Collective Observations

Sugar, ships and science: The City Observatory and Caribbean commerce.

Lisa Williams, author, poet, and founder of the Edinburgh Caribbean Association, explores the role that the City Observatory played in shipping to and from Leith. Now home to Collective, the City Observatory site has a long history as a crucial provider of accurate time to the city of Edinburgh and the Port of Leith. Time was kept by tracking celestial objects passing over the transit telescope which still sits in the Observatory today.

In her presentation, Lisa discusses the lives of the founding members of the Observatory and the development of mathematics and science, both of which were intertwined with the Transatlantic slave trade and buoyed up by colonial commerce.