Understanding ‘Place’ in Historical Botanical Collections: science, commerce, empire, and the early-modern herbarium

Project overview

This CDA project brings together two concepts of botanical ‘place’ to enhance our understanding of early-modern herbarium collections.

On the one hand, geolocating the incidence of biological species is a crucial component in the ongoing efforts of life scientists to understand global biodiversity and ecological change in the era of climate crisis.

For contemporary botanists, ‘place’ data is a fundamental component of how scientists assess species diversity and distributions, plant persistence and migration, and the risk of local and global extinction events.

In the humanities, ‘place’ has also been important for historians of science seeking to understand how early-modern Europeans acquired natural specimens and knowledge from across the known world. Indeed, the processes of globalisation via which early-modern merchants shipped people, wealth, commodities, and objects of nature around the planet are increasingly recognised as intrinsically connected with both the formation of European empires and the rise of industrial capitalism, two key precipitants of our contemporary climate crisis. 

This project will specifically examine the spatial provenance of an extraordinary global plant collection, the ‘Sloane Herbarium’ at the Natural History Museum (NHM), to ask:  

• What ‘place’ data is recorded for botanical specimens in the Sloane Herbarium (compiled between 1680–1753)? How and where is it recorded? What archival and methodological challenges does it present for twenty-first century researchers?  

• How did early-modern botanists understand the significance of ‘place’ for organising collections of plant specimens? Do such place-concepts relate to modern understandings of phytogeography and biodiversity?  

• How tractable is early-modern botanical place information as the source of georeferencing data? What advantages and risks are inherent in leveraging such data?  

• What more can a study of how place functions in the collection teach us about the global dimensions of the Sloane Herbarium, not least in connection to economies of commerce, enslavement, and empire?  

Our project will find focus through the herbarium of James Petiver (c.1663–1718), an apothecary of the middling sort and Fellow of the Royal Society in early-modern London.

Petiver’s is at once the most sizeable individual component of the Sloane Herbarium and globally the most diverse, his specimens stretching from the Philippines to Newfoundland. What sets Petiver apart is that his plants are also the best documented in terms of provenance.

Capturing, decoding, and contextualising the detail of this provenance information – as a record both of early-modern species distribution and of historical accumulation – will be central to the project’s interrogation of the place of ‘place’ in the disciplinary formation of botany as commercial, scientific, and imperial technology. A core research task will be to structure and populate an historical collections dataset that catalogues Petiver’s plants and their provenance, and is integrated with existing information management frameworks at NHM. 

The studentship incorporates a range of disciplinary perspectives including the history of natural history; history of collections; archival research; environmental / plant humanities; digital humanities; global history. The successful candidate will join the PhD cohorts at both NHM and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at QMUL. 

For further information about the Sloane Herbarium, begin with: https://data.nhm.ac.uk/dataset/sloane-herbarium-inventory

Eligibility and requirements

Student Eligibility

• LAHP welcomes applications from ‘home’ and ‘international’ (including EU) applicants (Please refer to ‘International Students‘ section below);
• Applicants should have a good undergraduate degree in a relevant discipline, and a Masters-level qualification or equivalent which meets AHRC requirements for research training. Applicants with relevant work/professional experience who are considering doing a PhD are also encouraged to apply.
• Applicants are subject to meeting the host university’s (i.e. the institution where the lead supervisor of the CDA is based) admissions criteria, and any LAHP award is conditional on the candidate being offered a place to study at the host university.
• Students who are currently undertaking a PhD are not eligible to apply for these CDA projects. However they can consider applying to the LAHP open studentship competition, provided that they have at least 50% left of the PhD studies from the start of the award (i.e. October 2025) to the start of their writing up period.
• Please contact the Admissions Office of the CDA project’s lead institution where you are applying for a PhD place to determine your fee status. LAHP is not able to advise on fee status.
• Funding is available for both full-time and part-time students. Awards cannot be deferred. Successful candidates will be assumed to be starting their studies in October 2025.

International students

LAHP may award up to 30% of its studentships (including stipend) to international students. The AHRC will only fund the Home fee rate. The difference between the Home and International fee is either covered or waived by most of our partner institutions.

Please refer to the UKRI eligibility criteria (TGC 5.2) for further information about ‘Home’ and ‘International’ fee status.

Specific requirements

• Applicants must evidence demonstrable interest in the history of collections, history of science, historical geography, and/or working with historical natural history collections. With this in mind, applicants may be drawn from a range of formal disciplinary backgrounds across the humanities and life sciences. 

• The successful applicant will clearly explain the relationship between their education / experience and the topic of the award, and indicate how their present research interests relate to the proposed project. 

• Some experience of handling natural history collections, conducting archival research, and/or conducting botanical research will be of benefit to applicants. 

• Candidates will normally hold (or expect to receive before October 2025) a Masters degree. Equally, we recognise that research students can approach a doctorate via various routes. Doctoral applicants who have not completed a Masters degree are eligible to apply providing they can demonstrate equivalent experience that has prepared them for doctoral research. For this studentship, equivalent experience might include, but is not restricted to, a strong track-record of employment in a museum, botanic garden, or heritage institution, that includes responsibility for relevant archival research, collections curation, and/or public engagement activity. 

• For further information about the project or to request an informal conversation about the application process, please contact Richard Coulton (r.x.coulton@qmul.ac.uk) and Mark Carine (m.carine@nhm.ac.uk).