This paper demonstrates how a decolonial labour history can illuminate the systemic entanglements of science with slavery and empire. To do so, it reinterprets the Natural History Museum of the University of Edinburgh (1804-24) as a site where scientific authority was produced through racialized, gendered and classed labour relations. Combining microhistorical method with decolonial critique, the article reconstructs the choreography of everyday labour - the cleaning, heating, guarding, labelling and preserving of collections - that underwrote the museum's credibility. It shows, first, that the museum's intellectual order depended on precarious labour and material care; second, that this labour was unevenly valued, rendering women's work largely nameless in the record and Black and colonized labour disposable; and third, that the museum's growth was inseparable from imperial circuits of extraction that moved specimens, techniques and people across the British Empire. A case study of the formerly enslaved taxidermist John Edmondston (aka John Edmonstone) reveals how artisanal skill, racialized evaluation and institutional discipline converged in the processing of major accessions, illuminating natural history's entanglement with plantation labour regimes. The paper concludes by proposing a new way of writing institutional histories, one that treats material maintenance and racial capitalism as constitutive of scientific modernity.
Historians of science have demonstrated the many ways in which science and politics are interrelated. The production of scientific knowledge, the organization of research and the application of science and technology are deeply intertwined with structures of power and governance. Climate science is a prime example to demonstrate the political qualities of science and the diversity of entanglements of science and politics. We argue that these entanglements have a wide range of meanings, such as scientists' political agendas and manoeuvres, the policies of scientific and funding institutions, the uses of science by corporate or state actors, and the political agency of science and technology, as well as public debates about them. To better capture the diversity of these entanglements, we suggest developing more fine-grained conceptual taxonomies or categories. As a possible starting point for further differentiation, we introduce the concepts politics of science, science for policy and politics in science. Next, we illustrate this conceptual differentiation using the history of weather and climate science as an example. Finally, we provide a short summary of the contributions to this special issue and their addition to the state of knowledge regarding the epistemology and politics of climate science.
