As the consequences of the Anthropocene become one of the most pressing political issues of our time, humans are beginning to grapple with their destructive relationship to nonhuman life. What does it mean, for example, to kill animals in order to study them? A historical exploration of violent humanistic knowledge practices in the age of Empire.

In the nineteenth century, conquering the world also meant exploring and mastering it scientifically. This project follows those men and women who travelled around the globe to collect animals in order to study them. The fact that “collecting” actually meant to capture and kill specimens by the hundreds and thousands, and that this violent work had to be organized and performed by somebody, is a part of modern scientific practice that has yet to be carefully scrutinized and historicized.

The project looks at three different collecting grounds:

• Birds in the tropical dry and moist forests of Northern South America
• Fish and mollusks in the shallow and deep waters of the Southwestern Pacific
• Large mammals in the mixed wood and grasslands of Southern Africa

The project's main attention is directed at everyday practices, at the manual skills and techniques of killing, eviscerating, and skinning animals-turned-specimen. But it also seeks to uncover the many different people, indigenous and intruders alike, involved in this practice, as well as to read carefully the traces of violence left on or in the objects themselves, i.e the animal specimens.

Our goal is to account for the complexities of human curiosity and the many different and culturally specific histories of violence against nonhuman and human life within the broader framework of colonial subjugation and its politics of difference - in order to write the history of Humanism as a posthumanist history of imperialism.

This subproject takes us into early to mid-nineteenth-century Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Botswana) and the burgeoning trade of specimens – the focus will be on mammals – for an ever more expanding market supplying private commerce as well as the numerous, rapidly growing natural history museums in Europe and North America. Transnationally operating entrepreneurial explorers, naturalist adventurers, colonial officials, as well as white settlers animated the hunt for the much-coveted larger fauna. These men (and some women) relied heavily on Southern African vernacular knowledge, and on the guidance of countless unnamed local experts and their knowhow in bushmeat hunting. Casting Africans, however, as cruel and inapt towards animals and nature, white naturalists were key players in creating early game reserves for their gentlemanly pleasure of safari hunting in the name of animal preservation. The context of collecting in this case study is thus that of settler colonialism, recurrent frontier conflicts over access to land and wildlife, and the beginnings of imperialist conservationism.

The approach of the subproject is microhistorical: it proposes to pay close attention to the daily deeds and experiences of all historical actors – local and intruder, human and nonhuman alike – involved in the enterprise of collecting mammal specimens. The goal is to understand how the practice of killing animals to keep and study them evolved in the terrain as an interspecies affair, and how it was interwoven with violence committed against human life, that is, within the broader historical context of colonial violence and its politics of difference (often casting black and indigenous populations as less-than or subhuman). The study scrutinizes different material technologies and bodily techniques, rooted in Southern African and European traditions of hunting that informed practices of knowing and appropriating the natural world. It seeks to sketch out quotidian life experiences of hunting parties that were often all-male groups, in which transimperial, interracial, interspecies working relationships, at times companionships, but also antagonisms evolved. And it pays particular attention to daily routines, manual skills, and savoir-faire in the predatory interaction with other living creatures.

This sub-project investigates extinct species, related to the geographical frameworks of the overall SNF project, as a way to explore historical and contemporary attitudes toward animal preservation. The focus will be on emblematic species such as the quagga, the thylacine, and various birds and reptiles from the Pacific and South America. The study analyses both the historical causes of their extinction - primarily linked to colonial violence, native ecosystem disruption, scientific practices during the 19th century - and their contemporary symbolic and educational value - how these animals are testimonies to interspecies history and have become emblems of ecological awareness today.

Methodologically, the project integrates material culture studies with human-animal studies. It adopts a transregional approach to compare the preparation and preservation techniques of specimens held in different major natural history museums. In parallel, it engages with archival sources to highlight the motivations and mechanisms behind the large-scale killing. In doing so, the sub-project examines extinction as both a material and conceptual legacy of violence.

This dissertation project focusses on fish and mollusks from the Southwest Pacific that were located, captured and killed in the 19th century to be sent to museums in Europe during a time of intensive colonial extraction and accumulation. The endeavor of Western science was thus not detached from the economy of colonialism and violence. This project considers the maritime animals that can be found in European collections today not only as natural history objects, but also as actors within colonial trade and scientific networks.

The region known as the Pacific and Oceania was the stage of sustained and intense seafaring exploration and colonization by different imperial powers in Europe, as well as Japan and the United States, throughout the nineteenth century. The study follows naturalists and traders that crossed the vast geographical area of the South Pacific, exploring and capturing marine life off the coasts and following the far-reaching movements of fish and whales. Ship crews were constituted of a diverse group of actors, both colonizing and colonial subjects, who, among others, brought critical navigation and fishing skills with them.

