Imperial Botany
Related terms: plant, environmental science, natural history, agriculture, plantation, colonial inhabitation
Botany, in the broadest sense of the term, refers to the study of plants. Approached in this way, it might be considered transhistorical and universal. Yet in the early modern period, a particular kind of botany established itself in Europe: ‘imperial botany,’ or what others have called ‘the botany of empire’ (Schiebinger 2004; Batsaki et al. 2013; Subramaniam 2024). While imperial botany is not a unified project, there are nevertheless clear political and epistemological markers through which we can trace its past and present. It largely pertains to the kind of botanical practice set in motion by broader European colonial projects, concurrent and contributing to conquest and settlement in the Americas and beyond from the 15th century onwards. Historian Londa Schiebinger notes that “botany – expertise in bioprospecting, plant identification, transport, and acclimatisation – worked hand-in-hand with European colonial expansion” (Schiebinger 2004, 7). European botanists would be aboard the earliest colonial expeditions and collect vast quantities of comestible, medicinal, and ornamental plants from across the globe. They developed procedures and techniques for acclimatisation and cultivation, and thus botany established itself as a scientific discipline of central importance and prestige throughout the long 18th century. This is no longer the case, however. Botany is nowadays practically non-existent in the scientific academy (Crisci et al. 2020, 1173). Yet imperial botany, as I define it here, is not confined to a discrete historical period. Its practices and principles continue to crop up throughout contemporary science and agriculture. In this brief entry, I will map some of these threads in an attempt to tease out the colonial continuities of a particular mode of relating to plants.
One of the foundational tenets of imperial botany might be the simultaneous appropriation and erasure of knowledge. Engaged by colonial powers and charged with documenting, collecting, and transporting ‘new’ plant and seed specimens, European botanists were often highly dependent on the specialised knowledge of local Indigenous populations. In these colonial contact zones, however, power asymmetries played out in conflictual ways. Historian Samir Boumediene describes a “simultaneous desire to appropriate and extract, to save and to destroy” on the part of European botanists (Boumediene 2016, 135). Encyclopedic and exhaustive codices were drawn up, pages upon pages of descriptions and illustrations of flora and their usages studiously detailed. Yet the mirror image of these efforts to record and preserve was manifest in the manifold modes of erasure that took place at the same time. As names were noted, oral languages were forced into writing, and phonetically incompatible sounds were transcribed into the Latin alphabet, distorting them beyond recognition (Boumediene 2016, 117). Moreover, the imposition of an ‘official science’ within the colonies disavowed local knowledge and practices, all while using them to drive imperialist expansion and profit (Djinn Genuisz 2009, 3). A monopoly on the medicinal uses of plants also served as a device for colonial control and a source of immeasurable wealth in the imperial core.
In the present, we see such practices reinstituted and remade. In the continued pursuit of plants for medicinal and comestible purposes for profit in the 21st century, appropriation goes hand in hand with erasure in the form of official science, but also in the form of displacement and dispossession of local communities. Researcher Chanelle Adams notes how in Madagascar “to justify the exploitation and appropriation of phamarcie gasy, [local healing practices based largely on medicinal plants] for financial and political gain, colonial medicine and Big Pharma have relied on categorizing pharmacie gasy as largely ‘toxic’ and in need of Western governance” (Adams 2017). This manifests in regulation, standardisation, and intellectual property rights in the form of patents. Currently, around 15,000 smallholder farms run by Bionexx, a French-owned pharmaceuticals company, cultivate the non-native Sweet wormwood (Artemesia annua), producing dietary supplements and cosmetics on the island. In 2012, police evicted 6000 families from their farmlands so that Bionexx might extend its plantations (Business and Human Rights Resource Centre 2012). Local people are dispossessed of materials, plants, knowledge, labour, and land, which are appropriated by transnational pharmaceutical companies owning and profiting from the plantations on the island, echoing state-led colonial practices set in motion centuries earlier.
Most histories of botany, critical or otherwise, accord a central importance to Carl Linnaeus’ system of binomial nomenclature within the establishment of the discipline. It remains the established procedure for classifying and naming plant life. Yet the implementation of the binomial system saw thousands of species renamed, decontextualising them from the situated knowledge contained in a multiplicity of other names, including knowledge of their origin and their usage, thus doubling down on other forms of colonial erasure. Moreover, as biologist Banu Subramaniam has observed, “Linnaeus built a thread that rendered biological life as a model of human gender, race, and sexuality as he saw it” (Subramaniam 2024, 24). The epistemological consequences have been the reduction of “the complexity of biological life and the richness of its worlds” (24), producing binaries and hierarchies that endure beyond just plants. Notably, Linnaeus also used his Systema Naturae to subdivide the human species into four racial categories, formalizing hierarchies of race “[that] came to bear upon forms of knowledge across fields such as economy, politics, and philosophy that were central to upholding capitalist relations of exchange and the justification of colonial expansion” (Gray and Sheikh 2018, 166).
