The gift of a Genevan Colonist in Surinam

Having left Europe for Surinam in the early 1750s, the Genevan Ami Butini bought a small coffee plantation there in 1759. After signing the deed in Amsterdam, he continued to Geneva where, in honour of his home town – and as proof of his own merit – he donated a hundred specimens of Surinamese fauna preserved in alcohol to the cabinet of curiosities in the Academy Library which at the time served as a museum. Not surprisingly, his gift also included several objects representative of Surinam’s Indigenous peoples’ customs which would have been considered at the time as part of the country’s «natural history». However, none of the objects evoked the enslaved people who laboured on Butini’s plantation. There is nothing exceptional about this silence either: slavery was a reality deemed necessary in this Calvinist colony as elsewhere in the world; it did not constitute grounds for «scientific» observation.