Brockway science and colonial expansion

Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens
Author(s): Lucile H. Brockway
Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 6, No. 3, Interdisciplinary Anthropology (Aug., 1979),
pp. 449-465
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/643776
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science and colonial expansion:
the role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens
LUCILE H. BROCKWAY-Chappaqua, New York
Until the last few decades, anthropology has concentrated its attention on the
nonliterate peoples, while largely leaving the vast material of written history to the
historians. Yet the many points of interaction between literate and nonliterate societies
have drawn anthropologists into the study of colonialism as a process and of Europe's
historical impact on the rest of the world. Clifford Geertz's pioneering study of Javanese
agricultural involution (1963) under Dutch colonial rule still stands as a model of combined
historical and ecological analysis, as does Eric Wolf's synthesis of Middle American culture
and history (1959).
A fruitful interdisciplinary approach is now emerging between anthropologists and those
historians and sociologists who are interested in analyzing the mainsprings of European
power and its expansion in the age of empire. Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) has embarked
on a four volume study of the modern world system; Fernand Braudel (1972) has treated the
sixteenth-century Mediterranean as an integrated regional system; and Jane and Peter
Schneider (1976) have shown how the culture of modern Sicily has been shaped by its
history as a perpetual colony, with ever-changing masters, within the Mediterranean
political-economic system. Eric Hobsbawm (1968) takes us to the heart of nineteenth-
century Great Britain; Daniel Gross in a quantified study of the diet of Brazilian sisal
workers (Gross 1970; Gross and Underwood 1971) shows the dire effects of world market
capitalism on these agricultural laborers; and Ravindra K. Jain (1970) examines a Malayan
rubber plantation, with its Tamil workers, non-Tamil Indian staff, and European manager.
This paper makes a contribution to the tradition of combined historical and ecological
analysis by focusing on the botanic garden, a historic institution with worldwide connec-
tions whose nineteenth-century expansion resulted in a greatly accelerated process of plant
transfers with consequent ecological, economic, social, and political changes. Data come
from library and archival materials, especially from the Library and Herbarium of Kew
Gardens, England and of the New York Botanical Garden, and from exposure through field
trips and anthropological training to ecosystems of the tropics. Taking the worldwide net-
work of a vast institution as the unit of analysis may seem removed from the community-
oriented focus of much traditional anthropology, yet the results of the study underscore
The political implications of scientific research are explored through an
analysis of the botanic garden as an institution generating information
about plants of economic value. Botanic gardens have contributed signifi-
cantly to the colonial expansion of the West through active participation
in the transfer of protected plants and their scientific development as
plantation crops for the tropical colonies of the mother country. Cin-
chona, rubber, and sisal are prime examples.
botany and colonialism 449
I

how much of what happens in villages around the world is a consequence of, or is influ-
enced by, processes that occur on a world scale.
interrelated information networks
Since the sixteenth century, scientific knowledge, and the application of that knowledge
via technical innovation, has been the cutting edge of Western comparative economic ad-
vantage. Advances in ship building, navigation, and weaponry allowed Western nations to
penetrate all the oceans of the world and to establish outposts for trading their industrial
goods, the products of that same technology. Advances in communications allowed
Western scholars and scientists to exchange information, to codify it, to preserve it, and to
build on a rapidly accumulating base of useful knowledge. The learned societies that pro-
liferated in the eighteenth century performed experiments, published their proceedings,
received reports from travelers all over the world, and weighed and disseminated the new
information. During the nineteenth century, scientific knowledge increased at an exponen-
tial rate in Europe, both within and outside the universities, as new scientific institutions
were founded.
Through the example of the British botanic garden network in the period 1841-1941,2
this paper explores the early role of formal scientific institutions in the expansion of em-
pire. Such institutions played a critical role in generating and disseminating useful scien-
tific knowledge, which facilitated transfers of energy, manpower, and capital on a
worldwide basis and an unprecedented scale. In particular, the imperial botanic gardens
undertook plant transfers and scientific plant development that resulted in new plantation
crops for the tropical colonies, thereby altering the patterns of world trade and increasing
the plant energy, and human energy in the form of underpaid labor, that the European core
extracted from the tropical peripheries of the world system.
Although my research is focused on the botanic gardens of Great Britain, the leading co-
lonial power, the Dutch from their Buitenzorg Garden on Java engaged in many parallel ac-
tivities, sometimes in cooperation with the British, sometimes in competition with them.
