From the Ottoman World to Exeter: The Untold Story of RAMM’s Natural History Collections

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Join us at the Second Exeter University History Department/Friends of RAMM Annual Lecture at which Dr Semih Çelik’s will focus on the story of how minerals, fossils, stuffed animals, dried plants, seeds, and other natural history specimens journeyed from the Ottoman Empire to Europe. You will discover the story of Major General George Elliot’s collection in RAMM, gathered as he Captained the Arethusa during the Crimean War, and travel back in time to the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea. For this lecture Dr Çelik has opened up National Archives across Europe, as well as the logs of ships sailing across the Mediterranean, to tell us the story of how some of the collections came to RAMM. This promises to be a fascinating lecture, situating part of RAMM’s collection within the wider story of collecting in the context of war and Empires. Dr Semih Çelik’s work focuses on the history of science in the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, locating the Ottoman Empire within global history, and on building non-colonial histories of the environment and science. To find out more about natural history collecting under the Ottoman Empire, please see Dr Çelik’s paper, Science, to Understand the Abundance of Plants and Trees: The First Ottoman Natural History Museum and Herbarium, 1836–1848, which you can access here.