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Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of The British Royal Botanic Gardens
Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of The British Royal Botanic Gardens
Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of The British Royal Botanic Gardens
Until the last few decades, anthropology has concentrated its attention on the
nonliterate peoples, while largely leaving the vast material of written history t o the
historians. Yet the many points of interaction between literate and nonliterate societies
have drawn anthropologists into the study of colonialism as a process and of Europe’s
historical impact on the rest of the world. Clifford Geertz’s pioneering study of Javanese
agricultural involution (1963) under Dutch colonial rule still stands as a model of combined
historical and ecological analysis, as does Eric Wolf’s synthesis of Middle American culture
and history (1959).
A fruitful interdisciplinary approach i s now emerging between anthropologists and those
historians and sociologists who are interested in analyzing the mainsprings of European
power and i t s expansion in the age of empire. lmmanuel Wallerstein (1974) has embarked
on a four volume study of the modern world system; Fernand Braudel(l972) has treated the
sixteenth-century Mediterranean as an integrated regional system; and Jane and Peter
Schneider (1976) have shown how the culture of modern Sicily has been shaped by its
history as a perpetual colony, with ever-changing masters, within the Mediterranean
political-economic system Eric Hobsbawm (1968) takes us to the heart of nineteenth-
century Great Britain; Daniel Gross in a quantified study of the diet of Brazilian sisal
workers (Gross 1970; Gross and Underwood 1971) shows the dire effects of world market
capitalism on these agricultural laborers; and Ravindra K. l a i n (1970) examines a Malayan
rubber plantation, with its Tamil workers, non-Tamil Indian staff, and European manager.
This paper makes a contribution to the tradition of combined historical and ecological
analysis by focusing on the botanic garden, a historic institution with worldwide connec-
tions whose nineteenth-century expansion resulted in a greatly accelerated process of plant
transfers with consequent ecological, economic, social, and poiitical changes. Data come
from library and archival materials, especially from the Library and Herbarium of Kew
Gardens, England and of the New York Botanical Garden, and from exposure through field
trips and anthropological training t o ecosystems of the tropics.’ Taking the worldwide net-
work of a vast institution as the unit of analysis may seem removed from the community-
oriented focus of much traditional anthropology, yet the results of the study underscore
Since the sixteenth century, scientific knowledge, and the application of that knowledge
via technical innovation, has been the cutting edge of Western comparative economic ad-
vantage. Advances in ship building, navigation, and weaponry allowed Western nations to
penetrate all the oceans of the world and to establish outposts for trading their industrial
goods, the products of that same technology. Advances in communications allowed
Western scholars and scientists t o exchange information, to codify it, to preserve it, and to
build on a rapidly accumulating base of useful knowledge. The learned societies that pro-
liferated in the eighteenth century performed experiments, published their proceedings,
received reports from travelers all over the world, and weighed and disseminated the new
information. During the nineteenth century, scientific knowledge increased at an exponen-
tial rate in Europe, both within and outside the universities, as new scientific institutions
were founded.
Through the example of the British botanic garden network in the period 1841-1941,2
this paper explores the early role of formal scientific institutions in the expansion of em-
pire. Such institutions played a critical role in generating and disseminating useful scien-
tific knowledge, which facilitated transfers of energy, manpower, and capital on a
worldwide basis and an unprecedented scale. In particular, the imperial botanic gardens
undertook plant transfers and scientific plant development that resulted in new plantation
crops for the tropical colonies, thereby altering the patterns of world trade and increasing
the plant energy, and human energy in the form of underpaid labor, that the European core
extracted from the tropical peripheries of the world system.
Although my research i s focused on the botanic gardens of Great Britain, the leading co-
lonial power, the Dutch from their Buitenzorg Garden on Java engaged in many parallel ac-
tivities, sometimes in cooperation with the British, sometimes in competition with them.
The French in the nineteenth century were so occupied with political problems at home
and with expansion into Algeria and Morocco that they did not take an active part in the
transfer and development of tropical plants. But later they copied British and Dutch
methods in their rubber plantations in Indochina. The Belgians and the Portuguese each
had a botanic garden solely devoted to developing tropical plants for the benefit of their
colonial planter^.^ The Germans entered the race for tropical colonies late in the game, but
they had some outstanding successes in scientific plant development-for example, sisal,
which I will discuss at a later point.
