Cultivating Agricultural Subjects: School Gardens and the Nature Study Movement in Early Twentieth-Century British Ceylon

• In Event: Studying Nature

Abstract

My paper examines a school gardens program in early twentieth-century British Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). Agriculture was a dominant mode of colonial extraction, yet infrequent attention is paid to agricultural education, an important means by which such extraction was furthered. Environmental histories of colonial Lankan agriculture generally focus on the late nineteenth-century coffee-to-tea plantation transition (Webb, Duncan). By 1900, however, “agriculture” covered everything from the plantation sector to village cultivation, and administrators sought umbrella forms of governance for it. In 1901, a Lankan Dutch Burgher civil servant named Christopher Drieberg seized upon this debate — he pioneered a colony-wide school gardens program.

Intriguingly, Drieberg’s scheme had American ideological roots. He had stumbled across pamphlets on “nature study,” a popular 1890s Cornell School of Agriculture pedagogical initiative, which aimed to revitalize rural lifestyles by fostering positive experiences between children and nature. Although Drieberg’s program outwardly focused on “nature study,” and not scientific agriculture, the underlying intention was to prime young rural Lankans to be receptive towards doctrines of agricultural improvement, by linking cultivation with school and by encouraging experimentation with new crops from other tropical colonies. Over the next decade, the school gardens program spread like wildfire: it reached 58 schools by 1903, and 244 by 1910.

Two questions guide my paper. Firstly, how did nature study, a North American agricultural revival movement, translate via a Eurasian administrator into the rural vernacular school system of British colonial Sri Lanka? Secondly, how did Drieberg’s nature study-inflected school gardens program typify a growing tendency within the British Empire to understand colonized tropical space through formalized agricultural institutions — and to what end? I argue that nature study in 1900s Lankan school gardens reflected an impulse amongst colonial officials to raise agricultural subjects for Britain’s tropical empire — thereby codifying an imperial agricultural logic of tropical space.

Author

• Clare Bradford Anderson, Harvard University