Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World - Softcover

 
9780812220094: Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812220099 ISBN 13: 9780812220094
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

In the early modern world, botany was big science and big business, critical to Europe's national and trade ambitions. Tracing the dynamic relationships among plants, peoples, states, and economies over the course of three centuries, this collection of essays offers a lively challenge to a historiography that has emphasized the rise of modern botany as a story of taxonomies and "pure" systems of classification. Charting a new map of botany along colonial coordinates, reaching from Europe to the New World, India, Asia, and other points on the globe, Colonial Botany explores how the study, naming, cultivation, and marketing of rare and beautiful plants resulted from and shaped European voyages, conquests, global trade, and scientific exploration.

From the earliest voyages of discovery, naturalists sought profitable plants for king and country, personal and corporate gain. Costly spices and valuable medicinal plants such as nutmeg, tobacco, sugar, Peruvian bark, peppers, cloves, cinnamon, and tea ranked prominently among the motivations for European voyages of discovery. At the same time, colonial profits depended largely on natural historical exploration and the precise identification and effective cultivation of profitable plants. This volume breaks new ground by treating the development of the science of botany in its colonial context and situating the early modern exploration of the plant world at the volatile nexus of science, commerce, and state politics.

Written by scholars as international as their subjects, Colonial Botany uncovers an emerging cultural history of plants and botanical practices in Europe and its possessions.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Londa Schiebinger is John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science and Barbara D. Finberg Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Stanford University. She is the author of The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science; Has Feminism Changed Science?; Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science; and Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Claudia Swan is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University and founding Director of the Program in the Study of Imagination. She is the author of The Clutius Botanical Watercolor: Plants and Flowers of the Renaissance and Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland: Jacques de Gheyn II (1565-1629).

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INTRODUCTION
Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan

In 1735, the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris commissioned an expedition to the equatorial regions of South America to measure the length of a degree of meridian near the equator in order to determine the earth's size and shape. The French were the first foreign scientists to penetrate the interior of Spanish Peru: for centuries Spain had guarded the secrets of its American natural resources. Two emissaries of the Spanish Governor accompanied the expedition to make independent observations and to keep an eye on the foreigners. Among the members of the expedition was the French explorer and mathematician Charles-Marie de La Condamine (1701-1774). While La Condamine entered Spanish territory on official business—to find these measurements and to chart the course of the Amazon—he is famous for having taken this opportunity to spirit away seedlings of the precious Peruvian bark trees (Cinchona officinalis) from which quinine derived and of trees yielding valuable caoutchouc (rubber). Among other things, he wished to test the fabled Amazonian botanical poison, curare, with which natives of the region poisoned their arrows, and to settle the question of whether Amazons (the warlike women said to inhabit the wilds of the river named after them) actually existed. Joseph de Jussieu (1704-1779), a member of the dynasty of French naturalists, accompanied La Condamine, who called him his "botanical eyes." Their dream was a familiar one: to procure (legally or not) valuable foreign botanicals—often precious remedies; in this case, cinchona—for production in some part of the French empire. La Condamine wrote of his prospecting for the valuable Peruvian bark:On June 3rd I spent the whole day on one of these mountains [near Quito in present-day Ecuador]. Though assisted by two Americans of the region whom I took with me as guides, I was able to collect no more than eight or nine young plants of Quinquina [cinchona] in a proper state for transportation. These I had planted in earth taken from the spot in a case of suitable size and had them carried on the shoulders of a man whom I kept constantly in my sight, and then by canoe. I hoped to leave some of the plants at Cayenne [in Guiana] for cultivation and to transport the others to the King's garden in France.Despite his care, the plants did not prosper (La Condamine was unaware that cinchona grows only at high altitudes). Nonetheless, while gathering geographical information, he also collected seeds of potentially valuable plants—he mentioned ipecacuanha, simarouba, sarsaparilla, guaiacum, cacaos, and vanilla—and kept his eyes open for treasures yet unknown to Europeans.