I shall concentrate on two principal cases-cinchona and rubber-tracing their removal
from their natural habitats in Latin America to their establishment as important commer-
cial crops in the Asian colonies, all under the auspices of the Royal Botanic Gardens at
Kew. As important as their physical removal was their improvement and development by a
corps of scientists serving the Royal Botanic Gardens, a network of government botanical
stations radiating out of Kew and stretching from Jamaica t o Singapore t o Fiji. This new
technical knowledge of improved species and improved methods of cultivation was then
transmitted to the colonial planters and was a crucial factor in the success of the new plan-
tation crops and plant-based industries, one of the main sources of wealth of the empire.
In the opening years of the industrial era, before the rise of the chemical industry with i t s
synthetic substitutes for raw materials, for example, fibers and pharmaceuticals, botanical
knowledge concerning economically useful plants was a counterpart, in a wide sector of
The modern European botanic garden has i t s roots in the hortus medicus attached to the
medical schools of the Renaissance universities, starting in northern Italy and Southern
France in the sixteenth century and spreading north to all the important centers o f learning
in Europe. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a surgeon-naturalist customari-
ly sailed on each of the many worldwide voyages of exploration sponsored by learned
societies or national governments. This practice added appreciably to botanical collections
and spurred a great interest in botany as a science. Many of the exotic specimens brought
t o England by explorers such as Captain Cook (who observed the transit of Venus in the
South Pacific, named Botany Bay, and claimed Australia for Britain all in one voyage,
1768-1771) were placed in a royal garden in the palace grounds at Kew, just upriver from
Seeds are among the most precious and easily transported cultural artifacts. We need
not review here the anthropological literature on the prehistoric spread of the main food
complexes from centers in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Mesoamerica, and the tropical
lowlands of South America. Nearer to our period, Arab traders and farmers introduced
many valuable cultivars of Asiatic origin to medieval Europe. On the European Mediterra-
nean littoral and islands they grew rice, sugarcane, citrus fruits, and large-chromosome cot-
ton, often under the plantation system of production, which Europeans copied and took
with them to the New World (Braudel 1972:155; D. B. Crigg 1974:26; Lane 1973; McNeill
1974; on the origin of specific crops, see Baker 1970 and Heiser 1973).
With the Conquest, all of these crops, and others, were brought to the Americas, and
Plantations as such came late t o the Asian colonies. The chartered trading companies
found there sophisticated societies with greater wealth and more artisan-produced trading
goods and peasant-grown indigenous crops long known and desired by Europeans than had
been the case in the New World. The Dutch in Indonesia pioneered in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries in extracting cash crops from the peasants-first cloves and nutmegs,
then sugar, indigo, and coffee6-under a system of forced deliveries, quotas, fixed prices,
and a labor tax (Ceertz 1963:50ff). Corporate-owned enclave plantations of introduced
crops were a midnineteenth-century development.
In the first half of the nineteenth century the British acquisitions in India were s t i l l
governed by the British East India Company, which had traditionally been more interested
in trading than in planting. But having despoiled India’s home industries, which produced
the fine textiles and other luxury goods that had attracted it t o India (Dutt 1950; Mukherjee
1974; Zeitlin 19721, the company was then starting t o turn India into a source of raw
materials such as cotton, indigo, hemp, saltpeter. It sent India’s peasant-produced raw cot-
ton to Manchester and brought back Lancashire’s machine-made goods t o Calcutta. Until
1834, the company also had the monopoly in British ports on imports of tea, for which
After the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 in Bengal and North India, the British Crown took over
the governance of India from the British East India Company. Britain greatly strengthened
her military and civil bureaucracy in the Indian subcontinent. Now more than ever there
was concern over the health of the troops and their dependents in the “dangerous climate”
of India. In conjunction with the India Office, Kew Gardens sent plant collectors in 1860 t o
the high montane forests of Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Colombia t o secure seeds and
seedlings of the cinchona tree, whose bark yielded the valuable drug quinine, a specific
against all forms of malaria. “Peruvian bark” infused in wine had by then been known t o
Europeans for two hundred years; the Spanish colonists had learned of it from native herb-
alists and taken their knowledge to Spain about 1640.9After some spectacular successes in
All these seeds and seedlings of different varieties of cinchona, collected in 1860 and
1861 from Peru and Ecuador and a few years later from Colombia, were shipped to Kew.
