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The practice of early modern natural history depended on the collective collecting activities of a great variety of people. Among them, artisans played a major role in acquiring and distributing knowledge about the natural world and they contributed significantly to the scholarly labour in natural history. This distributed labour was both acknowledged by contemporaries as well as hidden from sight, reflecting the period's dominant norms for class and gender. By combining an interpretation of the visual representation of labour in European insect studies with an examination of written sources about natural history practices from about 1680 to 1810, this article decodes the oftencodified frontispieces and other more symbolic illustrations to offer new insights into the labour of natural history. Those who identified as scholars and artisans (or both) conceptualised their own intellectual and practical engagement with natural history within the semantic field of work. Some seemed to have even envisioned a new social role for academics as well as artisans. This article analyses the diversity of the "productive forces" in insect studies as they changed over time and it reconstructs what I will call the social imaginaries of participation.

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Universities were an important site of Enlightenment improvement discourse and knowledge economies in the German-speaking lands and Scandinavia. Late eighteenth-century state building and scholars’ expectations of their own ‘usefulness’ regarding these processes were closely intertwined. The life and publications of the German-speaking Danish naturalist Johann Christian Fabricius (1745–1808) are used here to understand contemporary debates on the state of education, political economy and the development of the sciences in relation to ideas about economic and social progress. Fabricius was professor for ‘œconomics, cameral sciences and natural history’ at Kiel University for more than 30 years, from 1775 to 1808, and was one of the most outspoken writers on economic reform in Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark. Fabricius’ suggestions for improvement involved directly addressing social categories as well as the re-organization of universities in form and curricular content. Fabricius was engaged in debates on how to best achieve the specific knowledge and skills considered useful for the emerging nation-state. The essay analyses Fabricius’ interventions in these debates in the context of the contemporary development of the ‘research university’ around 1800.

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