The Floracrats: State-Sponsored Science and the Failure of the Enlightenment in Indonesia (review)

Do you know of any Indonesian natural scientists? Most of us, Andrew Goss suggests, would have difficulty coming up with more than a couple of names. In this book, Goss offers some reasons why this might be so. He argues that “the failure of the Enlightenment . . . is the key to understanding the history of science and the politics of knowledge in modern Indonesia” (p. ix). Goss supports his thesis by examining three formative periods in the relationship between state and civil society: the 1830s and 1840s, when a few Europeans tried to incorporate scientific inquiry into a broadly defined natural history, with the product of this union, they hoped, being an integral part of an emergent civil society; the decades around 1900, when Melchior Treub, an experimental biologist, equipped the Buitenzorg Botanical Gardens with a laboratory that became famous among the European scientific community as a place to study tropical nature; and the 1950s and 1960s, when scientists of the newly established Republic of Indonesia considered how to craft a distinctly Indonesian biology. At these moments it seemed possible to enlarge public support for science. In each case, however, knowledge production was effectively co-opted by states suspicious of sources of legitimacy outside of their control.

Strictly speaking, only chapters 2, 4, and 6 address technology directly. For example, chapter 2, “Quinine Science,” analyzes the quinine gardens directed by Franz Junghuhn, a former military doctor. These gardens were designed to reflect the “glory and power” (p. 34) of his patron. It shows that whereas Junghuhn knew how to court political power—he named a species of cinchona after his patron—the ex-physician could not get this species to become a commercial source of quinine for anti-malaria drugs. Goss’s analysis of an 1863 Dutch parliamentary debate about quinine science shows nicely how political and economic liberalism in the Netherlands could affect science in the Dutch East Indies. After this debate and Junghuhn’s death in 1864, quinine science was placed under greater bureaucratic oversight and successful research eventually produced cinchona trees with high quinine yields.

Yet there is much else of interest to historians of technology throughout this book, starting with the title. Playing on the well-known concept of technocrats, Goss defines floracrats as “naturalists working as colonial officials on state projects” (p. 9). He argues that the word “technocrat” does not accurately describe the naturalists and biologists he considers, because colonial and postcolonial “state policies were not about creating technical solutions per se but about generating systems that they could effectively administer” (p. 47). This is a subtle distinction but one that is consistent with Goss’s evaluation of the balance of power between government officials and scientists in Indonesia.

Two of the most significant findings of Floracrats come in its analysis, beginning in chapter 5, of the role of biology and biologists in decolonization. First, Goss convincingly demonstrates that postcolonial approaches to science in Indonesia have roots in the colonial period. Goss argues that especially after 1959 Indonesian biologists carried out “desk science,” which “linked pure knowledge to national development” (p. 164). While this practice failed to produce “world-class science,” it ensured state support for biological research that fulfilled national needs. A prime example was Flora Malesiana, a project aimed at synthesizing knowledge about Indonesian plants. Second, Goss holds that only science and not scientists played a significant role in the Indonesian revolution of the late 1940s. Ming-cheng Lo’s Doctors within Borders (2002), a study of Taiwanese medical doctors, suggests differences with regard to the role of disciplines in anticolonial movements.

My main criticism of this otherwise useful book concerns the author’s use of the concept of civil society, a notoriously slippery term. Goss’s discussion of civil society is well integrated into the historical narrative, but he gives the term more explanatory power than it perhaps merits. An overly tight linkage among...