Richard Klein has written that the British propagation of the red cinchona was a com-
plete and costly fiasco (1976:18), but Klein ignores the noncommercial features of the cin-
chona experiment that were of paramount importance t o the British government. The
Dutch could afford to pursue the commercial goal with a single mind because they did not
have to maintain a large army in the tropics, but protecting the health of their troops was
the prime British concern. Government manufactories in Bengal and in the Madras
Presidency of India produced a cinchona bark compound, totaquine, that was much
cheaper than pure quinine but almost equally effective. I t was distributed t o military per-
sonnel, civil servants, and large planters for mass treatment of their coolies (Parliamentary
Blue Book, Cinchona, Madras, 1860-1897).
In Bengal some totaquine was put on the general market and could be bought at any
postoffice for a penny a packet -as the Kew historians loved to boast -highlighting only
The rubber transfer of 1876 was in many respects a reprise of the cinchona transfer, but it
was an unqualified commercial success.
In the opening years of the twentieth century, 98 percent of the world’s rubber came
from Latin America. Long before the arrival of Europeans, indigenous peoples had
discovered the elastic properties of the latex of certain trees and shrubs and the smoke-ball
method of processing the latex. The bulk of this crude rubber, and the best quality rubber,
came from the latex of Hevea species found throughout the Amazon basin. Rubber was
first used in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States for rainwear and machine
belts and rollers. The invention of the bicycle and the automobile greatly increased the de-
mand for the substance. The wild rubber industry underwent several successive booms, and
in the years 1909-1913, exports of rubber brought Brazil more revenue than coffee exports
and made the port cities of Para (now Belem) and Manaus opulent cities (Wolf and Wolf
1936:48).
This prosperity was built on the shaky foundation of a natural monopoly of the highly
desired Hevea species. But in 1876 Kew Gardens and the India Office had jointly sponsored
the removal of wild rubber seeds from Brazil. Henry Wickham, a plant collector in their
employ, succeeded in smuggling out seventy thousand Hevea seeds from under the nose of
the custom‘s officer in Para City and proudly presented them t o Joseph Hooker at Kew
Gardens (Wickham 1908). Orchids were turned out of the greenhouses at Kew to make way
for the rubber seeds. O f those that germinated, nineteen hundred young trees were sent t o
the Peradeniya Gardens on Ceylon, which sent twenty-two specimens on t o Singapore. This
The valuable cinchona trees and the most valuable rubber trees occurred naturally in the
Andean montane forests and the Amazon basin, respectively, both regions of low popula-
tion density. During the rubber booms, the labor shortage in the Amazon basin was such,
that many Amazonian Indians were pressed into involuntary servitude as rubber tappers,
and many tribes, for example, the Huitotos, the Boras, and the Andokes, were decimated by
the abuses they suffered at the hands of armed guards hired by the rubber barons. This
genocide was partially documented in the British Government Blue Books of 1912 and
1913.”
By contrast, European planters in South and Southeast Asia could draw on the immense
pool of excess labor produced and reproduced in the old agrarian empires. Europe had
penetrated these empires in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, and had systematically
undermined their native industries, handicrafts, and trade. Under a system of indenture
that carried penal clauses for nonpayment of debt, that is, virtual debt slavery, Tamils from
South India emigrated t o work the plantations on Ceylon and in Malaya. The system got i t s
start in the 1840s when coffee plantations were opened up on Ceylon. The government did
not intervene t o protect the immigrants from working and living conditions that led to an
estimated death rate of 250 per thousand each year; instead, the first piece of labor legisla-
tion, Ordinance 5 of 1841, enabled the planter t o hold the worker t o his contract (Ludowyk
1967:196, quoting from an official dispatch from Tennant t o Lord Grey, Colonial Secretary).