The French in the nineteenth century were so occupied with political problems at home
and with expansion into Algeria and Morocco that they did not take an active part in the
transfer and development of tropical plants. But later they copied British and Dutch
methods in their rubber plantations in Indochina. The Belgians and the Portuguese each
had a botanic garden solely devoted to developing tropical plants for the benefit of their
colonial planters.3 The Germans entered the race for tropical colonies late in the game, but
they had some outstanding successes in scientific plant development-for example, sisal,
which I will discuss at a later point.
I shall concentrate on two principal cases-cinchona and rubber-tracing their removal
from their natural habitats in Latin America to their establishment as important commer-
cial crops in the Asian colonies, all under the auspices of the Royal Botanic Gardens at
Kew. As important as their physical removal was their improvement and development by a
corps of scientists serving the Royal Botanic Gardens, a network of government botanical
stations radiating out of Kew and stretching from Jamaica to Singapore to Fiji. This new
technical knowledge of improved species and improved methods of cultivation was then
transmitted to the colonial planters and was a crucial factor in the success of the new plan-
tation crops and plant-based industries, one of the main sources of wealth of the empire.
In the opening years of the industrial era, before the rise of the chemical industry with its
synthetic substitutes for raw materials, for example, fibers and pharmaceuticals, botanical
knowledge concerning economically useful plants was a counterpart, in a wide sector of
450 american ethnologist

the economy, of today's industrial research; and at a time when much research was not yet
institutionalized but was the work of semiamateurs, institutions like Kew Gardens were as
important in furthering the national welfare as our modern research laboratories today. If
the botanists could suggest where to find a plant that would fill a current demand, how to
improve this plant through species selection, hybridization, and new methods of cultiva-
tion, where to cultivate this plant with cheap colonial labor, how to process this plant for
the world market, then the botanists may be said to have had a major role in making a col-
ony a viable and profitable part of the empire.
The rubber plantations of Malaya, developed from seeds of wild Brazilian rubber, are the
best example of the series of events described above. These plantations furnished not only
much revenue but also served as a vital strategic resource. Their place in industrial growth
and political hegemony of the West became painfully clear when Southeast Asian sources
of natural rubber were cut off in World War II. Cinchona, the Andean fever-bark tree from
which quinine is made, underwent a similar development under the leadership of Kew
Gardens and had important demographic and political effects through the control of
malaria it afforded, not only in India where the botanical development took place, but
throughout the tropical world. The colonial penetration of Africa in the late nineteenth
century by the European powers was accomplished only after a cheap and reliable source
of quinine was available. In the military defense of the empire from brush wars to world
wars fought in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific, quinine
was a necessary item of war materiel.
In the case of both cinchona and rubber, a plant indigenous to Latin America was surrep-
titiously transferred-in plain English, smuggled-to Asia for development by Europeans in
their colonial possessions. The newly independent Latin American states, Brazil, Mexico,
Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, each lost a native industry as a result of these
transfers, but Asia acquired them only in a geographic sense; the real benefits went to
Europe. In this plant smuggling we see relations of power and powerlessness that con-
tradict and subvert nominal political authority and independence. In its broadest aspects,
our unit of analysis is not any one society or empire, but the network of relations emanating
from the West that penetrated all societies, binding weak to strong, colonized to col-
onizers, and colonizers to each other.
The mechanism of the Western botanical expansion described here is a small, homo-
geneous scientific elite, an "invisible college" (Crane 1972; Ziman 1976), whose par-
ticipants were in touch with each other at home and abroad, making and implementing
decisions of worldwide implications with the wholehearted support of their government
and the commercial establishment.
Kew Gardens, the botanic garden par excellence
The modern European botanic garden has its roots in the hortus medicus attached to th
medical schools of the Renaissance universities, starting in northern Italy and Souther
France in the sixteenth century and spreading north to all the important centers of learning
in Europe. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a surgeon-naturalist customar
ly sailed on each of the many worldwide voyages of exploration sponsored by learned
societies or national governments. This practice added appreciably to botanical collections
and spurred a great interest in botany as a science. Many of the exotic specimens brough
to England by explorers such as Captain Cook (who observed the transit of Venus in th
South Pacific, named Botany Bay, and claimed Australia for Britain all in one voyage,
1768-1771) were placed in a royal garden in the palace grounds at Kew, just upriver from

London. Like his father and mother, George III was an avid collector. At Kew in 1789, 5500
species were grown and that number doubled by 1814 (King 1976:16). The king put his royal
garden under the direction of Sir Joseph Banks, who sent out plant collectors in the king's
name.
