalist’s career.
Joaquim José da Silva and a Natural-History Expedition in Angola
| E. Figueiredo et al. | Candollea | 2021
A reconstruction of a Portuguese colonial expedition and the naturalist, assistants, manuscripts, and specimens it produced.
James Petiver’s Plants
| C. E. Jarvis | Notes and Records of the Royal Society | 2020
A study of Petiver’s surviving herbarium and the dispersed international network that supplied its specimens.
The Materials of Natural History
| Arthur MacGregor | Worlds of Natural History | 2018
A chapter on the tools and preservation techniques that allowed organisms to become transportable scientific specimens.
Museum Nature
| Samuel J. M. M. Alberti | Worlds of Natural History | 2018
A history of museums as sites where collected nature was ordered, displayed, and connected to imperial possession.
Publics and Empires
| Worlds of Natural History | Cambridge University Press | 2018
A set of studies on how public participation, domestic labor, print, and empire expanded natural-history collecting.
Vegetable Empire
| Miles Ogborn | Worlds of Natural History | 2018
A chapter on plants, paper, correspondence, and the imperial infrastructures that coordinated botanical information.
Illustrating Natural History: Images, Periodicals, and Scientific Communities
| Geoff Belknap | British Journal for the History of Science | 2018
A study of how images and periodicals helped geographically dispersed collectors recognize and compare specimens.
‘Scarcely More than a Christian Trophy Case’? The London Missionary Society Museum
| Chris Wingfield | Journal of the History of Collections | 2017
An analysis of a missionary museum where natural specimens and cultural objects arrived through global evangelizing networks.
Magic and Memory: Douglas Montague’s Collecting in New Caledonia
| Julie Adams | Journal of the History of Collections | 2016
A study of natural-history, ethnographic, photographic, and sound collections assembled during a colonial Pacific expedition.
A Young Slip of Botany: Botanical Networks, the South Atlantic, and Britain’s Maritime Worlds
| John McAleer | Journal of Global History | 2016
A study of naval routes and island stations that enabled plant collection and exchange across the South Atlantic.
The Experimenter’s Museum: GenBank, Natural History, and the Moral Economies of Biomedicine
| Bruno J. Strasser | Isis | 2011
A history connecting older museum practices of accumulation and exchange to modern biological databases and specimen repositories.
Visible Empire: Scientific Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment
| Daniela Bleichmar | Postcolonial Studies | 2009
An analysis of images, specimens, and paperwork used to make imperial nature visible and administratively useful.
Objects and the Museum
| Samuel J. M. M. Alberti | Isis | 2005
A widely cited framework for following objects from field collection through exchange, classification, display, and reinterpretation.
Placing Nature: Natural History Collections and Their Owners in Provincial England
| Samuel J. M. M. Alberti | British Journal for the History of Science | 2002
A study of ownership and civic identity that situates provincial collections within wider national and imperial networks.
The Specimen Dealer: Entrepreneurial Natural History in America’s Gilded Age
| Mark V. Barrow Jr. | Journal of the History of Biology | 2000
A history of commercial dealers who converted animals and plants from around the world into standardized scientific commodities.
Exhibitions, Public History, and Teaching Resources
Slavery and the History of the Collections We Care For
| Natural History Museum | Natural History Museum | Accessed July 15, 2026
A public research hub tracing specimens, collectors, and institutional wealth connected to transatlantic slavery.
Colonial Histories of Australian Mammal Collections in Cambridge
| University Museum of Zoology | University of Cambridge | Accessed July 15, 2026
A project uncovering collectors, assistants, violence, and Indigenous knowledge associated with Australian mammals.
Whales in Wembley: The Colonial Origins of Blue Whale Bones
| Natural History Museum | Natural History Museum | Accessed July 15, 2026
A specimen biography connecting whale bones in London to colonial whaling, shipping, and exhibition culture.
Reconnecting Cetacean Specimens with Legacies of British Colonialism
| Natural History Museum | Natural History Museum | Accessed July 15, 2026
A project researching how whales and dolphins entered British collections through imperial maritime networks.
Decolonising the Natural History Collection at the Booth Museum
| Brighton & Hove Museums | Brighton & Hove Museums | Accessed July 15, 2026
A museum case study revising interpretation of hunting, taxidermy, empire, and the environmental costs of collecting.
Decolonising the D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum
| University of Dundee | University of Dundee Museums | Accessed July 15, 2026
A project examining colonial provenance and developing new labels for zoological specimens used in university teaching.
Colonialism in the Context of Natural History
| Natural History Museum Bern | Natural History Museum Bern | Accessed July 15, 2026
An institutional program researching colonial acquisitions and making collection histories visible specimen by specimen.
Colonial Contexts
| Landesmuseum Natur und Mensch Oldenburg | Landesmuseum Natur und Mensch | Accessed July 15, 2026
A thematic portal exploring how natural-history and cultural collections were formed through German colonial relationships.
Colonial Botany
| University of Potsdam Botanical Garden | University of Potsdam | Accessed July 15, 2026
An educational overview of plant collecting, economic botany, naming, and botanical gardens within colonial expansion.
Revealing the Silent Truth Behind Natural History Collections
| North Lanarkshire Museums | North Lanarkshire Museums | Accessed July 15, 2026
A museum-studies reflection on researching colonial histories attached to specimens in a local collection.
Critical Changes at the Pitt Rivers Museum
| Pitt Rivers Museum | University of Oxford | Accessed July 15, 2026
A resource documenting changes to displays, terminology, human-remains policies, and relationships with communities of origin.
Fault Lines: Imagining Indigenous Futures for Colonial Collections
| Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology | University of Cambridge | Accessed July 15, 2026
A collaborative exhibition using contemporary Indigenous perspectives to challenge the authority of colonial collections.
Natural History: A Reading List
| Whitney Barlow Robles | JSTOR Daily | March 13, 2025
A curated bibliography highlighting enslaved collectors, Indigenous experts, imperial expeditions, museums, and the material practices of natural history.
In London, Natural History Museums Confront Their Colonial Histories
| Jessica Leigh Hester | Atlas Obscura | October 14, 2019
A survey of London projects exposing the imperial violence and erased labor behind natural-history displays.
Tackling the Colonial Context of Natural History Collections
| Museums Association | Museums Journal | September 13, 2019
A report on exhibitions and community programs that confront colonial collecting and scientific racism.
