ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Flora and the Imperial Machine: 19th-Century Botanical Exchange from Historical Data to Colonial Ecology

• In Event: Grafting Colonial Botanies

English Abstract

The importance of botanical networks to colonial expansion has been well analysed as a process of calculation, trade, and extraction. This paper adds to that landscape a model for exploring the 19th century colonial botany trade as a global environmental system at a level above that of individual species. While studies of plant introductions tell important stories at the intersection of scientific and economic history, the subsequent accumulation, dispersal, and reconfiguration of colonised plants represents a key opportunity to write environmental histories of science and empire.

Working with Kew Gardens’ 19th century exchange ledgers and their paper trails, historical botanical data systems are joined by modern ones to gather, supplement, and model plant history en masse. Paying attention to the ways plants left traces in the archives and the world outside them builds a dataset that highlights the living material changes driven by colonial plant trading.

Within this material, East India Company trading reveals the negotiated ecology of Canton and the extension of old world plants to sustain and develop trading posts. Meanwhile, Botanical garden shipments beyond those of ‘discovery’ show the living and dying within scientific plant collections that built networks between them in order to sustain their ecologically disconnected specimens. Finally, plant exchange between botanists, colonists, gardeners, and imperial citizens reveals the living worlds that spread around and outside larger institutions. Together, this shows how colonial plant exchange transferred regional ecology into a global botanical system that was itself a new kind of ecology at a global scale.

Author

• Nathan Cornish, University of Southampton, Exeter University, Kew Gardens