Insects are among the world’s wondrous flora and fauna that inspired the rich visual and material cultures of salons across Europe. In the 17th and 18th centuries, these gatherings in glittering rooms occupied an interesting position in British society, being social and domestic spaces that were also part of the scientific studies of botany and entomology – studies intricately interwoven with colonialism. Bugs such as the cochineal, native to Central and South America, became another important part of British trade, used for pink and red dyes in cloth and paint throughout the period. In competing with the Spanish in this trade the British would then transport these insects to India to produce their own demand, using them for such goods to acquire the kinds of coveted textiles that graced the bodies of salon ladies. Bugs were also collector items; wealthy collectors such as Sir Hans Sloane would amass great collections of insects, still housed and studied in London’s Natural History Museum today. Bugs were also important to medicine, and profit in the maintenance of plantations and in the transport of slaves across the Atlantic. Insects were simultaneously living things, objects of curiosity, pests and natural resources to be exploited. Tucked away in the Student Salon cabinet, with shells and seeds, the Blue Milkweed Beetle (whom I have affectionately named Ignatius Solomon Terry) reflects investment in the natural world and profit throughout this period. 

European bug history has been enriched by several women, elite and otherwise, despite the long term male dominance with figures like the biologist and physician Carl Linneus. Women such as Maria Sibylla Merian contributed to the documentation of nature through her watercolour illustrations of the nature of South America in the 1700s, which depicted insects in their own environments, such as her illustration of a pineapple surrounded by cockroaches. Her prints undoubtedly influenced subsequent botanists travelling abroad, notably Marianne North’s illustrations of Indian flora and fauna in the 1800s. Artists would craft exquisite, detailed visual representations of nature that would be evoked in the homes of the elite, particularly through their fabrics and wallpapers. These women often travelled for diplomatic and intelligence-gathering purposes. The literature and visual art that women travellers created was inextricably tied to colonialism and the access it granted them to expanding natural worlds. The nature they would capture in print – would then be replicated in England, through botanical gardens such as the garden of Mary Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort, or Kew Gardens in the 18th century. When Behn mentioned the wondrous insects of South America, she also noted that she had donated some of them to antiquaries in London.

If you were to stare into a 17th-century still life painting with a floral arrangement, chances are that you will also see a fly or beetle resting on a petal. The study of entomology has long been entwined with botany, both fields enhanced by artistic illustration as well as the increasing use of the microscope in the 17th century. Whilst male figures such as Robert Morrison were lecturing on botany at Oxford women did not have the same access to these intellectual spaces. Books such as Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) were points of access to these kinds of knowledge. They were illustrated with depictions of observations, for example the famous flea by architect Christopher Wren. The 17th century was full of both men and women who were trying to reason with the world they existed in. Women did engage with Micrographia, particularly evidenced in Margaret Cavendish’s critique of the text, Observations upon experimental Philosophy (1666). Whilst this text is not exclusively on bugs it does lean into the springs of independent female thought surrounding natural philosophy. Her argument centered around the “truth” of nature through microscopic “eyes”, opposed to her own natural philosophy’s adherence to speculative reason. Cavendish’s novel The Blazing World, published in the same year, catapults a woman into a parallel universe where she tries to make sense of various things including its natural world. These texts did spark interest as Cavendish was the first woman to attend meetings at the Royal Society in 1667 following these publications. Women were very engaged in disseminating theories and ideas on the ever expanding natural world. A blue milkweed beetle may not be a remarkable discovery now, but if a 17th century woman were visiting a colony in North America, this jewel-like bug may have seemed otherworldly. 

Furthermore, the study of insects beyond these circles of knowledge, was also bound in trade, profit and control. Trade of commodities across the globe led to the transportation of pests, be it back to Europe or to other destinations, and knowledge of a broader nature was crucial to the production at plantations controlled by the East India and Royal Africa companies to maintain profits. It was also important for the control over people, both subjugated and enslaved. Notably, in the passage of black enslaved people on ships bound to the Americas and Caribbean, as they were kept in horrendous conditions often with animals, which would lead to pests such as cockroaches infesting the ship hold and other areas. This impacted the health of all the people onboard these ships and later on land, as bugs, such as the American cockroach, would be transported across the sea. In the prioritisation of maintaining profit, entomology was a crucial part of colonialism through medical and environmental sciences. 

All this lay behind my initial insistence that a bug belonged in our cabinet. Bugs were an integral part of science, trade and collections in 17th and 18th century England, and Europe more broadly. They were considered worthy of the fashionable literature of the salon – in the 1570s, in France, a flea threw salon attendees into a poetic frenzy after being caught climbing down the breast of Catherine des Roches, one of the salon hosts. Insects also offer an avenue for thinking about the place of women within early modern science, art, travel, and collecting Within the realms of natural science and philosophy, women played valuable roles in the study of entomology and botany, from scientific illustration to the study of, and debates around the functioning of the living world. Our bug, Ignatius Soloman Terry, is a small yet mighty part of our cabinet in this way. 

