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

普通观众摘要奴隶制和奴隶贸易的遗产是理解现代文化的一个重要话题。关于他们遗产的文献通常只关注社会和经济影响，而不考虑智力和科学后果。这项拟议的研究将通过关注18世纪英国主导的跨大西洋奴隶贸易来检验这些后果。在此期间，英国博物学家招募了奴隶船外科医生和船长，在西非和美国奴隶转运点的港口收集昆虫、植物、贝壳和其他标本，以便从通常禁止他们进入的地区收集标本。这个项目将探索通过奴隶贸易网络的对象、思想和个人的流通如何产生新的科学知识。为了做到这一点，它将审查科学论文和信件、奴隶制公司的机构记录、个人信件和皇家学会的记录，以讲述英国奴隶制的故事和现有学术中基本上缺失的科学。通过考察科学和奴隶贸易错综复杂的历史，这个项目鼓励对种族、殖民主义、科学和科学实践的伦理影响等问题进行更广泛的讨论。这项研究的最终结果将是一本面向广大读者的书，包括普通公众和历史学家以及科学和文化研究学者。技术总结学者经常忽视科学和奴隶制之间的相互依存关系。而且，最重要的是，关于科学家如何利用奴隶贸易创造新的自然知识的研究很少。该项目认为，跨大西洋贩卖奴隶的网络应该被理解为一个自然历史空间，与科学的所有地方一样，这个空间的社会和物质环境塑造了它所产生的自然知识，也被它塑造了。该项目还提供了一种新的方式来理解奴隶贸易文献中的一个经典问题。70年来，奴隶贸易学者一直在争论奴隶贸易的盈利能力及其在英国经济发展和工业化中的作用。这一项目表明，这场辩论的框架过于狭隘。为了充分了解欧洲人是如何从奴隶贸易中获利的，我们必须将稀有标本的收藏和他们研究产生的科学知识包括在奴隶贸易的利润中。

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