Logistical Natures: Trade, Traffics, and Transformations in Natural History Collecting Available to Purchase

The logistics of natural history sustained natural history’s capacity to acquire, classify and preserve specimens. This mobilization of nature established complex supply-chains, encompassing naturalists, colonial officers, museum curators, and many others, that materialized distinct global infrastructures. In suggesting the notion of Logistical Natures, this special issue renders the intersection of (critical) logistics and nature productive in two ways. First, the essays explore the logistics of natural history and analyze how large-scale, mostly colonial, infrastructures shaped knowledge, practices, and material culture within natural history. Second, Logistical Natures draws attention to the natural history of logistics for these infrastructures, such as postal services, military infrastructures, and railway systems, were also productive of new kinds of nature. Logistical Natures analyzes how modes of circulation materialized as (and in) the bodies, including people and specimens, and knowledge practices of natural history.