The editors of the forthcoming Natural Things will introduce and discuss the volume.
As early modern communities established newly global markets, trading spices and textiles, metals and materia medica, they codified a system of knowledge based on moving things which constantly remade their own meanings. Increasing globalisation thrived on the exchange of these things on the move and caused many substances to lose their links to nature. Simultaneously, alienation became more central as these things gradually became objects of European science.
This talk introduces the twelve essays and original visualisations collected in "Natural Things: Ecologies of Knowledge in the Early Modern World", to explore the relationships among natural philosophy, science, medicine, and European colonialism to highlight the dilemmas in natural science from 1500 to the early 1900s. Each essay focuses on a particular natural thing, which we define as an assemblage transcending the built environment. Episodes reveal connected—and disconnected—histories that link distinct regions across the globe, as natural things traveled from Borneo, China, Pacific islands, the Indian Ocean, the Ottoman Empire, and the Spanish Empire by way of naturalists, natural philosophers, collectors, merchants, apothecaries, physicians, agriculturalists, and professional scientists.
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