Colonial Botany

Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World

Londa Schiebinger, Claudia Swan, Londa Schiebinger, Claudia Swan

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780812293470
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte der Renaissance

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.

I.

Colonial Governance and Botanical Practices

Chapter 1

Dominion, Demonstration, and Domination

Religious Doctrine, Territorial Politics, and French Plant Collection

Chandra Mukerji

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, gardens played key roles in French political culture as acquiring and controlling territory became central to state government. While fortresses were constructed around the perimeter of France and forests were surveyed for reform, formal gardens were laid out over vast areas around royal residences as symbols of territorial domination and exemplars of orderly land management. Their designers demonstrated and experimented with the French capacity to control land and its resources, and to use them for advantage.¹ In this context, the collection and display of rare and exotic plants took on strategic significance. Colonial botany became embroiled in state politics as finding exotic species, learning their uses, collecting their various names, sending them to France, displaying them in botanical gardens, and comparing them systematically constituted practices of territorial governance as well as of natural history.

Imported plants played a small but important role in the military articulation of the state’s boundaries. Trees were used in fortress construction and shipbuilding; they were tools for defending state borders along coasts and in the interior. Forest reform was, in turn, fueled by the need for timber, and importations of new species of trees and the development of techniques for transferring large specimens into French gardens were visible exercises in military management as well as horticulture. The botanist Pierre Belon (1517?–64) brought plane trees into France and worked tirelessly (if ineffectively) to adapt them to the French climate. Others later succeeded, and plane trees became ubiquitous elements of French gardens, canal banks, and country roads. From the forests of North America, botanist-explorers from René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle (1643–87), to Michel Sarrazin (1659–1734) sent walnuts, mulberries, oaks, and other trees from Canada to the Jardin du Roi for the reforestation of France.²

At a more symbolic level, the collection and study of imported plants had much greater political significance. French gardens displayed intelligence in the use of territorial resources, as well as a legitimating capacity to manage nature and “improve” it through knowledgeable human action, which included collecting, naming, and finding the useful properties of new species. Botanical gardens at Montpellier, Paris, and some port cities were laid out strategically to contain a wide range of plants and to embellish and improve French life.³

Formal gardens, particularly at Versailles, took advantage of and publicly demonstrated French abilities to raise lush forests, acquire exotics, and use horticulture effectively. Versailles housed a huge collection of tender citrus and palms kept warm in the Orangerie in the winter and trundled out to scent the halls of the chateau in winter or to decorate the Parterre du Midi during warm weather. These botanical assets, tender plants of the Mediterranean world, exemplified French interests in and control over southern France. The flower parterres near the house were simultaneously filled with bulbs and other exotics that brought color and other sensual (and Edenic) qualities to the king’s domain—among them, plants from the Baltic and Mediterranean regions as well as far-flung trading stations. The potager, or kitchen garden, was equally a collector’s paradise, containing hundreds of varieties of pears, apples, and melons as well as vegetables forced behind glass to mature out of season. The royal collections of rare plants and tender species spoke of the ambition and intelligence of French naturalists and horticulturalists, and of the political aspirations of the monarchy to develop power over the natural world and deploy it to glorify France.⁴

Land management as a legitimating principle of power took on a unique role in French politics. Walks through the gardens at Versailles were used under Louis XIV (1638–1715) to demonstrate French power, using this grand park as a microcosm of territorial France for diplomatic purposes.⁵ Knowledgeable and orderly use of state land—both in royal gardens and in the countryside beyond—became a measure and moral foundation of political territoriality.

French political attention to territorial improvement intensified on account of the importance of land control during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in France. During the Wars of Religion the strategic parity of Protestants and Catholics made the conflicts over faith particularly hard to resolve. Fighting was repetitive and intense, and it destroyed human life as well as the landscape. One solution to the problem was to allocate places to faiths. In this context, some writers began to urge study and improvement of the countryside (God’s works) as an alternative spiritual practice to contemplation of the Word—the source of doctrinal conflicts.⁶ In the words of Bernard Palissy (1509–90):

