The mobile museum: economic botany in circulation

The Museum of Economic Botany at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, was originally established in 1847 as a public repository for 'all kinds of useful and curious Vegetable Products, which neither the living plants of the Garden nor the specimens in the Herbarium could exhibit'. Reflecting Kew's global networks of science, empire and commerce, the collection grew at such a rate that additional museum buildings were added in 1857, 1863, and 1910, the whole complex playing an important role in the production and dissemination of botanical knowledge during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Today Kew's Economic Botany Collection consists of over 90,000 objects, housed not in a museum but in a purpose-built research store. It is the diversity of this collection, especially its juxtaposition of botanical specimens, plant derivatives, indigenous artefacts and industrially-produced objects, which makes it truly unique: for example, seeds of the Brassica nigra from Ethiopia are found alongside objects as diverse as a cassava sieve made by the Ingariko people of Amazonia, and walking-sticks produced in the City of London. Transcending the purely botanical or the purely cultural, this is best described as a 'biocultural' collection, and it is of growing interest to a wide range of disciplines from ethnobotany to design history, as well as to diverse communities and museum curators around the world.

Why and how did objects enter and leave this collection, and why does this matter? This project seeks to examine the circulation of objects into and out of the Kew museums over the period between 1847 and 1987. For the founders of such museums, the mere accumulation of objects was not an end in itself: their collections were designed to be useful, scientifically, pedadogically and commercially. If museums were to contribute to the making of new knowledge, whether in natural history, anthropology or design education, this would be accomplished not simply through the acquisition of specimens or artefacts, but through their circulation either as physical objects or in other forms. Conceptualising museums in terms of the mobility of their collections requires re-thinking the way they have functioned historically and what can be done with their collections today.

In this context, the value of Kew's Economic Botany Collection to researchers is substantially enhanced by the unusually extensive documentation of the movement of objects through the collection. Two archival series stand out: the Museum's accession registers (or 'Entry Books') recording acquisitions from 1847 to the present, and its de-accession registers (or 'Exit Books') recording outgoing objects from 1881 to the present. Augmented by other archival resources, notably Kew Directors' correspondence, these two series provide fundamental data for the study of national and transnational circulation of plant materials of economic and ethnobotanical interest in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This project will use this unique archival record to map the circulation of biocultural objects into and out of Kew, at international and national scales. At the international scale, the research will identify the principal networks of exchange, focusing especially on links with museums in Australia, the United States and Europe. At the national scale, the research will consider Kew's place in a wider network of natural history and ethnographic museums, and will examine its role in providing specimens and artefacts to schools in the wider context of contemporary nature study. A series of focused object studies will trace the trajectories of objects through both national and international networks of exchange. Finally, the project will provide online access to an enhanced database of the Economic Botany Collection, including outgoing objects for the first time. This will be of lasting value to researchers, museum practitioners, source communities and educators worldwide.

The project is designed to be of lasting value to the following users and beneficiaries: (1) collections managers and heritage professionals, (2) museum curators and exhibitions staff, (3) enthusiast historians and botanists, (4) representatives of source communities, (5) educators, including museum learning departments and school-teachers, and (6) pupils and students.

1. Collections managers and heritage professionals. The enhanced database, to include de-accessions for the first time, will enable museum professionals to search for crucial provenance information about objects in their own collections. This will enable significant enrichment of knowledge and interpretation of the contents of other collections. Given the diverse nature and global scope of recipient collections, this benefit will be available to professionals in a diverse range of institutions, including many natural history museums and ethnographic museums around the world.

2. Museum curators and exhibitions staff. The project will enable curators to develop new ways of engaging with biocultural objects which are often little known and little understood, especially when objects originally donated to one institution and today found in another. By re-connecting these objects with crucial information concerning their provenance, and by highlighting their role in global patterns of migration, empire and commodity circulation, the project seeks to inspire new ways of using and displaying them in museum settings.

3. Enthusiast historians and botanists. The project will build on Kew's strong track record of public engagement with these groups, through guided tours of the Economic Botany Collection, public showcases and talks, blogs and web posts, accessible publications and other printed resources.

4. Representatives of source communities. There is growing interest amongst source communities worldwide in culturally significant objects made from plant materials artefacts found within biocultural collections such as those at Kew. We will make information of interest to source communities available via an easily accessible online database, and we will work with overseas partner museums, especially in Australia, which have well-established protocols for engagement with source communities.

5. Educators, including museum learning departments and school-teachers. The project will promote new approaches to biocultural collections through UK museum learning departments, and will provide new educational resources for use by teachers at KS1-KS2 level, including lesson plans, visual images and archival resources for use in the classroom. Educators will also be invited to participate in collections tours, and to make use of accessible printed resources about the collections.

6. Pupils and students. School pupils will benefit from the provision of educational resources to educators in museums and schools. Direct engagement with pupils at primary school level will be achieved through a project to reconstruct two school museums based on our research on Kew's role in the promotion of object-based study in the classroom a century ago. Students at University level will also benefit from a placement scheme managed jointly by the PI and CI enabling them to gain work experience within the Economic Botany Collection at Kew.

Some of the impact described above, will be achieved by the organisation of educational and public engagement activity within the lifetime of the project. Further impact over a longer period will be generated by the dissemination of knowledge through the significantly enhanced collection database that will be freely accessible to all users of the web. Given the nature of the resource and the international scope of the project, the geographical range of the impact is expected to be global.