La Condamine's interests, motivations, aims, and failures are representative of the volatile nexus of botanical science, commerce, and state politics that is the focus of this volume. Throughout the early modern period, from the earliest voyages of discovery, naturalists sought profitable plants for king and country, personal and corporate profit. By surreptitiously acquiring seedlings of the valuable Peruvian bark, La Condamine sought to undercut the Spanish monopoly on this antimalarial, valuable to Europeans in their efforts to colonize tropical areas. Like so many voyaging naturalists, La Condamine depended upon but did not quite trust his "native guides," whom he kept under constant surveillance. Moreover, like other naturalists, La Condamine overestimated the extent to which plants could be appropriated and reacclimatized; his efforts to transplant the delicate cinchona plants were in vain. In a similarly ill-fated assertion of the hegemony of European botanical practices and the unity of global botany, the great Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) sought to grow tea in the frigid wilds of Sweden.

Colonial botany—the study, naming, cultivation, and marketing of plants in colonial contexts—was born of and supported European voyages, conquests, global trade, and scientific exploration. The expanding science of plants depended on access to ever farther-flung regions of the globe; at the same time, colonial profits depended largely on natural historical exploration and the precise identification and effective cultivation of profitable plants. Costly spices and valuable medicinal plants—nutmeg, tobacco, sugar, Peruvian bark, peppers, cloves, cinnamon, tea—ranked prominently among the motivations for voyages of discovery. Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) and Vasco da Gama (1469-1524) aimed to secure sea routes to the rich spices, silks, and dyes of the Moluccas, China, and India that would enable their countries to conduct trade without the intermediary of Middle Eastern and Venetian merchants. Plants also figured in generating funds for European colonial expansion. Already on his second voyage, in 1494, Columbus brought to the West Indies sugarcane cuttings, eventually one of the world's most lucrative cash crops. Colonial endeavors moved plants and knowledge of plants promiscuously around the world. At the height of its powers, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (Dutch East Indies Company or VOC)—colloquially known as the first multinational company—imported as many as six million pounds of black pepper to the Netherlands annually. Botany was "big science" in the early modern world; it was also big business, enabled by and critical to Europe's bourgeoning trade and colonialism.

This volume presents a number of case studies that, together, chart the shifting relationship between botany, commerce, and state politics in the early modern period. The essays gathered here, written by scholars as international as their subjects, study botanical endeavors in Europe and its colonies as well as in Siberia. Chronologically, they cover three centuries (roughly 1550-1800) of varying colonial and botanical theories and practices. Colonial practices, scientific organization, and commercial connections differed not only over time but also from place to place: the absolute monarchies of Spain and France operated differently in this regard from the United Provinces of the Netherlands, the constitutional monarchy in England, or other states. It is our thesis that early modern botany both facilitated and profited from colonialism and long-distance trade, and that the development of botany and Europe's commercial and territorial expansion are closely associated developments. In ways the remainder of this introduction will suggest, the essays presented here adumbrate an emerging cultural history of plants and botanical practices in Europe and its far-flung colonies and possessions.

Colonial Politics of Botany

One of the primary aims of this volume is to chart a new map of European botany along colonial coordinates, and in this sense it offers a lively challenge to the historiography of early modern botany. A resilient and long-standing narrative in the history of botany has characterized its rise as coincident with and dependent on the development of taxonomy, standardized nomenclature, and "pure" systems of classification. Indeed, the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed key developments in the systematization of many fields. But to isolate the science of botany is to overlook the dynamic relationships among plants, peoples, states, and economies in this period. Recent studies by Richard Drayton, Paula Findlen, Richard Grove, Steven Harris, Lisbet Koerner, Roy MacLeod, James McClellan, David Miller, François Regourd, Emma Spary, Pamela Smith, and others have revealed how early modern science and especially natural history, of which botany was a subfield, remained strategically important in global struggles among emerging nation states for land and resources.

While it is our general thesis that early modern botany intimately supported and profited...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812220099
ISBN 13 
9780812220094
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
343
Herausgeber
Schiebinger Londa, Swan Claudia
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Mare Nostrum Group B.V.
gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk

Doelen 72
Breda
4831 GR
Niederlande

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