Everyday practices of collecting and preserving maritime fauna involved multiple perspectives and knowledges. European trading firms, that specialized in natural history collecting usually combined with the hunt for ethnographica, were motivated by economic and scientific interest to accumulate specimens of species that were yet to be described by Western science. The boundaries between their different trading goods that ranged from consumer goods and ethnographic objects to dead animals and human remains cannot be clearly drawn. This insight poses a challenge and an even greater opportunity for an interdisciplinary approach to writing a history of colonial science and violence.

For indigenous island populations, knowledge of nature was taught by and through animals, both practically and figuratively. Thus, marine animals play a central cultural, spiritual and also economic role in the South Pacific region. Their particularly mobile behavior, their impermanence once they deceased and the threat of the Climate Crisis today make these animals elusive actors. Even the greatest effort of today’s collection managers cannot prevent specimens in collections from decaying, which reinforces the notion of evasion, and a sense of inevitable loss. How did decay influence the practices of killing and preserving maritime animals and how does it affect practices today?

Letting specimens tell their story through an object history will show entanglements between various actors, disciplines and institutions. To enable the accumulation of biodiversity, an infrastructure was created by European museums and traders to send equipment to collectors and the collected specimens to Europe, spanning across the globe and involving multiple imperial powers. Moreover, collecting wet specimens took place in the geographically wide historical context that included indigenous strategic use of wayfinding competences and other nature knowledges in their encounter with imperial intruders.

The historical and contemporary practices surrounding the contact between humans and marine animals can reveal overlooked connections and entanglements between scientific disciplines, natural history collections, and contemporary environmental challenges. Overall, this project will highlight the obligations that arise from being part of a world interconnected in the past and the present, creating a dialogue between collections, practices, archival sources and contemporary perspectives.

This subproject is situated within the research field that explores the global dimensions of scientific knowledge production. Specifically, it focuses on how nineteenth-century ornithological practices in South America reflected and reproduced asymmetrical power relations, particularly those embedded in imperial dynamics. These practices involved the collection, preservation, and circulation of bird specimens to European institutions. Furthermore, it examines the role of these practices in shaping the epistemological frameworks of nineteenth-century natural history, including the standardization of taxonomies and the circulation of representations of biodiversity. The subproject will address this primary research question through an analysis of the understudied case of Colombia. Despite its pivotal position within the global scientific networks of the period, Colombia has frequently been overlooked. This subproject will specifically examine the scientific and environmental relationships between Colombia and Europe using as case studies the so-called bird collection “Bogota skins” and what I term the “Bucaramanga skins”.

The hypothesis of the subproject posits that post-independence ornithology in Colombia operated within transnational polycentric networks that integrated local knowledge and practices with European scientific traditions. These networks not only reinforced imperial hierarchies but also critically depended on local skills, knowledge, and resources—elements often marginalized in traditional historiographical accounts. These intricate dynamics constituted a sophisticated system of knowledge production characterized by power asymmetries and mutual dependencies. Actors including institutions, traders, politicians, and scientists were interconnected through practices that transcended simple colonial hierarchies, revealing a more nuanced understanding of production, circulation, and validation of natural history knowledge. This subproject investigates how scientific knowledge production in post-independence Colombia intertwined with commercial networks and imperial power, exposing the often-overlooked contributions of local actors and the hidden costs of specimen collection.

To deepen the understanding of these practices, this subproject addresses three key research lines. First, it examines the roles of local actors—e.g. indigenous hunters, traders, and intermediaries—in transforming Colombian avifauna into global commodities and shaping European taxonomic frameworks. Second, it analyzes the material practices of preservation and transportation, emphasizing their adaptation to local environmental conditions and contributions to shaping European scientific representations. Third, it explores the dual commodification of Colombian avifauna as both scientific artifacts and luxury commodities. In doing so, it highlights the ecological, social, and intertwined human and non-human violence inherent in these processes, which are often obscured in contemporary narratives.

Methodologically, the subproject will employ a three-layered qualitative approach. First, archival research in Colombian and European archives to reconstruct the networks that facilitated the circulation of ornithological specimens. Second, a visual and material culture layer to examine how specimens were preserved, transported, and visually represented, emphasizing their transformation into epistemic artefacts and commodities. This layer will analyze preserved specimens, their visual documentation, and their movement across imperial contexts to reveal the intersections of materiality, knowledge, and power. Third, a historiographical and epistemological layer to explore how specimen collection practices influenced nineteenth-century European epistemologies of nature.

This subproject onceptualizes bird specimens through a dual analytical lens: as epistemic artifacts and as imperial commodities. This approach offers novel insights into how scientific specimens functioned as both scientific tools that shaped European taxonomies and as commercial objects that circulated within global and imperial networks. The subproject will show that nineteenth-century Colombian ornithological practices, while presented as neutral scientific endeavors, were deeply embedded in imperial power structures yet crucially dependent on local knowledge systems and expertise. This theoretical framework thus seeks to illuminate the complex interplay between ornithological knowledge production, imperial power, and local agency in nineteenth-century ornithology.