ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Mobilized Science: An Examination of the Development of the International Botanical Congress from 1864 into the Twentieth-Century

• In Event: Institutions and Standards in the 19th and Early 20th Century

English Abstract

Modern botanical science developed for imperial purposes, in the early modern period, and organized towards environmental and nation-building projects through the twentieth-century. History of science scholarship typically gives attention to “big science”, such as nuclear technology and life science innovation as the main vantage point to understand these global interactions. But, botanical science, as a forerunner to more specialized sciences: forestry, agriculture, and horticulture, operated as a significant space for scientists, states, and non-state actors to pursue local and global modernization goals. Under conditions of entangled imperial legacies, modernization projects relied on the theoretical and practical advancement of botanical science and technology discussed in conferences like the International Botanical Congress (IBC) to help address sustainability and biodiversity concerns. The IBC was created in 1864, and continues to tackle critical questions on biodiversity and the natural environment today. Here, the exchange of globalized technoscience drove many states and scientists to identify and solve overlapping national and natural science problems together. I examine science and political formation through the development of the IBC, an early progenitor of modern western science. To do so, my paper looks at the history of the IBC to shed light on ways the growing convention of western science and standardization of nomenclature informed international relations and co-operations. I argue that the IBC acted as a space for the increased mobilization of labor, diverse science interests, and states to engage with political and cultural concerns, contributing to the promotion of western science as the dominant science in the twentieth-century.

Author

• Calvin Jordan, University of California San Diego (UCSD)