ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“Unshrinkable, Unsplinterable and Practically Indestructible”: Plywood Crates, Scientific Transport, and Colonial Commerce

• In Event: The Environmental Lives of Things: Science and Technology, Environmental History, and Material Culture

English Abstract

Historians of science have recently been attentive to the role of containers in science. From Luke Keogh’s history of the Wardian case (2020) to Susanne Bauer, Martina Schlünder, and Maria Rentetzi’s edited volume on the many metaphorical and literal boxes of science (2020), the square or rectangular objects that contain specimens and supplies are beginning to receive close scrutiny. This paper builds on this critical work by focusing on another box type: the plywood crate. Plywood is made by adhering thin layers of wood together with their grains in opposing directions; a technique documented as early as the Egyptian Old Kingdom. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scientific and exploratory expeditions began to ship supplies in uniform plywood crates. In the field, researchers often found creative reuses for the empty boxes, including furniture, building material for shelters, and book bindings. Some plywood companies, like Venesta Ltd., even used the cachet of these expeditions to advertise their products.

However, the crates’ immense appeal as a uniform, durable, lightweight container also had deleterious environmental effects. Prior to the containerization of ocean shipping, plywood crates enabled greater transport of colonial commodities, and were instrumental in the booming rubber, tea, and cacao plantation economies of the long nineteenth century. Additionally, consumer demand for plywood continues to contribute to deforestation in southeast Asia even today. Like modern-day cardboard boxes, plywood crates were ubiquitous to the point of being inconspicuous, while forming a key support of global logistics chains: embodying connections between science and technology, commerce and colonialism, and environmental exploitation.

Author

• Sarah Pickman, Independent scholar