Scott, Brad;
Pickering, Victoria;
Coulton, Richard;
Nyhan, Julianne;
Carine, Mark;
(2025)
Collecting and cataloguing the world: the botanical collections of Hans Sloane (1660-1753).
Systematics and Biodiversity
, 23
(1)
, Article 2455440. 10.1080/14772000.2025.2455440.
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Abstract
Botanical collections assembled before the widespread adoption of the ‘Linnaean’ system of binomial naming often have nomenclatural significance, are increasingly utilized to investigate genetic and environmental change, and are important sources for the history of science and medicine. However, such early collections may be difficult to access and interpret, and few have machine-readable metadata or images. The natural history collections of Hans Sloane (1660–1753), assembled between the 1680s and his death in 1753, constitute the de facto foundation collections of the Natural History Museum, London. This study analyses Sloane’s Herbarium and ‘Vegetable Substances’ which make up the largest surviving components of Sloane’s natural history materials and the largest pre-Linnaean botanical collection in existence. The collections contain specimens contributed by hundreds of people from over 70 countries and territories worldwide. New data sets are presented that enable novel research and a comparison of their parts. The data provide details of the people and places mentioned in these sources, along with a complete transcription of the Vegetable Substances catalogue, and new folio-level metadata for the entire Herbarium. The results provide precise estimates of the scale of the collections (8812 surviving specimens of the Vegetable Substances, and 121 506 specimens in the herbarium) and demonstrate their heterogeneity, reflecting their complex histories. Aspects of the collections’ histories can be read from the data and reveal some of the organization and management practices that shaped the collections as we have them today. However, we show that there is frequent ambiguity and uncertainty in the provenance of specimens, while the human histories connected with their assembly are often opaque, embedded in the trading networks of colonialism and enslavement. These data permit analyses of the collections at scale for the first time, yet also suggest that multi-disciplinary approaches are required to fully unlock such historical collections.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Collecting and cataloguing the world: the botanical collections of Hans Sloane (1660-1753) |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/14772000.2025.2455440 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/14772000.2025.2455440 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2025 The Trustees of the Natural History Museum. Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
| Keywords: | historical collections, limits of data, manuscript catalogues, provenance, Sloane |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Information Studies |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10206393 |
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