A heavy quiet hung over the herbarium when I first stepped inside. Rows of cabinets stretched toward the ceiling, each drawer holding dried plants pressed so flat they looked almost painted onto the paper. Every sheet carried a label—dates, locations, collectors’ names written in a script that felt like a whisper from another century. I expected to feel wonder, and I did. But as I read the places aloud in my head—Java, 1819; Sierra Leone, 1843; Bombay, 1857—the wonder soured a little. These weren’t just botanical souvenirs. They were pins on a map of imperial ambition.

We tend to imagine natural history collections as quiet, neutral spaces. Cabinets of curiosity, laboratories of pure science. But that framing falls apart the moment you trace how the specimens got there. From the 1600s forward, these collections were tangled up with colonial expansion. They helped European powers map unknown territories, locate valuable resources, and tighten their grip on distant places. To see them clearly, you have to look past the glass cases and into the networks of power that filled them.

The Collector’s Network

Europe’s great age of collecting didn’t happen by coincidence. It unfolded alongside the age of conquest. Every ship carrying soldiers, clerks, and merchants also carried naturalists—sometimes on official business, sometimes just obsessed amateurs who paid their own way. These collectors couldn’t operate alone. They leaned on the whole machinery of empire: naval routes, colonial outposts, and the labor of local guides and informants. The names of those local experts almost never made it onto the labels.

Sir Joseph Banks is a good starting point. He sailed with Captain Cook on the Endeavour in 1768 and came back with more than 30,000 plant specimens, many from Australia and the South Pacific. Later, he ran the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Banks’s work changed botany. But it was also deeply political. The plants he gathered were studied for their economic potential—breadfruit was shipped to the Caribbean to feed enslaved laborers cheaply. His collection wasn’t just a record of nature. It was a blueprint for exploitation.

Banks had plenty of company. Naturalists working for the Dutch East India Company, the French colonial administration, and the British Empire sent home crate after crate of specimens. These plants and animals were sorted, classified, and displayed in metropolitan museums, where they reinforced a story of European mastery. Even the act of assigning a Latin name erased older, local knowledge and announced ownership.

Mapping the Imperial Imagination

Collections functioned like intelligence reports. Empires need information: which rivers you can navigate, which forests hold timber, which soils might support plantations. A pressed plant carried clues about climate and soil. An animal skin hinted at local fauna you could hunt or domesticate. A rock sample suggested minerals worth extracting. Museums and botanical gardens became hubs in this information network.

Kew Gardens looked like a beautiful park, but it was a clearinghouse for botanical data that served British interests. The movement of plants—cinchona from South America to India for quinine, rubber from Brazil to Malaya—was coordinated through these collections. The goal was straightforward: break monopolies, secure resources, and make the empire self-sufficient. The specimens were the raw material of that strategy.

The whole enterprise was often packaged as benevolent exchange, knowledge shared for humanity’s benefit. But the benefits flowed almost entirely one way. Communities that had cultivated and used these plants for generations watched them get appropriated, commodified, and sometimes ripped out of their environments. The label that credits a European collector hides a messier story about who really found, identified, and handed over the specimen.

The Invisible Laborers

One of the most obvious gaps in these old collections is the absence of indigenous and local people. European naturalists didn’t wander alone through unfamiliar landscapes. They relied on guides who knew the terrain, hunters who tracked animals, and herbalists who understood plants. In many cases, the specimens that ended up in European museums were gathered by these unnamed experts. Their names were almost never written down. The credit went to the European who shipped the crate home.

Take William Roxburgh, the botanist and illustrator who worked for the East India Company. He’s celebrated for his studies of Indian flora, but he depended on local collectors and artists whose identities are mostly lost. That pattern repeats everywhere in the colonial world. The collections stand as monuments to a system that erased non-European knowledge even while relying on it completely.

Scholars have started recovering some of these hidden figures—Tupaia, the Polynesian navigator who guided Cook, or the African collectors who worked for the British Museum. But the labels themselves, with their terse data, push back against that recovery. They were designed to make the world legible to European science, and in doing so they flattened whole landscapes of human expertise into a few lines of ink.

