Latin America Between Colony and Nation. Selected Table of contents (9 chapters). Passage to The Colonial Roots of Latin American Independence. Lynch.
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Maltese Settler Clubs in France 3.
A Hierarchy of Settlers and the Liminal Maltese 4. The Algerian Melting Pot 5. The Ambivalence of Assimilation 6. Malta as Algeria in the Pied-noir Imagination. Privacy Notice Accessibility Help. Skip to services menu. Search by title, author, keyword or ISBN. New Anthropologies of Europe. I hoped to leave some of the plants at Cayenne [in Guiana] for cultivation and to transport the others to the King's garden in France. Despite his care, the plants did not prosper La Condamine was unaware that cinchona grows only at high altitudes.
Nonetheless, while gathering geographical information, he also collected seeds of potentially valuable plants—he mentioned ipecacuanha, simarouba, sarsaparilla, guaiacum, cacaos, and vanilla—and kept his eyes open for treasures yet unknown to Europeans.
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La Condamine's interests, motivations, aims, and failures are representative of the volatile nexus of botanical science, commerce, and state politics that is the focus of this volume. Throughout the early modern period, from the earliest voyages of discovery, naturalists sought profitable plants for king and country, personal and corporate profit.
By surreptitiously acquiring seedlings of the valuable Peruvian bark, La Condamine sought to undercut the Spanish monopoly on this antimalarial, valuable to Europeans in their efforts to colonize tropical areas. Like so many voyaging naturalists, La Condamine depended upon but did not quite trust his "native guides," whom he kept under constant surveillance. Moreover, like other naturalists, La Condamine overestimated the extent to which plants could be appropriated and reacclimatized; his efforts to transplant the delicate cinchona plants were in vain.
In a similarly ill-fated assertion of the hegemony of European botanical practices and the unity of global botany, the great Carl Linnaeus sought to grow tea in the frigid wilds of Sweden. Colonial botany—the study, naming, cultivation, and marketing of plants in colonial contexts—was born of and supported European voyages, conquests, global trade, and scientific exploration. The expanding science of plants depended on access to ever farther-flung regions of the globe; at the same time, colonial profits depended largely on natural historical exploration and the precise identification and effective cultivation of profitable plants.
Costly spices and valuable medicinal plants—nutmeg, tobacco, sugar, Peruvian bark, peppers, cloves, cinnamon, tea—ranked prominently among the motivations for voyages of discovery. Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama aimed to secure sea routes to the rich spices, silks, and dyes of the Moluccas, China, and India that would enable their countries to conduct trade without the intermediary of Middle Eastern and Venetian merchants. Plants also figured in generating funds for European colonial expansion. Already on his second voyage, in , Columbus brought to the West Indies sugarcane cuttings, eventually one of the world's most lucrative cash crops.
Colonial endeavors moved plants and knowledge of plants promiscuously around the world.
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At the height of its powers, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie Dutch East Indies Company or VOC —colloquially known as the first multinational company—imported as many as six million pounds of black pepper to the Netherlands annually. Botany was "big science" in the early modern world; it was also big business, enabled by and critical to Europe's bourgeoning trade and colonialism. This volume presents a number of case studies that, together, chart the shifting relationship between botany, commerce, and state politics in the early modern period.
The essays gathered here, written by scholars as international as their subjects, study botanical endeavors in Europe and its colonies as well as in Siberia. Chronologically, they cover three centuries roughly of varying colonial and botanical theories and practices. Colonial practices, scientific organization, and commercial connections differed not only over time but also from place to place: It is our thesis that early modern botany both facilitated and profited from colonialism and long-distance trade, and that the development of botany and Europe's commercial and territorial expansion are closely associated developments.
In ways the remainder of this introduction will suggest, the essays presented here adumbrate an emerging cultural history of plants and botanical practices in Europe and its far-flung colonies and possessions. One of the primary aims of this volume is to chart a new map of European botany along colonial coordinates, and in this sense it offers a lively challenge to the historiography of early modern botany.
A resilient and long-standing narrative in the history of botany has characterized its rise as coincident with and dependent on the development of taxonomy, standardized nomenclature, and "pure" systems of classification. Indeed, the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed key developments in the systematization of many fields. But to isolate the science of botany is to overlook the dynamic relationships among plants, peoples, states, and economies in this period. While it is our general thesis that early modern botany intimately supported and profited from European expansion, Europe's emerging nation states engaged in different types of colonial arrangements and in different relationships with traders and naturalists.
According to historian Philip Curtin's cogent characterization of these interactions, Spain established a "territorial empire" in the New World. Spanish conquistadors took New Spain Mexico and Peru by military conquest and attempted to reproduce the socio-political structures of the Iberian Peninsula in these American domains. Spain's American holdings were not conceived as "colonies" but organized as viceroyalties or kingdoms within a greater federated monarchy. These Spanish-American viceroyalties contrasted with Portuguese and Dutch "trading-post empires.