Banks was a member of the Privy Council, personal advisors
President of the Royal Society, England's most prestigious learne
a founder of the Linnean Society, devoted to botany and natura
own wealth, political connections, and scientific interests, Ban
young botanists, supplying them with a meeting place and a lib
and often underwriting the expenses of their collecting trips an
man, he had accompanied Captain Cook on that epochal expedi
Banks was a protean figure, representing in his own person bot
which was pervasive in the arts and sciences and in politics und
and the influential role played by the learned societies in intell
"The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew" were thus originally a royal
were made into a state institution, charged by a Treasury Com
Mother Country in everything that is useful in the vegetable
dinating the efforts of "the many gardens in the British colonie
Calcutta, Bombay, Saharanpore, the Mauritius, Sidney, and Tr
wasted for want of unity and central direction" (quoted in Bean
was to be the nerve center for all the British colonial botanic stat
ther stated that "from a national garden of this kind Governme
authentic and official information on points connected with the
it would afford the plants they required" (Bean 1980:xvii).
From 1841 on, funding for Kew Gardens was supplied by an
Parliament. By today's standards not much money was spent. T
went to work for ?300 per annum; in 1861 the last official Kew
Japan with a salary of ?100 a year, the same amount paid the fi
gone out to South Africa in 1772 (Coats 1969:76). In 1872, when
travagance from a pinch-penny Minister of Works, its annua
(McLeod 1974). But Kew did not have to depend solely on its ow
lonial gardens was funded separately by the Colonial Office. I
made its ships available to the Kew collectors, and the Post Off
of plants to and from the colonies; in the two important plant
most concerned, the India Office paid collectors, salaries and tr
Kew's first official director, who served from 1841 to 1865, was
a former protege of Sir Joseph Banks and Professor of Botany at
Hooker not only shaped the new state institution by his own
founder of the Hooker dynasty at Kew, being succeeded by his
(director from 1865 to 1885), who was in turn succeeded by his
Dyer, who served until 19055. From 1841 to 1905 these eminent V
with a firm hand, enjoying the prestige that Victorian society acc
of them received knighthoods. Joseph Dalton Hooker was one of
and earliest public supporters. The Hookers' personal network
also included Charles Lyell, the geologist; Thomas Huxley, the b
nent botanists as John Lindley, George Bentham, and John S
daughter married Joseph Dalton Hooker. They were thus in the
thought of their time, but they did not question the prevailing
This rising scientific establishment had many battles with t
Darwin's novel theories, but in their own domain at Kew Garden

with little interference from their nominal superiors in the Ministry of Works and the
Treasury. The one exception, already mentioned, occurred in 1872-1873 under the
Gladstone reform government and was ostensibly a battle over t1e budget. On a deeper
level, it was a struggle for scientific autonomy against the bureaucracy. The attack on Kew
also carried undertones of anti-Darwinism; because Darwin, Huxley, and Lyell came forth
in Hooker's defense, it constituted another round in the fight between Darwin's supporters
and his detractors (de Beer 1965; McLeod 1974). Public opinion and the press supported
Kew Gardens, which emerged strengthened from this public airing of its operations. Not
even the charge by a caustic critic that Kew Gardens was a place "where barbarous
binomials are attached to dried foreign weeds" (quoted in McLeod 1974:62) could detract
from its popularity. The Gladstone government fell over this and other, weightier matters
and was succeeded by a conservative government led by Disraeli, who cared more for the
glory of the empire than for a puritanical economy in government.
Under the Hookers Kew Gardens had many functions: 1) display and public education: it
drew thousands of visitors every year to see its acres of plantings and labeled specimens, its
greenhouses and museums; 2) the collection and classification of plants, for taxonomy is
fundamental to a young and expanding science; 3) research, with a special laboratory built
in 1878 for the study of plant physiology, cytology, and genetics; 4) the publication of many
books, journals, and botanical drawings; 5) information storage and retrieval, centered in a
library and herbarium, which grew from William Hooker's private collection: today it holds
seven million dried and mounted plant specimens, the world's largest herbarium; and 6) a
training program, formalized in the 1870s, which sent hundreds of botanists and gardeners
to all the colonial gardens, to the universities, and to the great commercial nurseries.
