ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Cotton, Botany and Empire: Tracing botanical sciences in the archive of the first industrial city

• In Event: Science and Empire in the Anthropocene: Towards an Environmental Shift 2 - Making Imperial Worlds

English Abstract

This paper examines the entanglement of botany, empire, and industrial capitalism through the cotton archives of Manchester—the world’s first industrial city. Moving beyond narratives of the Industrial Revolution as solely driven by mechanical innovation, it foregrounds the role that botanical sciences played in creating extractive cotton economies in rural India. Archival materials—ranging from plant specimens and lithographs to correspondence between imperial botanists and Manchester merchants—reveal how colonial agricultural experiments sought to classify, standardise, and “improve” cotton varieties from India to suit the demands of Lancashire’s mills. These scientific practices were not neutral: they transformed plants and landscapes into instruments of extraction and control, reproducing hierarchies that cast Indian cotton as “inferior”, justifying interventions to reshape local agriculture practices and erasing existing knowledges. Tracing these processes, the paper highlights the role of botanical knowledge in materialising imperial ambitions and shaping global cotton commodity chains. The paper argues that the making of industrial modernity depended as much on the circulation of seeds and specimens as on machines and free markets ideologies. Recovering archival connections between cotton, botany, and empire reframes plant science as a key vector of colonial power—one that continues to inform contemporary debates on sustainability, biodiversity, and the legacies of extractive agriculture.

Author

• Arianna Tozzi