Anniversary Talk – Reading Empire, Enslavement and Botany: A Case Study of William Roscoe’s Monandrian Plants (1828)

Talk by Lucy Moynihan
This talk will discuss the entangled networks of enslavement, empire and botany, by focussing on a case study of William Roscoe’s 1828 monograph on the Monandrian Plants of the Order Scitamineae. Using previously understudied archival documents, including the 1823 notebook of Liverpool enslaver Charles Stuart Parker, and his letters to Kew Botanic Gardens from Demerara, it will unpick the hidden history of colonial slavery that lies behind Liverpool’s historic Botanic Garden. While William Roscoe is often memorialised as an abolitionist in Liverpool, this case study shows that he exposed the enslaving networks of the Sandbach-Tinne family in order to facilitate his own botanical studies. While Roscoe’s work was written in Liverpool, based almost entirely on plants kept in the Botanic Garden and on books like Edward Long’s History of Jamaica, available to him at the Liverpool Athenaeum library, his project relied upon an entire global network of researchers. By uncovering the transfer of knowledge between enslaved botanical experts in Demerara, Athenaeum member Charles Stuart Parker, and Roscoe’s wider network of collaborators, to the pages of a single book shelved within the Athenaeum library, the interconnected networks of enslavement, empire, and botanical knowledge are revealed.

Bio:
Lucy Moynihan is in the final year of her AHRC NWCDTP-funded collaborative PhD at the University of Liverpool. Her thesis examines ‘Race, Enslavement and Abolition at the Liverpool Athenaeum, 1797-1833’. Her doctoral research examines Liverpool’s first hybrid subscription library and newsroom as a site embedded within transatlantic networks of enslavement, combining close archival work with large-scale biographical and institutional data. The project demonstrates the concentration of leading Liverpool enslavers within the Athenaeum’s membership, reassesses abolitionist figures such as William Roscoe, and analyses how pro-slavery interests used library spaces and collections to construct racialised and pseudoscientific worldviews. Lucy is also a co-founder of the Liverpool Colonial Legacies Research Network.

25th Anniversary celebration event.