I came to consider the marvellous deeds which the Sovereign has commanded Nature to perform; and among other things I contemplated the branches of the vines, of peas, gourds, which seemed as though they had some sense of their weak nature; for being unable to sustain themselves, they stretched certain little arms like threads into the air, and finding some small branch or twig, came to unite and attach themselves, never again to part thence, that they might sustain the parts of their weak nature . . . when I had seen and contemplated such a thing I could find nothing better than to employ oneself in the art of agriculture, and to glorify God, and to recognize Him in His marvels.⁷

Studying nature and using land effectively was a spiritual path with social virtues in a country devastated by war. During the reign of Henri IV (1553–1610), Olivier de Serres (1539–1619) made this mesnagement (rational land management) philosophy explicitly political. He argued that the legitimacy of a regime and the moral and political fiber of a good ruler were (or ought to be) reflected in the orderliness and abundance of the countryside.⁸ De Serres convinced Henri IV to put the rebuilding of French lands (in part through strategic plant collection and cultivation) at the heart of his administration.⁹

By the mid-seventeenth century, when the French monarchy was once again overtly Catholic, mesnagement ideas about the restoration of Eden seemed too Protestant, and stewardship was abandoned as an explicit principle of power in France. Still, demonstrations of intelligence in using the natural world remained marks of virtuous administration; stewardship was reduced to reasoned use of political territory.¹⁰

The garden theorist Jacques Boyceau de la Barauderie (1560–1633) was crucial in engineering the shift from the moral language of mesnagement politics to a learned language of territorial governance. This admired and charming courtier was from one of the famous Huguenot gardening families living by the Tuileries in Paris. He was also an educated man who had ambitions for his profession, wanting to make elite garden design a recognized art form and, as such, closer to architecture than agriculture. Treating rational land use à la mesnagement tradition as an intellectual pursuit, he argued that young gardeners of talent should acquire formal education in mathematics, engineering, and classical design. Proper schooling would allow them to build French gardens with a measured orderliness that would highlight the continuities between French and classical culture and display the lawful orderliness of nature. Boyceau argued that parterres or formal garden beds should be laid out in complex and symmetrical ways to embody the abundance and orderliness of nature as it was known to science. This design strategy was implicitly a program of “restoration,” intended to bring gardens closer to perfection using human intelligence, but Boyceau’s writings presented the work as intellectual, a fruit of knowledge rather than faith. With this shift in register, he melded antiquarian and scientific forms of “rationality” with mesnagement techniques.¹¹

The gardens built for Louis XIV by Boyceau’s protégé André Le Nôtre (1613–1700) were experiments in and massive displays of this “intelligent” territorial management.¹² The publicist André Félibien (1619–95) praised them for improving on nature with art, just as Boyceau had prescribed. Even as Louis XIV turned against the Huguenots, revoking the Edict of Nantes and making faith once again the dominant moral mandate for Christian governance, the material techniques and political logic of mesnagement land use, stripped of religious connotations by Boyceau, remained central to French governance. Stewardship was folded into territorial administration, and botanical study and horticulture remained important aspects of government.¹³

French rule over its colonies was shaped by these moral currents, which animated French territorial politics—the association of legitimacy with visible and effective land management. The great statesman Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s (1619–83) early hope was that colonies would quickly flourish and gain the same political status, social customs, and material control as other regions of France. However, colonial lands required a level of mastery and orderly management of the landscape that was hard to realize—particularly outside of France. Stewardship worked well enough in Saint Domingue (Haiti), where disease and the Spanish had decimated the indigenous population (see Londa Schiebinger’s essay in this volume), so there were no traditional land management strategies to displace. The labor force was made up of slaves who had been wrested from their own lands to populate the island. The sugar plantations in Saint Domingue acquired both the “natural orderliness” associated with virtuous management and the “abundance” needed to subsidize the requisite infrastructure.¹⁴

In contrast, territoriality worked less well in Canada, Louisiana, and Madagascar, in spite of the botanical assets of these colonies, precisely because there were still indigenous groups in these regions intent on preserving their own ways of life. Illness, warfare, and the more marginal success of economic ventures made these sites poor examples of “dominion” or good administration. In these colonies, reforming the populations through faith became more pressing than land reform, and plants with useful or sensual properties were packed off to France, where they could be properly placed both intellectually and practically inside French culture. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, plants from the colonies were “rescued” in this way from botanical backwaters and folded into territorial politics. At the Jardin du Roi both the glories of exotic plants and the marvels of human intellect were demonstrated to Parisians, and specimens from abroad were ceremonially translated into assets of France.¹⁵

