Kathleen Murphy (California Polytechnic State University), “Searching for Goliath: Insect Collecting Through the Eighteenth-Century British Slave Trade” (HSHM Colloquia)

Professor Murphy’s book project, Collecting Slave Traders: Natural History and the Eighteenth-Century British Slave Trade, examines the intersection of the history of science and the history of the British slave trade. It explores how the circulation of objects, ideas, and individuals through the networks of the slave trade engendered new scientific knowledge between 1660 and 1807. She argues that the particularities of the British slave trade shaped the knowledge produced through its networks and that scientific knowledge, in turn, influenced the development of the slave trade.