But the nineteenth century emphasis was on economic botany, which meant colonial
botany. Kew became a clearinghouse for the exchange of plant information and a depot for
the interchange of plants throughout the empire; it sent plants wherever it saw commercial
possibilities. With one foot in the tropics of each hemisphere-with colonies in both wet
and dry environments, at sea level and in the Himalayas-Britain could shuffle plants at
will. Often these plants were new and improved varieties, from seeds grown experimentally
at Kew. Tea plants and seed were sent from India to Jamaica, where nutmeg was also in-
troduced; tobacco was sent to Natal, South Africa; papyrus, ipecac, and mahogany to In-
dia; Portuguese cork oaks to Australia and to the Punjab; Liberian coffee grown from seeds
at Kew to both the East and West Indies; West Indian pineapples to the Straits Settlement;
and rubber-yielding vines from Assam to West Africa (Bean 1908; Blunt 1978; Kew Bulletin
1941:208; King 1976; Markham 1862:60). Plant transfer is as old as the practice of
agriculture, but it had never before been undertaken on such a scale.
seed and plant transfers
Seeds are among the most precious and easily transported cultural artifacts. We need
not review here the anthropological literature on the prehistoric spread of the main food
complexes from centers in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Mesoamerica, and the tropical
lowlands of South America. Nearer to our period, Arab traders and farmers introduced
many valuable cultivars of Asiatic origin to medieval Europe. On the European Mediterra-
nean littoral and islands they grew rice, sugarcane, citrus fruits, and large-chromosome cot-
ton, often under the plantation system of production, which Europeans copied and took
with them to the New World (Braudel 1972:155; D. B. Grigg 1974:26; Lane 1973; McNeill
1974; on the origin of specific crops, see Baker 1970 and Heiser 1973).
With the Conquest, all of these crops, and others, were brought to the Americas, and

native American plants taken to the Old World in what Crosby (1972) calls the "Columbian
exchange." Europeans brought wheat to make their daily bread, grapes for their wines,
olives for their oil, vegetables like lettuce and cabbage, temperate fruits like apples and
peaches, tropical fruits like mangoes and bananas, forage grasses like alfalfa and timothy
hay; while Mesoamerican maize, squash, beans, and chilies, Peruvian white potato and
tomato, tropical lowland manioc and sweet potato spread around the globe, carried by
Spanish and Portuguese mariners to Europe, Africa, and the Far East. The most important of
these were maize and the white potato. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the
white potato fed the poor of a rapidly industrializing northwest Europe (Langer 1975;
McNeill 1974), while maize was welcomed in the drier soils of southern Europe and the
Balkans, in West Africa, and in the Chinese uplands beyond the reach of irrigation, which
had hitherto been lightly settled (Ho 1955). The spread of new food staples seems to be the
common denominator in the post-Columbian worldwide population explosion, as is evident
in China's population increase. There, the upward population curve is remarkably similar to
Europe's (from about 150 million in 1640 to an estimated 430 million in 1850, according to
Ho 1959), yet the population rise antedates any significant modernization brought about by
Western contact.
Many food plants of critical importance, many medicinal plants, for example, digitalis
sassafras, guaiacum, and certain hallucinogens, like cannabis, Jimson weed, and one of the
Daturas have traveled anonymously without need of help from national governments. But
national governments were intimately involved in the plantation economy, the most salien
form of commodity production in the tropical colonies, through their regulation of the
labor supply, whether recruited by indenture, peonage, or slavery, and through licenses,
taxes, tariffs, and embargoes. The main New World plantation crops-sugar, tobacco, in
digo, rice, and cotton-were well established before botanical gardens came into prom-
inence as an arm of the government in the late eighteenth century. However, South
American coffee owes its start entirely to a botanical garden, the Botanical Garden of
Amsterdam, whose one coffee tree sent from Java produced seeds that led to the first
plantings in Dutch Guiana, then in French Guiana and Martinique, and in 1727 in Brazil
(Baker 1970:110), where coffee became one of the great export crops.
the tea transfer: a model
Plantations as such came late to the Asian colonies. The chartered trading companies
found there sophisticated societies with greater wealth and more artisan-produced trading
goods and peasant-grown indigenous crops long known and desired by Europeans than had
been the case in the New World. The Dutch in Indonesia pioneered in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries in extracting cash crops from the peasants-first cloves and nutmegs,
then sugar, indigo, and coffee6-under a system of forced deliveries, quotas, fixed prices,
and a labor tax (Geertz 1963:50ff). Corporate-owned enclave plantations of introduced
crops were a midnineteenth-century development.
In the first half of the nineteenth century the British acquisitions in India were still
governed by the British East India Company, which had traditionally been more interested
in trading than in planting. But having despoiled India's home industries, which produced
the fine textiles and other luxury goods that had attracted it to India (Dutt 1950; Mukherjee
1974; Zeitlin 1972), the company was then starting to turn India into a source of raw
materials such as cotton, indigo, hemp, saltpeter. It sent India's peasant-produced raw cot-
ton to Manchester and brought back Lancashire's machine-made goods to Calcutta. Until
1834, the company also had the monopoly in British ports on imports of tea, for which

China was then the sole source. The demand for tea was high, but how was the company to
pay for it without losing precious silver to China? China wanted few British woolens and on-
ly a little raw Bombay cotton. The answer was found in opium.