These companies held the right to govern, administer justice, conclude treaties, and maintain an army as well as a fleet. Curtin has restricted "settlement empires" or what he calls "true colonization" to North America. Large numbers of Europeans emigrated and settled in North America. Native populations were run out so that these colonies consisted primarily of relocated English and French. Finally, Curtin characterizes European settlement in the Caribbean as the "plantation complex," where Europeans conquered and then replaced vanishing native peoples with settlers, not primarily from Europe as in New England, but from Africa.
While scientific investigation was often bound up with colonialist projects, these intimate connections were pronouncedly varied. The Dutch VOC, for example, was a conglomerate born of small investment initiatives; its ties to the government of the Dutch Republic were forged of individual connections. Instead, enterprising individuals such as Jacobus Bontius , Hendrik van Reede tot Drakenstein , and George Everhard Rumphius collated and transferred the knowledge of eastern plants to European audiences.
The absence of state sponsorhip as such in the east merits comparison, however, with the relationship between Dutch governance of Brazil in the mid seventeenth century and science there.
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French science, by contrast, was largely initiated and financed by the king and his ministers. McClellan and Regourd have characterized the highly bureaucratic and centralized organization of French science from the time of Louis XIV onward as a "scientifico-colonial machine. The efficacy of this "machine" to mobilize material and intellectual resources more than fulfilled royal colonial ambitions: French absolutism set the tone for the association between science and government throughout much of the eighteenth century in France and also Europe generally. A number of the essays in this volume contribute further to the study of early modern colonial governance and botanical practices.
Chandra Mukerji discusses how plant collection, cultivation, gardening, and engineering contributed to building the French territorial state. The administration of the Jardin du Roi, in the heart of Paris, worked hand-in-hand with the navy, outfitting ships with medicinal plants required for long voyages and, in turn, receiving specimens from around the globe.
The purpose of the King's garden, founded in , was to bring useful and glorious plants under the control of the state, to represent the power of the monarch as part of a lawful system of nature, to improve French forestry, increase French silk production, and generally yield profits.
As Mukerji points out, French botanical efforts were intended to consolidate power within France itself and not necessarily overseas. In other European countries, however, the relationships among colonizing efforts, state governance, and botanical practices were not so direct. More specifically, he situates Linnaean systematics within the context of Swedish cameralism, a political economy that sought to create a "miniaturized mercantile empire" within Swedish borders, thus staunching the flow of bullion out of the country. Botany was to serve this cause by identifying and acclimatizing to Swedish soil plants—such as tea, cinnamon, and rice—that could substitute for expensive imports.
The relationship between individual states and botanical reconnaissance shifted over time. As historian Richard Drayton has shown, English natural history was promoted through individual initiative along Dutch lines until the latter part of the eighteenth century, when the English adopted the successful French model. It is significant that much botanizing was initiated and directed by the British War Office.
Along with military intelligence, the Secretary of War asked colonial governors for "botanical dispatches" detailing the management of natural resources in their territories. Michael Bravo's paper on Moravian naturalists highlights the fact that colonial governance did not originate only in states, trading companies, and metropolitan botanical gardens.
Bravo is careful to emphasize that missionary societies cultivated distinctive relationships with their imperial patrons: Catholic Franciscans in California, for example, became cogs in the machinery of the Spanish empire, while Protestant Moravians in Greenland received little more than permission from the Danish crown to settle and purchase land in its territories. Focusing on missionary naturalists also undercuts the view of colonial botany as tied exclusively to large-scale economic activities: The Moravians in the Danish West Indies were an exception.
Hardship drew them into the same plantation complex of sugar cane and slave trading as their nonreligious counterparts. Unable to achieve an internally self-sufficient community, these servants of God produced sugarcane for cash—and with the labor of African slaves. Variations on the relations between colonial governance and botanical practices abound in the early modern period. There are as many sorts of colonial botany as colonies, in the sense that different state structures or companies deployed or produced differing modes of scientific practice.
Colonial botany developed along with a web of trade routes, and was informed by patterns of commerce and naval prowess that kept them open. Vast quantities of botanical specimens and data were brought back to Europe throughout the early modern period by voyages sponsored by colonialist powers.
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In many cases, data was assimilated to dominant European paradigms for understanding and organizing the natural world, but in some cases, important new paradigms were developed. His text on New World materia medica , items that Monardes sold as well as prescribed, was a classic of its time. And yet, Monardes himself never crossed the Atlantic.
It's really too long for a class read-along, but it has a very complete table of contents, so that students can pick the sections they wish to read. This book has great photographs and puts the child right in the middle of the century. It's full of all types of interesting information in short titled paragraphs. This is one of our favorites for sharing with the whole class.
- George Cruikshank [with Biographical Introduction];
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- Colonial Memory and Postcolonial Europe.
This is a thematic unit developed with Colonial Williamsburg that has oodles of activities that you can use in any study of Colonial America. It even has a map of Williamsburg and tons of photos. We love this book! This is an extremely informative book and can be a read-aloud. While it deals specifically with the Pilgrims and not with all of Colonial America, the information is directly applicable.