A World of Natural Specimens

Guest Lecture

A World of Natural Specimens
The rise of the Globalized Market of Natural History
in the Eighteenth-Century Europe 

par

Dorothée Rusque

Historienne, MSCA EUTOPIA-SIF postdoctoral fellow, Héritages et CYAS

Le mardi 6 juin 2023
de 12h30 à 14h00 (Paris time)

               Auditorium de la Maison Internationale de la Recherche (CY Cergy Paris Université, Neuville-sur-Oise)
et sur Zoom

At the crossroads of global history, economic history, history of knowledge and material history, this presentation explores the modalities of the naturalist market’s globalization in the 18th and 19th Europe. The study of natural history developed considerably in the 18th century, to the point of becoming a dominant field of knowledge. While the colonial and scientific expeditions contributed to the inventory of the natural world, the scholars tried to classify it by various systems and methods. The multiplication of collections gathered by naturalists, amateurs and curious also gave a new dimension to the quest for natural specimens. This quest contributed to the emergence of a naturalist market in the main European metropoles, where shops and collections’ auctions were concentrated.

This presentation attempts to capture the naturalist trade by examining the role of merchants - especially the case of the Forsters family business - and the process of commoditization of nature. The analysis combines different scales of observation, by paying attention to the place of the shops within the urban space, the main sites of the European naturalist market and its global expansion through the exchange networks and circulation of natural specimens within the British Empire. Dorothée Rusque will thus question the construction of the economic value of objects which is ensured by tools such as auction catalogues, the merchants as intermediaries between producers and consumers of natural specimens, as well as the interconnexions between scientific knowledge and commercial knowledge.

Lien zoom : https://cyu-fr.zoom.us/j/94697276348
Meeting ID: 946 9727 6348

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