Moreover, Linnaeus’ binomial system is emblematic of the epistemological commitment to reductionism in imperial botany. While explorers such as Alexander von Humboldt believed that “plants resembled ruins in their capacity to evoke past empires” and was thus “poignantly aware of the historicity of his encounters with the flora of foreign places” (Batsaki et al. 2013, 9), botany eventually shifted away from such practices of naturalism and its understanding of plants as organisms and communities that might lead to broader understandings about nature. The mid-17th century saw the application of microscopy to plants, and thus the ‘discovery’ of the cell (Hooke 1667). With the microscope at the centre of botanical research during this period, “the plant and the animal are seen not so much in their organic unity,” but rather as “paws and hoofs, flowers and fruits,” writes philosopher Michel Foucault (Foucault 1966, 139). While microscopy solidified the position of botany as a positive science – faithful to the doctrine of observation, through the sense of sight, enabling the establishment of ‘facts,’ facts that give access to ‘truth’ – it also set in motion its demise. This reductionist approach – based on the assertion that biological systems are most fruitfully investigated at the “lowest possible level” (Brigandt and Love 2017) – eventually resulted in the dissolution of botany as an autonomous scientific discipline within the academy.
This had two major effects. Firstly, imperial botany moved away from collecting, cataloguing and classifying, and towards a more intimate relationship with colonial agriculture and the plantation. Secondly, the discovery of the cell, and subsequently the molecule, gave birth to new life sciences – molecular biology, biochemistry and molecular genetics – which rapidly took the place and prestige of botany. While plantation practices continue in the present, science in the service of industry also continues to generate techno-fixes to environmental issues that often disproportionately disserve the Global South. The case of France’s overseas plantations distils much of the continuing colonial violence contained in the relationship between agriculture, botany and broader science. In the island départments of Guadeloupe and Martinique, where the colonial filiation remains unbroken, the banana plantations that replaced the sugarcane fields produce 270,000 tons of the crop yearly, 95 per cent of which are exported. It is here that Chlordecone, a highly poisonous pesticide, developed as a techno-fix to a banana weevil problem that threatened the productivity of the plantation, continued to be used until 1993, despite warnings from workers, and having been banned in the United States in 1979. The majority of the local population is thought to have the poisonous compound in their blood, while soils, rivers, and coastlines will be contaminated for decades to come (Ferdinand, 2019b). Notably, White descendants of colonists, who make up less than 1 per cent of the general population, “control 90 per cent of the agricultural sector,” while “the workers who were poisoned were descendants of enslaved people” (Knapp et al. 2024). The pesticide does not contaminate the fruit, but rather the soil, meaning those in metropolitan France can continue to consume the produce of the plantations, while the island’s boundedness ensures the risk is confined to a select part of the population: the formerly colonised.
It is here that we might locate imperial botany in the present. Botany may be many things: seed saving, cultivation, biodiversity preservation, ecological systems, and sustainability research. But its imperial aspects come to the fore when these practices fall “within the reductionist paradigm of producing [...] for the market, not biomass for maintaining ecological cycles or satisfying local needs of food, fodder, and fertilizer” (Shiva 2016, 73). It is here that contemporary agriculture and science risk reproducing and remaking what political ecologist Malcom Ferdinand calls “a colonial inhabitation of the earth”. That is to say, maintaining a mode of inhabiting the earth that is defined by exhaustive and extractive colonial relationships to the land, to non-humans, and the other (Ferdinand 2022, 35).
Defining botany as a foundational science of the environment and imperial botany as a foundational science of colonialism is a necessary first step to understand their logics and effects. Moreover, it allows for a further consideration of how imperial botany has always been destabilised by other ways of considering, cultivating, and caring for plants and the land they occupy. These practices – from the Creole garden on the fringes of the plantation through the agro-ecological practices that preexist and proliferate in the wake of empire to the increasing number of artistic experiments that engage with vegetal life and botanical tools – resist the colonial overdeterminations of botanical history. They include what I have elsewhere called “bootleg botany” (Saxby 2025) – ‘bootleg’ because they reinvent botanical practice without license or without necessarily cohering to official or institutional norms. It is these practices that must inform the study of imperial botany and alternative ecological futures.
