Combating Famine, Improving Empire : Botanical Science in a Colonial Context c. 1765-1800

• In Event: Framing Scientific Practice

English Abstract

This paper looks at the growth of the science of botany in colonial India in the second half of the eighteenth-century and demonstrates how botanical science was closely related to an imperial ideology of improvement that justified and even legitimised colonisation. Botanical Science in colonial India had begun with the explorations of Garcia da Orta in Goa, Heinrich van Rheede in Malabar, J. G. Koenig in Tranquebar and Robert Wight in Madras. But the works of these early explorers were disorganized and mostly of an academic nature. In 1786 however with the establishment of a botanical garden in Calcutta, botanical investigations became part of government policy rather than a private enterprise. Robert Kyd and William Roxburgh - the first two Superintendents of the garden believed botanical researches to be of particular value in combating Indian famines through the importation of drought resistant crops. Their optimism in this regard was shared by Sir Joseph Banks in London. This article argues that botanical science was not only crucial to the commercial interests of the EIC in terms of cultivating plants of economic value but botanical science was also used to legitimise empire and imperial agendas in the late-eighteenth century.

Author

• Baijayanti Chatterjee, Assistant Professor