Decolonising the Natural History Collections of Empire

This lecture, with a focus on India, aims to understand this important archive of knowledge of the natural world collected and organised in the context of the empire in the light of recent historiography on botany and empire. It highlights the importance of creating an inventory and digitally repatriating botanical specimens held primarily in British institutions, and highlights efforts for cultural remediation. The lecture examines neglected literature and networks in the imperial scientific network, which were crucial to what was a prodigious scientific renaissance in natural history and environmental understanding in the imperial context from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Vinita Damodaran is Professor of South Asian History at the University of Sussex and a specialist in the history of modern India with particular interests in environmental change, identity and resistance in Eastern India. Her research ranges from the social and political history of Bihar to the environmental history of South Asia, including using historical records to understand climate change in the Indian Ocean World. Her many publications include the books Nature and the Orient, Essays on the Environmental History of South and South-East Asia (1998), British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia(2010), Climate Change and the Humanities (2017), Geography in Britain after the Second World War (2019), and Commonwealth Forestry and Environmental History: Empire, Forests and Colonial Environments in Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and New Zealand (2020). At Sussex, Professor Damodaran is also director of the Centre for World Environmental History.