The organization of French botanical research changed with the erosion of dreams of re-creating Eden in the colonies. Botanists sent to these regions in the mid-seventeenth century (if they were lucky) became collectors for and “correspondents” of the Académie Royale des Sciences.¹⁶ They might or might not set up their own gardens (without state support), but they were certainly not asked to be stewards of their own colonies. Their collections were transferred to botanical gardens in French cities. Plants were physically assimilated to French soil, where they could be readied for participation in French intellectual and political life.¹⁷ This movement of plants might be understood as part of an abstract centralizing tendency in French state-based government, although it was closer to an expression of French territoriality with its religious roots and their attachment to botanical and horticultural knowledge.

Mesnagement Principles and Botanical Gardening

Beginning around the turn of the seventeenth century, French mesnagement principles came to shape the history of botany and not just public administration in France. Henri IV authorized the construction of the first major botanical garden in France for the medical school of the university at Montpellier. This garden was meant to be a place to acclimatize new species, study the pharmacological qualities of plants, and provide France with a center for exercising the intellectual and practical skills required for good medical practice throughout and virtuous stewardship of the kingdom. It was not only designed to make useful medicinal plants more commonly available in France but was also charged with promoting rural life through the strategic cultivation of new imports with refined horticultural techniques.¹⁸ This use of plant collection for political advantage fit perfectly with the mesnagement policies prescribed by Olivier de Serres.

The garden at Montpellier was modeled on existing Italian botanical gardens built near medical schools (as at Pisa and Padua) and has often been described as a replica of them. The program of education was comparably academic and similarly a product of the commercial culture around the Mediterranean that brought imported species of plants and books about medicine into circulation. Pedagogy in medical botany at Montpellier centered on plant demonstrations too. These instructional walks through the garden taught students how to identify plants and were connected to lectures on botany, which grappled with the problems of botanical nomenclature that likewise interested antiquarian natural philosophers in both Italy and France.¹⁹ The use of live plants in these early medical gardens was designed to improve on the empirically limiting practice of using only dried herbs for pharmacology. Dead plants were hard to study for botanical purposes, were of limited help in plant collecting, and often had to be obtained at high cost through drug sellers who had secret sources. The use of live plants was forcefully advocated by the Greek physician and pharmacologist Dioscorides (first century C.E.), whose De Materia Medica was first published in 1499 in Venice and appeared in a French edition by Jean Ruel (1474–1537) in 1516. Dioscorides argued that in order to understand plants one had to grow them and observe their development rather than cut them and collect them as dead specimens. He even advocated methods of field study, looking at how different flora grew in their natural habitat. His ideas, in turn, convinced the Roman physician Galen (b. 129 C.E.) of the importance of botanical field studies and careful observation of the physical properties of plants. As Galen’s works entered into the sixteenth-century medical curriculum, they supported a turn throughout Europe toward plant collection and cultivation, and the continued development of botanical gardening at Montpellier.²⁰

Plant demonstrations at Montpellier and later in Paris served to teach medicine but also articulated the intellectual and ceremonial underpinnings of territorial politics. The botanical garden was a built environment (like a political territory)—an intentionally designed combination of artifice and natural features with marked boundaries, internal infrastructure, and natural assets. It was a place to impose order on the natural world and to show the effects of human “improvements.” The botanical garden at Montpellier brought together naming practices, specimens, and the organization of the garden beds too. Different parts of the garden were designated by their microclimates—humid, dry, warm, cool—and plants were sorted among them just as mesnagement writers recommended in cases of planning estates and administering states. As a collection for study, as well, the garden stood between the countryside with its array of wild plants, on the one hand, and a pharmacist’s medicine jars with their dried herbs, on the other. It brought the order of knowledge to the disorder of plants—the fundamental act of stewardship. Plant demonstrations taught students how to learn from these collections and how to use their intellects to enhance life in France.²¹

The Montpellier tradition of botanical gardening and medical education was brought to Paris at the end of the seventeenth century, where it found a home at the newly conceived Jardin du Roi. This botanical garden was developed under the authority of the king’s household (officially, his physician) and had state as well as academic functions. It was...