‘Work Done by John Edmondston’: Labour, Slavery, and the Making of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh Museum, 1804–1824

This paper demonstrates how a decolonial labour history can illuminate the systemic entanglements of science, slavery, and empire. To do so, it reinterprets the Natural History Museum of the University of Edinburgh (1804-1824) as a site where scientific authority was produced through racialised, gendered, and classed labour relations. Combining microhistorical method with decolonial critique, the article reconstructs the choreography of everyday labour – the cleaning, heating, guarding, labelling and preserving of collections – that underwrote the museum’s credibility. It shows, first, that the museum’s intellectual order depended on precarious labour and material care; second, that this labour was unevenly valued, rendering women’s work largely nameless in the record and Black and colonised labour disposable; and third, that the museum’s growth was inseparable from imperial circuits of extraction that moved specimens, techniques and people across the British empire. A case study of the formerly enslaved taxidermist John Edmondston (aka John Edmonstone) reveals how artisanal skill, racialised evaluation and institutional discipline converged in the processing of major accessions, illuminating natural history’s entanglement with plantation labour regimes. The paper concludes by proposing a new way of writing institutional histories, one that treats material maintenance and racial capitalism as constitutive of scientific modernity.