These botanies flourish: in El Salvador, “formerly discarded traditional methods of terracing soil or managing water are carefully evaluated” and integrated into permaculture practices (Millner 2021, 20). Experimental soil repair techniques of composting and fertilising are developed, such as the bokashi fertiliser technique conceived of by Japanese horticulturalist and agronomist Teruo Higa as an alternative to chemical fertiliser – and they are transmitted through farmer-to-farmer movements across South America, bypassing big agrotech (Millner 25). In Martinique, the practice of Lasotè has been revived (Krier and Cozzolino 2023, 186); a form of collective, highly specialised agriculture that operates on and with difficult-to-cultivate parcels of land. It is not only a mode of cultivation but also of community, emerging from a broader tradition of collectively occupying land to prevent it from being parcelled up and privatised. For these alternative or bootleg modes of botany also rehearse forms of social organisation that favour practices that are reparative towards the earth, its plants, soil, bugs, microbes and other critters. These practices are of central interest to the environmental humanities, for it is here that we see the emergence of ancestral and creative modes of repairing that evade the extractive and fragmenting drives of imperial botany. For such alternative practices generate loci where questions of environmental cultivation and care are inseparable from anti-imperialist modes of inhabiting the earth.
References
Adams, Chanelle. 2017. “Pharmacie Gasy: The Neocolonial Instrumentalization of Toxicity to Discredit Healing in Madagascar.” The Funambulist, November 3, 2017.
Batsaki, Yota., Sarah Burke Cahalan, & Anatole Tchikine. 2016. The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century. Washington, D.C.: Harvard University Press.
Boumediene, Samir. 2016. La Colonisation Du Savoir: Une Histoire de Plantes Médicinales Du “Nouveau Monde” (1492–1750). Vaulx-en-Velin: Éditions des Mondes à Faire.
Brigandt, Ingo, and Alan Love. 2023. “Reductionism in Biology.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman.
Cozzolino, Francesca, and Sophie Krier. 2022. “‘Faire Danser La Terre.’” Techniques & Culture, no. 78 (December): 170–87.
Crisci, Jorge V., Liliana Katinas, María J. Apodaca, and Peter C. Hoch. 2020. “The End of Botany.” Trends in Plant Science 25 (12): 1173–76.
Ferdinand, Malcom. 2021. “Bridging the Divide to Face the Plantationocene: The Chlordecone Contamination and the 2009 Social Events in Martinique and Guadeloupe.” In Rutgers University Press EBooks, edited by H. Adlai Murdoch, 53–79. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Ferdinand. 2022. Decolonial Ecology Thinking from the Caribbean World. Translated by Anthony Paul Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge Polity Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1966. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge.
Gray, Ros, and Shela Sheikh. 2018. “The Wretched Earth.” Third Text 32 (2-3): 163–75.
Hooke, Robert, James Allestry, James Allestry, and Royal Society (Great Britain). 1667. Micrographia, or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses: With Observations and Inquiries Thereupon. London: Printed for James Allestry, printer to the Royal Society, and to be sold at his shop, at the Rose and Crown in Duck-Lane.
Knapp, Chris., Giada Santana, and Juli Simond. 2024. “The Toxic Legacy of the French Banana.” The Dial, September 26, 2024.
Le Collectif pour la défense des terres malgaches. 2012. “Bionexx-Madagascar : Expulsion de Milliers de Familles Des Terres Qu’elles Ont Mises En Valeur Pendant Des Décennies.” Business and Human Rights Resource Centre.
Millner, Naomi. 2022. Experiments in Situ: Soil Repair Practices as Part of Place-Based Action for Change in El Salvador. In Ecological Reparation, 19-36. Bristol: University of Bristol Press.
Saxby, Jessica. 2024. “Ballast Flora, Plants and the Politics of Colonial Memory in France.” Ph.D. Dissertation. London: Goldsmiths, University of London.
Schiebinger, Londa. 2004. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Shiva, Vandana. 2016. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Subramaniam, Banu. 2024. Botany of Empire Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Wendy Djinn Geniusz. 2009. Our Knowledge Is Not Primitive: Decolonizing Botanical Anishinaabe Teachings. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.