ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Plant Transfers Beyond Botany: Histories of Human-mediated Long-distance Dispersals to and from Latin America

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel aims to offer new insights into the entwined histories of science, empire, and environment as we trace intercontinental plant transfers to and from Latin America, between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth century. The long history of research on power relations, mediation, resistance and extractive practices in studies of Latin America encourages an epistemic reframing of the human-plant entanglements. Scholars have highlighted the importance of combining botanical, ecological and social factors when analysing plant transfers and their outcomes. We bring together approaches from environmental history, history of science, landscape and urban studies and geoanthropology to examine how accounts of plant transfers can reveal plural scientific worlds that exceed imperial models of classification, ownership, and cultivation. Using Araucaria araucana, Eucalyptus globulus, and Galinsoga parviflora as case studies, and looking into productive species introduction in colonial Chile, we spotlight the entanglement of local ecological practices with global scientific and imperial economies. We look beyond transfers facilitated by actors of institutionalised botanical science, tracing accidental dispersals as well as intentional transfers facilitated by military engineers, imperial bureaucrats, captains, merchants, gardeners, and seed traders. The talks are united by their engagement with human agency, which contributed to the long-distance spread of these plants, and the associated forms of knowledge and sense-making about the imported flora. Through concentrating on such alternative transfers, we aim to engage with the conference’s theme, which encourages attention to marginal voices, contested truths, and epistemic disobedience. In bringing together case studies that illustrate the flow of knowledge and biota across ecosystems and chronologies, we aim to elicit comparisons and discuss the global ecological dynamics of plant species transfer and human-mediated environmental change.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Mika Hyman, University of Cambridge

Individual Presentations

• Seeds of Reform: Plant Transfer, Ecological Change, and Environmental Governance in Late Colonial Chile - Natalia Gandara, Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso (Chile); John Carter Brown Library (USA).

• A Captain’s Box: Moving Seeds of Araucaria araucana, from Chile to the UK, c.1827 - Camila Medina Novoa, ETH Zürich

• A Botanical Escapee from Peru: the Spread of Galinsoga parviflora and Associated Narratives in Partitioned Poland - Aleksandra Kaye, The Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology

• An Australian Tree in the Tropical Andes: Eucalyptus globulus and the Global Circulation of Urban Nature - Diego Molina, Royal Holloway, University of London

Session Organizer

• Aleksandra Kaye, The Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology