At its height, the British Empire famously encompassed the entire earth. Less notoriously, it reached deep below the earth’s surface. Mining and engineering in Britain and its former empire are associated with global histories of migration, inequality, and exploitation; with the transformation of terrain and with ecological disasters past, present, and future. A British Mineralogy consists of mineral specimens from the Yale Peabody Museum (YPM) Mineralogy and Meteoritics collection, on display in the Long Gallery of the Yale Center for British Art. Many of these specimens are beautiful, but they are not displayed here as nature’s works of art. They are displayed, instead, as migrant objects, their fates and journeys tied to the British colonial project. Originally gathered from locations in the British Isles, southern Africa, eastern Australia, Sri Lanka, and western India, these objects were acquired at the Peabody from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Like the paintings on the walls around them, they have passed through British networks of power, knowledge, value, and exchange. Displayed “out of place” in the art museum, they offer an alternative to the visual narrative of Britain in the World in the Center’s current public galleries. These migrant minerals contain valuable materials, from the prosaic to the precious: graphite, tin, copper, diamond, and more. They were brought forth from the earth through the skilled labor of people whose lives became entangled with them and with the technological landscapes of extraction around them. Once unearthed, these specimens embarked on voyages across the globe, participating in the global flows of people and commodities that underlay British power in the period of high empire. Finally, they were assimilated into a natural history collection, where they shed some of their pasts in order to become emblems of nature, apparently outside of culture and history. What kind of mineralogy might embrace and acknowledge these stories of excavation, translocation, and arrival, rather than efface them in the name of nature? The entanglements put forward here—the idea that a mineral specimen might bear the weight of a fragile British identity, that representations of mineral science might be enmeshed with commodification and the world of consumable goods, or that the mining and movement of minerals might be entwined with the movement of and migration of people—are not new. A British Minerology is in part a response to British Minerology, the first major illustrated mineralogical publication in Europe, by the London artist and naturalist James Sowerby soon followed by its counterpart, Exotic Mineralogy. However, Sowerby frequently undermined his own proposed distinction between the British and the exotic. Both publications brimmed with suggestive elisions and ambiguities among the terms “British,” “English,” “empire,” “native,” “foreign,” and “exotic.” Both projects were limited solely to reproducing specimens held in London-based mineral collections, which depended, of course, upon networks of British travelers to distant lands. Even a meteorite—a piece of stone theorized to have fallen to Yorkshire from the heavens—was found to be worthy of inclusion as British, as was ice, snow, and hail. “What has been thought remarkable,” Sowerby observed in the fifth volume of British Mineralogy, “is that this work should include so many subjects previously considered as foreign.” Inspired by Sowerby, but grappling with the legacies of a colonial art collection in our post-colonial moment, here we propose a different British Mineralogy. Text entries for each specimen use it as the starting point for varied histories of mining, engineering, resource extraction, labor, and migration in the British Empire. Each mineral has been illustrated anew by the contemporary Indian artist and researcher Garima Gupta, whose work engages the visual and ecological legacies of trade and migration histories in former colonial empires. Together the text and the illustrations—developed collaboratively—engage in an exploratory practice of place-making, exploring the landscape from which the mineral has come, the political and social landscape through which it has traveled, and the surface of the object as a landscape of its own.The boundaries of locale and belonging and Britishness were drawn in a particular and peculiar way by Sowerby in 1804. Today, the Peabody draws these boundaries quite differently than we do at the Center; so too would a present-day UK immigration officer. In arraying these migrant minerals in an art museum under the uncomfortable rubric of A British Mineralogy, we ask : where are they really “from”? If they can never go “back,” where do they belong, and why does it matter? About the Curator Chitra Ramalingam is Associate Curator of Photography at the Yale Center for British Art, and Lecturer in Yale’s History of Science and Medicine Program. After a PhD in History of Science from Harvard University, she held research fellowships at the Science Museum, London and the University of Cambridge before arriving at Yale. Her research, teaching, and curatorial work focus on British photography, on the visual and material culture of Victorian science, and on decolonial museum practice. She is author of To See a Spark: Experiment and Visual Experience in Victorian Science (under contract, Yale University Press),and co-editor of William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography (Yale University Press, 2013).