Orchids are one of the most popular plants in the world. But back in the nineteenth century, orchids, specially the tropical ones, were a botanical curiosity and an exotic and expensive item only a few could afford. Those plants were extracted from the tropical jungles of South America to be sold in auctions in Britain. In this blog post, Camilo Uribe Botta shows how the networks created between Colombia, Belgium and Britain in the 1840s led to a constant supply of plants from the tropical Andes and also to new botanical discoveries and innovative methods on how to cultivate them in Britain.

From the late nineteenth century onwards, enterprising men from Britain and the British Empire began arriving in Southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, in Argentina and Chile. Part of a wider process of Europeanisation and capitalist colonisation, these men managed an imported activity which deeply transformed this South American borderland region: the sheep farming industry. An important part of this process was the installation of labour regimes, where managers from the British world introduced new practices of disciplining the local workforce. However, as Nicolás Gómez Baeza argues in this blog post, this history of Patagonian local capitalisms was also one of British-global-imperial transfers of diverse capitalist and management knowledge and behaviours.

The records of the eighteenth-century Foundling Hospital in London reveal an untold part of its history – that of the presence and experiences of Black, brown and mixed-race infants cared for by the charity. In this blog post, Hannah Dennett shares the first findings of her collaborative PhD project based at Warwick and the Foundling Museum. Her research to date has already revealed more incidences of children of colour being admitted into the Foundling Hospital in the eighteenth century than anticipated it would be possible to discover. As she demonstrates through the case of Mary Carne and her infant son born in 1798, the lives of these foundlings, no longer forgotten, are important for shaping a more complete history of the Foundling Hospital.