Sarah Longair - 'A spot in a world of waters': Island collecting in the western Indian Ocean in the age of empire

The Society for the History of Collecting 

are delighted to invite you on

Thursday, 23 May 2024, 6pm (BST); 7pm (CEST)

to a Zoom lecture delivered by 

Sarah Longair on the topic of

'A spot in a world of waters': Island collecting in the western Indian Ocean in the age of empire

Kew Economic Botany Collection: Basket lid made from coco-de-mer petioles (Cat No 35795), donated by Mrs Morris, 1873 © , copyright The Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

 ‘...a spot in a world of waters', was how a friend of Ada Edwards, wife of a planter bound for Seychelles, described this remote island colony on hearing of Edwards’s imminent departure. This paper aims to reorientate our perspective to these smaller places of empire and to explore collections and collecting practice on these island groups. I explore how material culture reflects ‘islandness’ or insularity, and how islands in turn shaped colonial collecting practice. The three case studies - the Maldives, Zanzibar and Seychelles - were all the subject of intense study in the nineteenth century as British imperial power expanded. They offer diverse examples of island groups in which collecting took place: Zanzibar includes two large islands close to the East African coast; the mountainous Seychelles archipelago located in the middle of the ocean, was uninhabited before European contact; and the Maldives are made up of over 1000 small islands over a vast oceanic space.  A running theme of the book is that islands are isolated geographically yet connected in numerous ways – part of the so-called ‘island paradox’.  Thinking about collecting practice also offers wider insights into the lived experience of empire and the exertion of and resistance to colonial power at the individual level.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY: Dr Sarah Longair is Associate Professor in the History of Empire at the University of Lincoln, UK. Her research examines the history of the British Empire in East Africa and the Indian Ocean world, in particular through material and visual culture. She has published on the history of museums in the empire, colonial collecting, and the history of Indian Ocean islands. Her first monograph, Cracks in the Dome: Fractured Histories of Empire in the Zanzibar Museum, 1897 – 1965, was published in 2015, and her forthcoming book project is entitled Island Collecting: Objects and Empire in the western Indian Ocean, 1860 – 1930. 

Chair to be announced