Dr Katherine Arnold PhD

Research Overview

My research sits at the interstices of the British Empire, German history, African history, global/transnational history, and the history of science and the environment, developing from my training in history, anthropology, and museum studies. As such, it embraces a range of approaches, methodologies, and source material across the early modern and modern periods. My PhD examined the influence of ‘entrepreneurial’ collecting on European natural history, drawing several significant conclusions. It demonstrates how a small, but exceptionally mobile group of Europeans became enmeshed in the overlapping human, material, and intellectual networks of the British Empire and reveals the extent to which the scientific knowledge generated by their work was fashioned outside of the Empire’s traditional spatial and conceptual boundaries. Equally, it overthrows the historiographical consensus on colonialism as merely a ‘fantasy’ for many ‘Germans’ and German institutions prior to the formation of the German nation-state and colonial empire. Moreover, the material and intellectual chaos that ensued from the use of these actors’ collections (due to their commercial and competitive logic) offers a challenge to any preconception that processes of Western knowledge production were simple, straightforward, or friendly, offering an alternative to the sometimes-unconscious acceptance of certain narratives about the ‘advance’ of Western science. Finally, it provided a unique opportunity to unite two historiographies often written in isolation from one another – those of central Europe and the British Empire.

These historical actors sit at the interstices of different conceptual approaches, emergent methods, and historiographies which otherwise might not have been brought into the same frame. This is because the established vocabulary – gentlemanly, amateur, non-state, Zantop’s ‘fantasies’, and even the much-loved ‘network’ of Lester – has proven insufficient. This research puts collectors at centre stage, investigating how they envisioned, and constructed, the world around them: one where the natural world was part of a capitalist cost-benefit analysis and commercially-motivated competition became a destructive force in European scientific attempts at understanding and categorizing that world.

I am in the process of transforming my PhD into a monograph focusing on the devastating 'entrepreneurial' nature of these actors' collecting practices on the environment, the peoples of southern Africa, and the production of knowledge on South African flora. I intend to explore in more depth how the process of collecting and the physical collections of these actors posed qualitative and quantitative challenges to the established Western taxonomic order. The chaos that ensued from the use of their collections helps us to better understand the disjuncture between collecting and processing physical and intellectual data, while urging us to reflect on how material facilitated, or more curiously resisted, easy transfer into ‘universal’ and ‘Western’ frameworks of knowledge.