Mumia Douse-Bah is a recent English Literature and History of Art graduate of the University of York.

Sometime between early 1779 and 1780, the poet Anna Seward put pen to paper to write her Elegy on Captain Cook. The British explorer’s death in Hawai’i was cause for national mourning. Anna’s poem rides the wave of popular British opinion at this time; many, Seward included, saw Captain James Cook as a heroic figure valiantly struggling to civilise the Polynesian peoples of the Pacific before dying at their hands. The 38-year-old writer was part of a learned and literary circle of men and women, and keenly interested in botany. From her home in Lichfield in Staffordshire, Anna staged Cook’s South Sea voyage and death within a landscape of ‘scorch’d Equator, and th’ Antarctic wave’, amidst ‘Leaves of new forms’, ‘flow’rs uncultur’d’, ‘vegetable silk’, ‘fruits unnam’d’, and animals such as a ‘Kangroo’, ‘poi-birds’, and a ‘Giant-bat’. 

Jumping from one island to another, Anna’s poem is hazy about location, perhaps indicating that she herself wasn’t entirely sure of the geography of these new places. The people that Cook comes across lack individual description or human dignity; they are ‘shiv’ring’ or ‘frowning natives’, ‘human fiends’ who scowl ‘with savage thirst of human blood’. They, like many of the commodities their land produces, are enveloped into a fantasy of the exotic. 

It was not until 1806 that Moehanga of the Ngāpuhi tribe in Aotearoa New Zealand would ‘discover’ England. Anna therefore knew no Māori men nor women but she mentions a New Zealand plant by name. Importantly, it was one that she appears to have seen herself and it provides one of the poem’s few geographical anchors. She writes in a footnote that ‘vegetable silk’:

‘is a flax of which the [New Zealand] natives make their nets and cordage. The fibres of this vegetable are longer and stronger than our hemp and flax; and some, manufactured in London, is as white and glossy as fine silk’. 

Harakeke or New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax), arrived in Europe after Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific in 1772–1775, only a few years before Anna’s poem was published. 

In the Student Salon cabinet, an envelope of harakeke seeds is modelled after those sent to botanist James Edward Smith from Norfolk Island in the late 1700s. ‘Flax Plant’ is scrawled across one side, accompanied by a drawing of harakeke with tentacle leaves. Inside, the seeds are flat, papery, and black. By including harakeke in her poem, Anna demonstrates how her material interests were central to her writing. Anna’s elegy on Cook earned her the friendship of David Samwell, the surgeon on Cook’s ship Discovery, who later presented her with some of his collection. Knowing her botanical interests, perhaps he gave her harakeke. Cook’s voyage led to the collection of not only seeds and harakeke fibre, but also cloaks. In Māori communities, harakeke was vital for producing items from clothing to nets, and valued for the medicinal properties of its flowers, sap, and roots. When Europeans arrived, they quickly identified harakeke as a plant that would be useful. 

Although Anna describes the silken ‘white and glossy’ fibres manufactured from flax in London, the carefully labelled package of seeds are a reminder that the ‘smiling Eden of the southern wave’ and its ‘valuable’ plants were still in the process of being catalogued for European uses. Seeds were only as valuable as knowledge about them. In York, where the Salon and its seeds live today, the Borthwick Archives hold a local letter dated 1863 from Mary Radley to Mary Backhouse. Radley asks her correspondent’s husband to ‘name the seeds enclosed & say if they require heat or particular soil – They have been sent from Otago New Zealand by a nephew of Revd Babington to his sister – who wants me to help her to rear some of them’. 

Side by side, Anna’s poem and the Salon’s seeds are a reminder of the reliance of British botanists on Indigenous plant interpreters. Anna’s footnote on harakeke is the most comprehensive mention of Indigenous subjects in her poem, which otherwise renders them somewhat invisible. Likewise, new research has provided evidence that the Polynesian Omai, here painted with two British botanists in a portrait unusual for its sensitivity, helped them to classify Pacific plants when he visited London in the 1770s.

A watercolour painted in 1769 by Tupaia, who joined Cook’s voyage in Tahiti as a navigator, reminds us of the power of such knowledge. It shows an unknown Māori man presenting the botanist Joseph Banks with a crayfish (lobster). Does the botanist want the crayfish as food, or for scientific classification? The man on the left is the one who knows how to find and catch it. 

The Māori that Cook met believed in the power of harakeke and used it in everything from clothes, to sails and transportation. While New Zealand’s flax industry faltered at the turn of the twentieth century, an enterprising Kiwi company has started making harakeke into sustainable sports equipment and car bumpers using traditional harvesting methods. Perhaps it’s time to return to this knowledge … These tiny seeds might have the potential to help save a world floundering from the misuse of resources, no small hangover of its colonial past.

Susannah Lyon-Whaley is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (UKRI-guaranteed) fellow at the University of York.

