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Re-examining Sir Hans Sloane’s collections
The private collections of Sir Hans Sloane formed the basis of the British Museum, the Natural History Museum and the British Library.
A new touring exhibition, For the Curious and Interested, will bring together many of these specimens to explore how and why Sloane collected these items. New research on these objects is now giving an insight into a range of topics from the climate crisis to Black resistance during the slave trade.
In 1753, Hans Sloane sold his vast collection of books, prints, cultural objects, and natural history rarities to the nation. This became the founding collection for the British Museum and later the Natural History Museum and British Library, with Sloane’s collections now split between these three institutions.
From January to October 2024, a new British Museum Touring Exhibition, For the Curious and Interested, will travel the UK showcasing a small selection of objects from the physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane’s collection.
The Natural History Museum will be providing Sloane’s personal, annotated copy of A Voyage to Jamaica and nine boxes from Sloane’s Vegetable Substances collection.
The Vegetable Substances collection comprises more than 8000 plant specimens and an original three-volume manuscript, which has been made available online. The nine boxes chosen for the exhibition highlight the commercial exploitation, circulation, and transplantation of plants across the globe and gives an insight into who helped Sloane collect specimens and name them and their uses.
They also provide information on those who are missing from the history books, largely the enslaved men and women who collected many of the specimens when Sloane lived on slave plantations in Jamaica.
The Vegetable Substances collection at the Museum contains thousands of specimens in little boxes ©The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
Sloane’s collection in contemporary research
The exhibition is supported by the Sloane Lab, which includes researchers here at the Natural History Museum who are using Sloane’s collection to re-examine past histories and apply new scientific techniques to specimens collected over 300 years ago.
Sloane’s collections pre-date the Linnaean system of naming plants, still used to this day, as they were collected and classified before that became the standard system of naming.
There are precious few herbaria that span this period of time, meaning that Sloane’s collection provides a unique source of data to inform our understanding of environmental change by comparing the distribution of plants between then and now.
The Sloane Herbarium provides insights into how plants were being moved around the world and cultivated in places far removed from their native range and how European knowledge of plant diversity was developing during a period of major expansion in global networks of trade and empire.
New techniques are giving us new ways to understand these questions. For example, DNA analysis of specimens of potato collected in 1660, have helped researchers to understand how potatoes that originated in the Andes adapted to the climate in Europe.
Many of the plant specimens from Jamaica in Sloane's collections were likely gathered by enslaved men and women ©The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
Enslaved workers controlling their own bodies
The collections are also allowing researchers to examine the links between plants and the slave trade. Akosua Paries-Osei is a researcher at Royal Holloway working on specimens in the Sloane Herbarium, particularly those relating to enslaved women’s botanical knowledge.
‘My research reimagines the transatlantic slave trade, centring the relationship between people, place and plants,’ Akosua explains. ‘I use botanicals to bring to life the hidden world of enslaved women’s botanical knowledge.’
‘Women brought this knowledge with them from Africa, refined and reinvented it in the Americas and the Caribbean. From here what was useful to Western doctors was incorporated into modern medical narratives. Their story is integral to the botanical knowledge of many plants and modern medicines.’
For example, gossypol is a compound found in cotton that acts as a contraceptive and in high enough doses an abortive agent. With cotton a staple of the slave trade, planted across the Americas and the Caribbean, the mainly women slaves who tended these plants used their indigenous knowledge of cotton to manage and control their fertility.
‘Enslaved women were valued for their ability to produce and reproduce,’ says Akosua. ‘By restricting their reproductive capacities, enslaved women directly resisted slavery as they impeded the ability of slave owners to profit from their reproductive capacities and increase their human stock.’
A panel depicting cotton in the Natural History Museum’s Hintze Hall ©The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
By 1791, an enquiry investigating the slave trade reported on the lack of slave offspring in what was then British Jamacia. The plantation owners were in favour of maintaining the slave trade but stated that they were ‘much under-handed’ referring to the decrease of or lack of slaves on many plantations.
As slave owners began to understand the anti-fertility properties of cotton the act of reproductive resistance risked severe violence, with the plant black haw, Viburnum prunifolium, utilised to counter the abortive effects of cotton.
However, this did not stop the enslaved women. While slavers came to know about the properties of cotton, other plants such as indigo and okra which also contained gossypol remained unknown to slave owners and continued to be used as a contraceptive.
Histories of science and natural history are intimately entwined within histories of enslavement and resistance. But enslaved African and Caribbean women were not passive recipients of enslavement. They were active agents who used their skills and knowledge not only for subsistence but also to disrupt, resist and dismantle slavery.
Today, the Sloane Herbarium is a collection valued and studied by both biologists and historians alike and as part of the Sloane Lab project, the Natural History Museum is working to make Sloane’s vast botanical collection digitally accessible to all.
An okra specimen from Sloane’s Vegetable Substances Collection. Image courtesy of Akosua Paries-Osei.
For the curious
The touring exhibition will examine how and why these objects from across the world were brought together, confronting the complex history behind Sloane’s vast collection, which was financed in part by profits from transatlantic slavery.
It will also explore some of the stories of those Sloane worked with and relied upon for their knowledge and skills, many of whom were unacknowledged.
While Sloane was the central figure in the assembly of his remarkable collection, he was not working in isolation. There were more than 300 named contributors recorded in the herbarium, and many more that were not named. Enslaved and indigenous people in Jamaica contributed their valuable knowledge and labour to Sloane’s collecting, but Sloane rarely recorded or acknowledged their contributions.
The exhibition will explore these narratives with partner museums across the UK, including the devolved nations of Northern Ireland and Wales.
