Abstract

Reinventing traditional markets in the first era of globalisation: the international barter trade in natural history specimens, 1860-1900

Barter exchange is commonly associated with pre-modern, local markets before the widespread monetisation of trading. The burgeoning nineteenth-century public museum sector built its natural history specimen collections through extensive international trading, which has been largely overlooked by scholars until quite recently. Barter, or exchange, despite its pre-modern connotations, was a distinctive aspect of this trade that reveals much about the diverse practices and motives of the institutional collectors. Economic-geographic benefits of barter included conserving the limited financial resources of museums and exploiting complementarities in the geographic distribution of specimens. We also reveal that collection management, institutional reputation, social connection, and international diplomacy were all part of a complex mix shaping this important international trade. Understanding how relative value was determined and complex logistics managed are also important questions that are addressed. To do this, we analyse the exchange practices of the three largest museums in the Australian colonies in the final four decades of the nineteenth century – the Australian Museum, the Queensland Museum, and the Museum of Victoria. They exchanged Australia’s “rare and curious” fauna with distant collectors across the globe including in North America, Europe, and the Pacific. The paper pioneers the deployment of extensive, comparative data on exchange in this trade through the use of exchange registers, annual reports and trustee minutes. It forms part of a broader interdisciplinary project designed to recover and reconstruct the data and histories of specimens collected by nineteenth-century natural history museums in light of rising rates of extinction today and to address contemporary concerns connected with de-colonization.