The tea, cinchona, and rubber plantations that later spread over Ceylon were largely work-
ed by Tamils.12 The recruiting was done by kanganies, originally family heads sent into
After the rubber coup, Kew Gardens did not take part in any more seed-smuggling
expeditions, but it continued to gather information on economically useful plants, even in
“protected industries,” instructing British consuls t o send specimens and reports, as in the
case of the Mexican sisal industry (Kew Bulletin 1892:22-23). In the late nineteenth century
Yucatan was the world’s only supplier of sisal, a hard fiber used for binder twine. Farmers in
Europe as well as on the continental plains of the United States, which had just come into
large-scale wheat production, needed sisal twine t o bind their wheat.
In 1892, the Kew Bulletin o f Miscellaneous Information published a series of articles on
all aspects of the Mexican sisal industry. It was expected that this information would help
the Bahamas, other islands in the British West Indies, Mauritius, Fiji, and perhaps India, t o
establish sisal industries. The Royal Botanic Gardens of Trinidad and St. Vincent and St.
Lucia had already found a supplier of a closely related sisal species in Florida. The name of
the nurseryman was printed in the Kew Bulletin reports (1892:34).”
Scientific information travels easily across international boundaries t o peoples culturally
prepared to receive it. The Kew Bulletin articles let the genie out of the bottle. A German
agronomist working for the German East Africa Company was looking for a suitable crop t o
develop in the dry areas of the new German colony. He read the Kew Bulletin reports,
ordered sisal bulbils from Florida, and soon had established a modern, rationalized sisal in-
dustry in German East Africa (Lock 1969). The British inherited this sisal industry after the
German defeat in World War I, when they acquired the German colony (renamed
Tanganyika; now Tanzania).
Meanwhile, Kenya had started its own sisal industry from purchases of German bulbils;
other East African colonies took up sisal, and Java added it t o i t s long l i s t of plantation
crops. The European sisal plantations had the advantage of modern scientific research and
modern machinery. In 1966, henequen, the Mexican variety of sisal, accounted for only 12
percent of the world’s hard fibers, while Agave sisalana, the variety developed by Euro-
peans, accounted for 75 percent (Lock 1969:326).
Not all A. sisalana was plantation produced, however. In the years of high demand
created by World War II, peasants in arid northeastern Brazil switched to sisal. But lacking
conclusion
In this study, Kew Gardens and i t s colonial affiliates emerge as a vital capital asset,
transforming knowledge into profit and power for Great Britain. The Dutch botanic gardens
played a similar role for the Netherlands, helping that nation to remain a strong corn-
merical power long after i t s political power had waned. Botanic gardens are generally seen
by the public as beautiful green enclaves planted with rare trees and flowers, with a
laboratory where botanists pursue the mysteries of plant cytology, or nowadays, the
ecology of the biosphere.
But botanic gardens, like other institutions, mold themselves to the functional re-
quirements and the ethos of their cultural era, and botanic gardens had a period of intense
activity in the service of Western colonial expansion. Through the exercise of sheer power
as well as by their scientific expertise, they increased the comparative advantage of the
Western core of nations over the rest of the world. The alliance of science, capital, and
political power had systemic results that we s t i l l wrestle with today.
notes
' I am grateful t o Daniel Gross, Joan Mencher. Joyce Riegelhaupt, Jane Schneider. Charles Tilly,
and Paul Wheatley for helpful comments on a previous version of this paper. The research was carried
out during my graduate studies at City University of New York.
Kew Gardens was the center of an informal network of British domestic and colonial botanic
gardens, numbering about thirty. Each colonial garden was funded by and was nominally under the
jurisdiction of i t s particular colonial government, but the director of Kew Gardens had de facto power
to choose their directors and could command their participation in any project he undertook.
The dates 1841-1941 are approximate, representing the period from the establishment of Kew
Gardens as a state institution up through the last year before Southeast Asia fell t o the Japanese in
World War I I , when the flow of tropical products to the West ceased.
"A planter is a person who gets someone else t o plant for him" (Anonymous).
' These voluntary associations filled a gap left by the English universities, temporarily sunk in
lethargy, little more than finishing schools for the sons of the peerage and gentry. Oxford and Cam-
bridge in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had a minimal interest in science; they did not
consider it a gentlemanly pursuit. By contrast, the Scottish universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow
taught botany and had botanical collections. Edinburgh was second only t o Kew in the number of
references cited