Global Commodity Chains and Local Use-Value

Global Commodity Chains and Local Use-Value:William Colenso, natural history collecting and Indigenous labour Megan Kuster On 20 January 1842, the joint botanical-missionary expedition led by Church Missionary Society printer William Colenso (1811-99) was making its way on foot from the hill of Te Wairere to the pa of Tapiri, through the interior of New Zealand's North Island. The travelling party was still regrouping following a poor night's sleep. The day before, two local guides had deserted the expedition, leaving behind some of the gear in a forest after deciding to return to Mokomokorea. Without access to camp bedding, the remaining travellers had been obliged to endure an uncomfortable, rainy night in the company of innumerable mosquitoes. In this final leg of what had been a strenuous three-month journey, the last stages were proving to be the most arduous. It is at this point in his "bush notes" that Colenso records detailed impressions of Abraham, an Indigenous man who had been travelling with the expedition and helping to deliver sermons since it set out from Paihia in November. Noting Abraham's skills as a negotiator and navigator, alongside his judgements of Abraham's life-story, Colenso wrote: "In passing over the road Abm. shewed me the spot where when a Child he was seized... by the Ngapuhi Tribe. ... The present was the first time of his passing the spot since his capture."1 This episode, a strikingly vivid and personal account of an Indigenous life-story, is entirely omitted from the 1844 published version of the expedition, which appeared in the third volume of the London Journal of Botany. The story's omission suggests that the Journal's scientific aims led it to prefer genres that were somewhat distinct from those of the contemporary travelogue.2 The printed account of the expedition was revised to include the expected tropes of Romantic discovery and to conform to the contemporary objectives of the natural history scientific community, pointing to at least two likely reasons as to why the published version contained no mention of Abraham, or any of the other named Indigenous guides and informants mentioned in Colenso's bush notes.3 In exploring how these two discourses-Romantic and scientific-may have impacted on Colenso's experiences as a colonial collector and on his practices of composition, revision, citation and publication, this essay explores both Indigenous responses to natural history collecting in nineteenth-century colonial New Zealand, and the methodological limitations and possibilities of using the colonial archive to explore such questions. In particular, the essay emphasizes the themes of knowledge production and the use-value of labour, raising questions about how scientists, collectors and Indigenous informants interacted with one another along the global commodity chain of the natural history specimen.4 It asks: Whose production of natural history knowledge is approved, reproduced and recorded in Colenso's archive, for what purpose and in what format? And what are the different valuations or hierarchical gradations of labour that emerge in his various accounts (published and unpublished) of the expedition? Writing in the present day, Kwakwaka'wakw scholar Sarah Hunt argues that citational politics is about whose work is being authorised in the context of knowledge production and reproduction: "It's really about who we cite in our work, whose work we hold up, which really validates and legitimizes that as knowledge."5 Expanding on Hunt's understanding of citation politics, I suggest that issues surrounding the citation of Indigenous labour in nineteenth-century natural history knowledge production are entangled with the valuation of natural history specimens as commodities in the global imperial marketplace. My first claim is that differentiated forms of labour surface in relation to tropes of natural history "discovery," and that Colenso's mode of citation reveals the division of primary and secondary labour-value in the field of imperial natural history collecting. I suggest, in other words, that Colenso's citation of Indigenous intermediaries follows a logic of labour differentiation that is enmeshed within tropes of "discovery" and which manifests differently across different textual forms.6 My second claim is that scientific specimen discovery had a value in a wider commodity chain

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