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Article ID: CBB001320636

Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History, and the British Slave Trade (2013)

Murphy, Kathleen S. (Author)

William and Mary Quarterly
Volume: 70
Pages: 637--670

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Slavery Trade routes Collections Museums Apothecaries Natural history Naturalists Spain, colonies Great Britain, colonies Specimen exchange Travel; exploration 18th century 17th century London (England) West Africa Great Britain Petiver, James

The natural history collections belonging to London apothecary James Petiver reveal the entangled histories of science and the slave trade in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British Atlantic. Naturalists such as Petiver exploited the routes of the slave trade to acquire natural curiosities and natural knowledge from West Africa, Spanish America, and British America. Petiver recruited British ship surgeons and captains employed on slaving vessels and at British factories to gather insects, plants, shells, and other specimens in West Africa and in American ports of disembarkation. The asiento agreement, with its extension of British slaving into Spanish America, allowed others to collect specimens from a region typically off-limits to British naturalists. Distinctive aspects of the British slave trade, including its geographies, its personnel, and its extension into Spanish America after the assumption of the asiento, shaped both Petiver's collection of naturalia and the natural knowledge that resulted from it. Petiver's museum suggests that we must look to the slave trade not only to understand the Atlantic world but also to understand early modern science. By so doing, we may discover that Europe's profits from the slave trade include gains not easily quantified.

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