Colonial Botany: Gender, Politics, and Commerce between Europe and the West Indies in the Eighteenth Century

Pennsylvania State Univ University Park, University Park PA

Investigators

Abstract

Project Abstract Proposal 0217605 Colonial Botany: Gender, Politics, and Commerce between Europe and the West Indies in the Eighteenth Century Londa Schiebinger, Penn State The last several years have witnessed renewed interest in the history of botany, the "big science" of early modern Europe. This book-length project explores the movement, triumph, suppression, and extinction of different botanical knowledges in 18th century encounters between Europeans and the inhabitants of the Caribbean. The project has several purposes. First, it asks scholarly audiences to consider the cultural politics of plants. Plants rarely appear in undergraduate or graduate courses on European, American, World History or History of Science, and are rarely part of our grand narratives of war, peace, or even everyday life. But they are important cultural artifacts, often at the center of political and economic struggles. In the eighteenth-century, plants played a role in political struggles surrounding slavery (slave women, for example, employed abortifacients to resist producing more field hands for plantation owners). Plants also figured in battles between trading companies, states, and local bio-pirates for monopolies on profitable colonial commodities. Second, this project seeks to examine the linkage between colonial botany and gender relations. While gender has received some attention in the history of eighteenth-century anthropology and travel literature and in the history of slavery, it has received relatively little in the history of colonial botany. In this project, the PI explores how European gender relations guided naturalists as they explored other lands, peoples, and their knowledges. Third, this project contributes to rethinking the history of botany. A long-standing narrative has presented modern botany as the rise of taxonomy, nomenclature, and "pure" systems of classification. This approach does not capture the realities of botany in the eighteenth century as a matter of state. Emerging nation-states that vied for land and resources saw botanists who collected rare and beautiful plants for study and global exchange as crucial for European colonizing efforts in tropical climates. Fourth, this project seeks to develop further and apply a new methodological tool that Robert Proctor has called "agnatology"--the study of culturally-induced ignorances. Agnatology refocuses questions about "how we know" to include questions about what we do not know and why not. While much of the literature on colonial science has focused on how knowledge is made and transferred between continents, the PI explores the non-transfer of important bodies of knowledge from the New World to Europe. The PI will work in archives and libraries in Europe and the Caribbean to prepare a book, for a broad scholarly audience including those working in STS as well as botanists and naturalists.