Natural history and scientific knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rose up from waves of human trafficking that connected the Atlantic Basin. Kathleen Murphy’s Captivity’s Collections queries how slave ship surgeons, castle factors, and sailors participated in scientific networks spanning West and West Central Africa, the Río de la Plata valley, the Viceroyalty of New Granada, the Caribbean, and Southeastern North America. Given the range of these relations and itineraries, scholars characterize natural history as the “big science” of the early modern era (6). Participants in these webs of exchange collected for metropolitan apothecaries, aristocrats, and gentleman natural philosophers. Murphy looks to field sites and collectors, including anonymized enslaved people, to question how the slave trade generated specimens and knowledge of plants, animals, and minerals from the dungeons of slave castles to the Middle Passage and final points of sale where the enslaved arrived in the Americas. Working against long-held narratives of science as an inherently benevolent and progressive social force, the book contextualizes how slavery nurtured academic museums, botanical gardens, herbaria, and research institutions.

Inspired by the efflorescence of scholarship on the intersection of slavery and capitalism, Murphy designates specimens collected from the slave trade as another form of profit––what could be theorized as intellectual property––that slave-based empires like Britain extracted from the minds and labor of people of African descent and by dispossessing Indigenous Americans of their land. Following Pratik Chakrabarti, Murphy emphasizes that violence, in the form of coercion, rape, torture, and death, was constitutive to the kinds of collections typical of early modern science (14). The book is divided into six chapters that examine different points of the trade as well as diverse careers and individual cases. Captivity's Collections scrutinizes a vast empirical base of sources ranging from unpublished travel accounts to specimen sheets, letters, miscellany catalogs, and scientific society records. In terms of theory, the book takes up critiques of objectivity advanced by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, as well as recent literature on public memory and slavery, such as the work of The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College, London.

The first two chapters focus on West Africa and English slaving from the period of the Stuart Restoration to the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution. Cape Coast Castle facilitated the movement of captives and specimens as a hub for the Royal African Company. Men like Edward Bartar––also known as Tom Ewusi–collected insects and pressed plants for the London druggist James Petiver in the 1690s. Bartar, an Anglo-Fante factor for the company, who likely collected animals in between receiving and delivering shipments of captives, is a figure that embodies the centrality of local knowledge facilitated by slaving in early modern science. After the loss of the company’s monopoly in 1697, the Duke of Chandos pushed the firm towards bioprospecting for drugs, dyes, and other West African resources. Among these drugs were roots bearing West African names, such as “Embasnobah,” whose properties alleviated dry gripes (61). This plant, and others like it, derived from the intellectual milieu of Akan, Fante, and Asante thinkers, among others, who studied and experimented with such plants before Europeans arrived.

The following two chapters look at English slaving in the Spanish Caribbean. Surgeons for the South Sea Company collected animals and plants for gentlemen naturalists in London. Medics like John Burnet even betrayed their countrymen by committing treason and pledging allegiance to the Bourbon Monarchy in Spain in exchange for professional recognition and handsome annuities. William Houstoun’s career in the Caribbean embodied the overlapping interests of British American colonial projects and the aims of scientific institutions. Houstoun secretly collected plants like Dorstenia contrajerva while serving the South Sea Company as a doctor in Veracruz, New Spain. His collections later appeared in the private holdings of the Chelsea physician Hans Sloane, whose estate formed the basis of the British Museum.

The final two chapters turn to collecting efforts in West Africa. Goliathus goliatus is a focal point for understanding the nexus of slaving voyages and entomology in the late eighteenth century. Dru Drury, a London-based silversmith, employed slave ship surgeons to seek out a Goliath beetle specimen, and particularly sought out slavers bound for the Gabon Estuary where a specimen had previously been found by a naval surgeon. Drury’s later investment in the career of Henry Smeathman in Sierra Leone closes the book's narrative.

Captivity's Collections is an admirable contribution to scholarship on early modern science and slavery. While Murphy’s analysis of slaving is otherwise excellent, a few points of criticism came to mind. One is that, given the book’s focus on natural history, Murphy overlooks how slave trading furthered the careers of individuals in the physical and social sciences, such as Malachy Postlethwayt, whose publications included texts on political economy and chemical metallurgy. The book’s periodization also forecloses a deeper look into networks of science, slavery, and abolitionism that flourished in the 1780s and 1790s. One group who complicates Murphy’s narrative is the African Association, whose members included both abolitionists and proslavery advocates. Mungo Park’s experiences on the Gambia River for the Association provides insight into how scientists collected alongside slave coffles, and the violence faced by women like Nealee, whom he described in his published Travels (1799). Adjusting the timeline forward into the early nineteenth century raises the question of how debates between abolitionist and proslavery scientists influenced knowledge of Africa in Europe, including the production of maps like James MacQueen’s A New Map of Africa (1841). Finally, more sustained discussions of aristocratic investment in science, especially Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland, and English country houses like Welbeck Abbey, could have illuminated connections between slavery and rural manors in the same way the book sheds light on scientific societies and museums. Despite these slight omissions, the book is an outstanding achievement, and historians of science and slavery would do well to consider assigning it to undergraduate courses and graduate colloquia on Atlantic slavery, science, and the eighteenth century.