Collecting humanity in the age of Enlightenment: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Edinburgh University’s natural history museum

The Enlightenment has long been defined as an age of expanding knowledge. Practices collection, classification and display objects, which intensified spread along with the global extension European empires commercial networks, meant that intellectual aspiration became in scope. This article focuses on colonial collections Professor Natural History at University Edinburgh, Rev. Dr John Walker, who was also keeper university’s natural history museum. studies particular actors involved movement a large collection objects from Hudson’s Bay Company. provided by employee Company, Andrew Graham penned manuscript about artefacts people inhabiting Rupert’s Land. Graham’s collecting network included other traders, First Nation Inuit European-based naturalists. highlights importance conferring historical agency diverse cast figures mobile formation communication knowledge humanity. It argues, however, this not frictionless but conditioned uneven power relations violence.