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

Writing from Lima in 1568, Pedro de Osma informed his Spanish correspondent: "[C]onsider how many more herbs and plants possessing great virtues . . . our Indies must have. But they are out of our reach and knowledge because the Indians, being bad people and our enemies, will not reveal to us a secret, not a single virtue of a herb, even if they should see us die, or even if they be sawed in pieces. If we know anything of the matters I have treated, and of others, we learned it from the female Indians. Because they get involved with Spaniards, and reveal to them all that they know" (95). Encapsulated in this remarkable passage are many of the themes contained in this rich and excellent volume of essays. The search for medicines, commercial exchange, translation between languages and cultures, the fraught process of knowledge making, and colonial relationships are leitmotifs in its sixteen articles, and yet the essays include much besides these themes. The sheer diversity of subjects discussed by the volume's authors highlights the variability of the colonial experience even while implacable brutality seems a constant of most of the colonial interactions chronicled in this volume's pages. The authors are concerned to make clear the variety of commercial and scientific settings in which botanical transactions took place and the variety of relations between indigenous and academic knowledge. The volume as a whole treats not just how knowledge traveled and was translated between cultures, but also how natural objects — seeds, plants, cash crops — made the voyages across oceans and cultures and transformed economies and ecosystems. As the editors write, "The story of colonial botany is as much a story of transplanting nature as it is one of transforming knowledge" (16).

The volume opens with essays that link botanical enterprises to political order in very different settings, but which, as a whole, show just how complex were the social processes of observing, collecting, and defining, and what long networks of human interactions they involved, particularly at colonial removes. They also point to how natural history seamlessly incorporated natural knowledge and economic profit. Indeed, interest in extra-European nature (and in much of European nature also) was almost always inextricably linked to commercial exploitation in the age of European expansion.

While almost all the essays treat in extremely interesting and important ways the relations between indigenous or practical informants and the scholars or merchants who were eager to gather specimens and knowledge in the colonies, the second group of essays specifically treats "Local Knowledge(s), Global Science." Many of the essays in this section show how local knowledge of the east Indies and the New World was translated, suppressed, ignored, or lost in its transition to universal botanical science. Some of these essays make the point that natural objects often had to be stripped of their local significances and cultures in order to become incorporated into European natural history, medicine, and commerce. Daniela Bleichmar's excellent essay underscores these points: "The circulation of knowledge from the New World to the Old and back to the New was dependent on native knowledge yet unable to access and credit indigenous populations as sources. American natives were at the center of this cycle and at the same time excluded from it" (95). Other essays in this section treat transactions among indigenous peoples, nativized Europeans, and Europeans at home and abroad in the Dutch East Indies, South America, and the Caribbean.

The third section of the volume, "Cash Crops: Making and Remaking Nature," focuses on plants as commodities and contains an outstanding essay by Emma Spary, who carefully charts the dispute about the identification of nutmeg and shows how personae such as botanist and categories such as nutmeg are constructed out of the political, social, and botanical politicking both in and between the metropolis and the colonies. Judith...