I recently revisited a museum I remember going to as a child with my parents, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it had changed from my memories. Instead of an exhibit on an arduous journey aboard the Mayflower to the “New World” with no mention of the transatlantic slave trade or the attempted genocide of Native Americans I remembered, curators had removed this entire section, and started to reframe it to bring awareness to the colonisation inherent in America’s “creation”.

Historically, the origins of museum and collection artefacts, and the stories we tell about them, have been whitewashed to be more palatable to white audiences and erase or evade trauma caused by the colonial past. However, over the last five to ten years, this has taken a turn for the better. Museums are getting better at acknowledging and highlighting the lives and depictions of marginalised people, often working with descendant communities to bring awareness, centre their own perspectives, and return dignity to them. Similarly, the Student Salon Project, focuses on the global entanglements, colonialism, and material and literary culture in seventeenth and eighteenth century salons through decolonial perspectives. For me, one of the objects in the Student Salon that really embodies this purpose is a seventeenth century trade bead, one that I will discuss alongside Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Jacques Savary des Brûlons’ The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1723). 

Oroonoko is a tragic love story written by the English royalist playwright Aphra Behn. It centres on the grandson of an African king who falls in love with a beautiful woman, before they are both sold as slaves. 

Before the reader is even introduced to the eponymous character Oroonoko, his love of Imoinda, and their enslavement narrative, the narrator establishes the novel’s setting of Surinam. This was a Dutch plantation colony in northern South America from 1667-1954, before becoming the independent Republic of Suriname in 1975 it is today. From the very beginning, the colonial presence of Europeans is inescapable – from the author’s choice of setting, descriptions of Indigenous people, the Africans enslaved there, and, topically, through descriptions of beads. 

‘We dealt with ‘em with Beads of all colours…the beads they weave into Aprons about a quarter of an ell long, and of the same breadth; working them very prettily into flowers of several colours of beads…’

Oroonoko, Aphra Behn, 1688, pp. 5-6

‘Those then whom we make use of to work in our plantations of sugar, are ******, black-slaves altogether; which are transported thither in this manner. Those who want slaves, make a bargain with a master, or captain of a ship, and contract to pay him so much a-piece, a matter of twenty pound a head for as many as he agrees for…’

Oroonoko, p. 13

Glass beads in seventeenth and eighteenth century England were imported and used for trade on a global scale. For example, William Davenport & Co, based in Liverpool in the eighteenth century, imported Venetian beads and other commodities for trade with Africa. Blue beads with white stripes similar to ours have been found at Bunce Island’s English slaving fort. As described in a chilling entry in The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1723), one person was worth 2.2kg of beads. Oroonoko reveals that in 1688, one person was worth 20 pounds through dehumanising and commercial language, and the reality of a human auction. 

‘It is a type of glassware, or small grains of glass of various colours, with which the ****** of the Coasts of Africa and the people of America adorn themselves, and which are given to them in exchange for a quantity of rich merchandise…In a cargo to treat six hundred and twelve Negroes; mainly between the River Sestre and the River Andres, about three thousand pounds of rassade are needed; namely twelve hundred pounds of counter-embroidered, eight hundred pounds of black rassade, and a thousand pounds of all the other colours…’

Jacques Savary des Brûlons, Dictionnaire Universel de Commerce, 1726, p. 653

These beads weren’t only traded with Africa or South America, but North America too, as described in The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce. Indigenous craftspeople used these imported beads and their own domestic beads and beadworking traditions. The Wampanoag, for example, made wampum belts from the quahog clam, sometimes creating adornment that also appropriated and reconceptualised European-made beads into their own cultures. 

This wasn’t a one-way trade. Tribal nations gifted beadwork to Europeans using their own beads and materials, for example as gifts to Charles II’s wife, Catherine of Braganza (1638–1705), or to the governor of Pennsylvania, William Penn (1644–1718). ‘Black Indian girdles made of wampum…’ are also found in William Cope’s cabinet of curiosities, one of the first in England, as catalogued in the Musaeum Tradescantianum (1656). These gifts were part of high diplomacy, and can be read as expressions of Indigenous sovereignty, not submission, as highlighted in a speech by Onondaga chief Canassatego in 1744. To quote Mikmaw scholar Robbie Richardson, ‘…the Indigenous appropriation of European goods [was] a political decision and articulation of symbolic power, and not, as Europeans frequently assumed, proof of the inherent superiority of their goods’. 

So, just how likely is it that salon attendees and salonnières would have had an awareness of trade beads? Well, we can’t know for sure, but there are connections between the Mancini Salon and Aphra Behn, the author of Oroonoko, and neither woman was ignorant of the global tensions and active colonialism occurring around them, whether in the colonies or the metropole. We don’t know if Aphra Behn attended the Duchess’ salon, but Behn did write about Mancini in her novella The History of the Nun (1689), and translated Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes (1686) into the English A Discovery of New Worlds (1688) shortly after Mancini read it in her salon. So there is a possibility that Oroonoko and its discussions on slavery (and trading beads) could have been read at Mancini’s salon.

Daisy Glassett-King is a third-year student in the English department at the University of York.