The Museum as a Stage for Power

Once the specimens reached Europe, they took on new roles. Museums like the British Museum (Natural History) and the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris were public spectacles as much as research centers. The displays were arranged to impress visitors with the sheer reach of empire. A room of exotic birds. A towering giraffe skeleton. A case of iridescent beetles. These were trophies of conquest, not just objects of study.

The architecture drove the point home. Grand halls, classical columns, rigid classification schemes—all of it suggested that European civilization alone could order nature’s chaos. The collections told a story of progress, from the supposedly “primitive” tropics to the enlightened metropole. Indigenous peoples often appeared in dioramas and ethnographic exhibits alongside the flora and fauna, framed as part of the natural world rather than as fellow humans with their own complex societies.

That staging had a long tail. It shaped how generations of Europeans understood their place in the world. It normalized the idea that some parts of the globe existed to be studied, managed, and exploited by others. Museums are still wrestling with that legacy today, as calls for repatriation and honest reckonings with colonial history grow louder.

Reckoning with the Legacy

Now, those same collections are being reinterpreted. Researchers use them to track environmental change, identify extinct species, and understand biodiversity in ways the original collectors never imagined. That scientific payoff is real. But it doesn’t wipe away the troubling history. Many institutions are starting to ask hard questions: Who owns these specimens? How were they acquired? What do we owe the communities they came from?

Some museums have begun revising labels, adding context about colonial violence and indigenous contributions. Others are digitizing collections and giving source communities access for land claims, cultural revival, and ecological restoration. These are modest steps, but they signal a move away from the old imperial model—the museum as a vault of unchallengeable authority.

The deeper problem is structural. The categories, the nomenclature, the whole framework of what counts as knowledge was built on colonial foundations. Real reckoning takes more than updated labels. It means rethinking the relationship between science, power, and the natural world. It means listening to voices that were silenced in the rush to collect.

Why Does This History Matter Now?

It’s fair to wonder why we should dig into the colonial roots of something as seemingly harmless as a dried plant. The answer is that these collections aren’t frozen in the past. They still shape scientific research, conservation policy, and cultural identity. When a researcher uses a 19th-century specimen to study climate change, they’re building on a foundation laid by empire. When a conservation group prioritizes certain landscapes, the data they rely on may have been gathered originally to serve colonial resource extraction.

Understanding this history doesn’t mean we toss the collections out. It means using them with a clearer sense of what they carry. Every time I look at a specimen now, I find myself asking: Who collected this? Under what conditions? Whose knowledge made it possible? And who benefits from keeping it preserved today?

FAQ

Were all natural history collections tied to empire?

Not every single one, but the overwhelming majority of major European collections between the 1600s and early 1900s were shaped by colonial networks. Even private collections often depended on colonial trade routes and local intermediaries.

How did indigenous people contribute to these collections?

Indigenous guides, hunters, and herbalists provided knowledge and labor that were absolutely essential. They identified species, located rare specimens, and shared ecological insights. Official records rarely acknowledged them, but the enterprise would have collapsed without them.

What is being done about repatriation of specimens?

Repatriation is a growing movement, though it’s complicated and varies from one institution to another. Some human remains and sacred objects have been returned. The debate over plant and animal specimens is less developed. Digitization and collaborative research projects are more common first steps.

Can these collections still be valuable for science today?

Yes, without question. They offer irreplaceable data for studying biodiversity loss, evolution, and climate change. The challenge is to use them ethically—acknowledging their origins and working in partnership with source communities wherever possible.

Walking back through that herbarium, I felt the weight of all those unspoken stories pressing in. The specimens are beautiful, meticulously preserved, scientifically priceless. But they’re also monuments to a particular way of seeing the world—one that measured, claimed, and commodified. To honor the full truth of these collections, we have to hold both realities at once: the wonder of nature and the scars of empire.