TAHANI NADIM* , MAREIKE VENNEN ** , INA HEUMANN *** AND FILIPPO BERTONI **** Logistical Natures: Trade, Traffics, and Transformations in Natural History Collecting ABSTRACT 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. Logistical Natures examines the intersection of two domains: natural history and logistics. Natural history’s effort to systematically understand and organize nature orchestrated global flows of people, knowledge, equipment, and *Museum fu¨r Naturkunde Berlin, Center for the Humanities of Nature, Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Invalidenstraße 43, 10115 Berlin, Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universita¨t zu Berlin, Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Str. 40-41, 10117 Berlin, tahani.nadim@mfn.berlin ** Landesarchiv Berlin, Eichborndamm 115, 13403 Berlin, mareike.vennen@posteo.de *** Museum fu¨r Naturkunde Berlin, Center for the Humanities of Nature, Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Invalidenstraße 43, 10115 Berlin, ina.heumann@mfn.berlin **** FILOtypes.nl, Wagenaarstraat 469, 1093CN Amsterdam, bertonifilo@gmail.com | 125 Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 54, Number 2, pps. 125–134. ISSN 1939-1811, electronic ISSN 1939-182X. © 2024 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www. ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2024.54.2.125. Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/hsns/article-pdf/54/2/125/816709/hsns.2024.54.2.125.pdf?guestAccessKey=fadc47e8-064e-4adb-a9b9-a7de00a68032 by guest on 16 May 2024