Introduction to “Working at the Margins: Labor and the Politics of Participation in Natural History, 1700–1830”**

This special issue seeks to understand natural history from the perspective of those for whom making knowledge was part of making a living, and to highlight the labor regimes – free and forced, from households to plantations – that sustained natural knowledge economies in Europe and its colonies through the long eighteenth century. Natural history was a broad but increasingly systematic field of study pursued variously out of medicinal, leisurely, and imperial interests, which involved the collection, classification, and commercialization of natural objects. It is sometimes assumed, then, that natural history was practiced exclusively by European and settler elites in this period. But this is itself an image that naturalists of the educated classes carefully cultivated, and which historians have significantly revised in recent years. Drawing upon some of the most energetic currents in the history of science, this issue proposes that the study of labor – encompassing a range of mental and manual activities – offers a useful, comparative framework for understanding how actors of diverse social strata participated in the collective enterprise of natural history. Wary of the limitations of what has been called “salvage biography,” which risks overrepresenting the agency of subaltern actors who contributed to European scientific enterprises, a focus on the workscapes of natural history instead points to the rules as well as the exceptions: histories not only of naturalists’ engagement with non-elite knowledge, but also of the larger systems of slave labor, peasant farming, family inheritance, workshop