The goal of the workshop is to gain a preliminary overview of the under-researched role of German actors in the extensive and systematic cataloging of flora and fauna that took place in the Asia Pacific in the long nineteenth century. While the workshop limits its geographical scope, it raises broader historiographical issues. The role of German practitioners and their international mobility is of particular interest in conjunction with questions relating to Science and Empire. Often outsider agents, these actors seized the opportunities presented by other imperial systems or local political authorities striving to establish regional control. By reappraising German international careers, the workshop proposes to give existing narratives a new turn. Furthermore, the workshop hopes to shed light on the role of auxiliary trades and practitioners in natural history. The increase in natural history museums, zoos, and private collections in Europe brought along the rise of a number of specialized trades. By the second half of the nineteenth century, natural history had become a collective enterprise supported by numerous hunters, brokers, taxidermists and producers of specialized tools. Taking a closer look at natural-historical surveys of the Asia Pacific offers a unique opportunity to set these ‘auxiliary’ actors and practices into focus.

Program

• 13:00-13:30 Introduction: about this workshop
• 13:30-14:15 Joceline Vanessa Finney: “An Australian library in Berlin: Wilhelm Blandowski and the Victorian Philosophical Society’s expedition to the Murray River, 1857”
• 14:15-15:00 Ayako Sakurai: "Molluscs, plants, and giant salamanders for Frankfurt - Johannes Justus Rein in Japan, 1873-5”
• 15:00-15:30 Coffee Break
• 15:30-16:15 Oliver Hochadel: “Tigers in transit. Alois Kraus’s animal-acquiring journey to Java, 1878”
• 16.15- 17.00 Kerstin Pannhorst: "Collecting, trading and writing East Asian insects around 1900: Hans Fruhstorfer, Hans Sauter and Rudolf Mell“
• 17.00-17.30  Roundtable Discussion