Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World [Paperback]

Londa Schiebinger (Editor), Claudia Swan (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0812220099 | ISBN-13: 978-0812220094 | Publication Date: July 17, 2007

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Well illustrated and imaginatively written, this . . . superb collection surveys the leading edge of current approaches but also points towards future research."—Renaissance Studies

"This collection contributes importantly not only to scholarship on science and empire, but makes clear the diversity of colonial relationships and the myriad and complex ways in which scientific knowledge was made."—Renaissance Quarterly

About the Author

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).

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press (July 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812220099
• ISBN-13: 978-0812220094
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #611,649 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ask the botanist, February 24, 2006

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Reader from Yellow River - See all my reviews

This review is from: Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Hardcover)

Botany became an important science during three centuries of European empire-building, from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Ships from England, France, the Netherlands, and Spain sailed to make discoveries in the service of storing up riches. Those riches weren't just precious metals such as New World gold. They were also luxuries whose sales made fortunes for peoples and empires. So Columbus sailed west, to break into successful spice-, silk- and dye-trading China, India and the Moluccas.

Riches were also made from garden and field plants, fruits, forest products, and flowers from Africa, the Americas, and the East and West Indies. So in 1494 Columbus brought sugarcane cuttings into the West Indies. That gave Spain a start on one of the world's most successful cash crops. Great fortunes awaited those who grew and handled non-native luxuries and cash crops such as cinnamon, cloves, coffee, maize, nutmeg, pepper, Peruvian bark, rubber, sugar, tea, and tobacco. Europeans needed to know what plants looked like and where they grew, to make sure they got the correct plants.

So botany grew hand-in-hand with European voyages. For science, settlement, and trade all drove collecting, classifying, and naming plants in the late 17th and 18th centuries. In fact, one reason behind Linnaeus classifying and naming plants was Sweden's standing in the world. His country needed to close their borders against a gold drain. Linnaeus' botanical contributions helped Swedish business and government choose which of the luxuries and cash crops grew in Sweden's climate and soils. What grew wouldn't have to be imported at high prices.

Editors Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, along with their contributing writers, offer readers a beautifully indexed, organized and written book. Their chapters give strong examples, facts, figures, historical illustrations, interpretations, and references. It's history. But what botanists, naturalists, planters, politicians, and traders did then affects us today. Seeds, plants, and cuttings were shipped, to become non-native exotics every which place but home. They were studied, pigeonholed, and named. But their natural settings and controls, such as diseases and pests, weren't. It wasn't naturally matching correct soil, correct plant, correct environment, correct controls. But, fortunately, science and its solutions have jumped way beyond the limits of COLONIAL BOTANY.