This accompanies Kathryn James’ Historical Journal article The Intoxicant as Preservative and Scientific Instrument in the World of James Petiver part of the Intoxicants and Early Modern European Globalization special issue

In one of his few ventures beyond London, and only after writing his will, the London apothecary and natural historical collector James Petiver attended the sale of Paul Hermann’s scientific collections in Leiden in 1711. He keenly observed the sale prices for the collection, remarking to Hans Sloane that “I verily believe the whole sold not for what the spirits & glasses cost.”

This article takes these “spirits & glasses” as its focus, following Petiver and his colleagues to examine the role of alcohol as preservation agent in early modern European scientific collecting. By the early eighteenth century, the wet collection was a mark of virtuosity, often displayed in glass containers, housed in glass-fronted cabinets. Useful as a means to transport specimens from the point of collection, alcohol also acted as an important mechanism of long-term preservation and display. Preserved in alcohol and housed in glass, the specimen became at once stable and dazzlingly visible.

This article highlights the fact that, alongside its other roles in the early modern British empire, alcohol was also an active force in imperial scientific culture in its role as medium of preservation and display. Petiver’s collecting depended on the Indies trade, and his ability to enlist medical apprentices and other skilled, ship-bound collectors as his agents, following his instructions on how to collect and preserve natural historical commodities. The rum or arrack that Petiver recommends to his agents in the Indies trade were used, in turn, as fixing agents for collections sustained by that trade, preserving and displaying these specimens for an audience of the curious in Britain and Europe. In this particular context, and distinct from its role in those other spheres of production and consumption discussed in this collection, alcohol acted as a form of media, a means by which the specimen was activated for its audiences.

As the articles in this volume argue, intoxicants underpinned European global expansion and expropriation: as staples driving the profits of colonial ventures (as in the case of tobacco and sugar) or as a commodity framing exchanges with indigenous peoples or the ‘welfare’ of European planters and soldiers (as in the case of alcohol). When used as preservative, however, alcohol facilitated European imperialism of a different kind: the seizure and transportation of foreign creatures and their recategorization as the performative specimens of a Western natural historical system of classification by which that same imperial epistemic and geographical expansion was justified. When alcohol worked, as a preservation medium, it activated the specimen of empire in ‘life-like’ form.

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