For the curious and interested: collaborations to unlock the botanical collections of Hans Sloane

For the curious and interested: collaborations to unlock the botanical collections of Sir Hans Sloane. Mark Carine: Natural History Museum, London The botanical collections assembled by Hans Sloane (1660–1753) form the foundation of the Natural History Museum’s herbarium. Gathered from the 1680s until Sloane’s death, they encompass approximately 120,000 pressed plant specimens preserved in 265 bound volumes, along with nearly 9,000 surviving “Vegetables and Vegetable Substances” housed largely in their original decorative wooden and glass boxes. Together, these collections represent material from more than 70 countries and territories worldwide and include contributions from over 500 named collectors. As Vicky Funk noted in her 2003 ASPT Newsletter article listing “100 Uses for a Herbarium (well at least 72),” herbaria support an extraordinary diversity of research. Sloane’s collections exemplify this breadth, underpinning work ranging from taxonomy and environmental change to the history of collecting practices and the entangled relationships between natural history, colonialism and enslavement. This talk explores how collaborations with historians and digital humanities scholars have enabled new ways to access Sloane’s herbarium and Vegetable Substances, digitally “unlocking” those collections and allowing researchers to interrogate them in new ways. The challenges and compromises inherent in this process are discussed and the new insights gained into Sloane’s collecting and cataloguing processes reviewed. Finally, new research avenues enabled by this work are highlighted - from genomic studies of extinction and domestication to investigations into shifting plant knowledge systems in southern India and the use of plant-based abortifacients by enslaved women as acts of resistance.