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

by Londa Schiebinger (Editor)

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Science, History Of Science

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science at Stanford University. She is the author of the award-winning Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (2004), among many other works.

Reviews

[Annelise]

Okay, this book was awesome. First, I was really excited because I was getting to read about plants (which is my favorite topic ever) in my history class, which was awesome. Second, this book was really well put together. Often, books where each chapter are written by a different author can be disjointed but I was able to follow themes pretty easily. I also liked that different chapters focused on different places, both in Europe and around the world, adding a lot of diversity in perspectives but also showing common themes around the world. There were a few chapters that we didn't read in class that I'm definitely going to go back to as soon as I have time, but from what I've read I learned a lot and my ideas about how the European empires functioned and expanded have changed dramatically.

On a related note, I read Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things this summer, and it touches on many of these themes in a fictional narrative, so if you enjoyed this book (or enjoyed that book) and want to read more books with similar information, I would recommend them both.

[Gail Marlow Taylor]

This book might be of interest to our group - so far it's really interesting.