Opium grown in Bengal under the auspices of the British East India Company and auc-
tioned by the company in Calcutta was exchanged in Canton for Chinese tea, which was
carried in company ships to Britain. The trade was lucrative but dangerous, because opium
was contraband in China. It had to be carried out through intermediaries-private British
traders and Chinese smugglers-and the trade suffered interruptions by the Chinese
authorities who were trying to suppress the use of opium (for a detailed account of the
opium-tea trade and the Opium War see Fay 1975). Why not grow tea in India?
In 1827 and again in 1834 a prominent company botanist, superintendent of the Saharan-
pore Botanic Garden, reported that India's Himalayan foothills would be suitable for tea
growing (Royle 1834). But Europeans were not allowed to go beyond the confines of their
warehouses in Canton, so they could not go in search of tea plants, and they had only the
sketchiest notions of tea processing, not even realizing that green tea and black tea were
processed from the same plant.7 The defeat of China in the Opium War (1839-1842), which
opened up five treaty ports to Europeans, gave the company the opportunity it sought in
regard to tea. In 1848-1851 it brought off a great plant transfer, whose success guaranteed
that it would be repeated: under the auspices of the British East India Company a plant col-
lector named Robert Fortune brought 2000 tea plants and 17,000 tea seeds (Fortune 1852)
out of China. He also brought Chinese experts in tea cultivation to start the tea industry in
India. At the same time, the company began cultivating the wild tea bushes of Assam as a
plantation crop. Tea, one of the hottest commodities in international trade and already the
British national beverage, would no longer have to be bought from China, but could be
grown on British soil.
To work the more than half million acres eventually planted to tea in India and Ceylon,
impoverished peasants and landless laborers were recruited under contracts with harsh
penal clauses, in what Tinker calls "a new system of slavery" (1974).
The key factors in successful botanical imperialism were now all at hand, with a model
for Kew to follow: a corps of trained botanists supported by the government and ready to
cooperate with the government in removing from a weaker nation (in this case a China
recently defeated in war) a desirable plant for development in India, Ceylon, and Malaya,
whose suitability as plantation colonies was beginning to be perceived.8 At midcentury,
Kew Gardens was a mature institution. The time was ripe for Kew to make a signal contribu-
tion to the national welfare: the transfer and development of two new plantation crops of
exceptional value, cinchona and rubber.
malaria and the cinchona transfer
After the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 in Bengal and North India, the British Crown took ove
the governance of India from the British East India Company. Britain greatly strengthene
her military and civil bureaucracy in the Indian subcontinent. Now more than ever ther
was concern over the health of the troops and their dependents in the "dangerous climate
of India. In conjunction with the India Office, Kew Gardens sent plant collectors in 1860 t
the high montane forests of Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Colombia to secure seeds and
seedlings of the cinchona tree, whose bark yielded the valuable drug quinine, a specific
against all forms of malaria. "Peruvian bark" infused in wine had by then been known to
Europeans for two hundred years; the Spanish colonists had learned of it from native herb
alists and taken their knowledge to Spain about 1640.9 After some spectacular successes i

curing King Charles II of England and members of the French royal family, Peruvian bark
therapy enjoyed a period of popularity that gradually declined because of problems with
dosage and because it was used against fevers other than malaria. In the early nineteenth
century, the old remedies of bleeding and purging were again in style. But in 1830 two
French pharmacologists isolated the active alkaloids in cinchona bark: quinine, quinidine,
and cinchodine. A British naval surgeon who had seen the appalling loss of life to malaria
on expeditions up the Niger River experimented with quinine on himself (Thomson 1846),
and in 1848 the British Medical Department of the Army adopted quinine prophylaxis (Cur-
tin 1961:109). Circumstances in both Africa and Asia were creating a great demand for cin-
chona, as Britain tried to consolidate her hold on India and expand her activities in Africa.
In the 1850s, the British government was spending ?53,000 annually (Parliamentary Blue
Book, Cinchona, 1852-1863) on the purchase of cinchona bark from the four Andean
republics, the sole source of the bark. Their exports of cinchona bark to Europe and the
United States, an estimated two million pounds of bark in 1860 (Markham 1862:572), were a
valuable source of revenue and foreign exchange to these newly liberated countries.
Bolivia, where the best cinchonas grew, had a state monopoly on cinchona bark and im-
posed severe penalties on anyone taking seeds or seedlings out of the country. In 1861,
Ecuador adopted laws to protect its cinchona trees from exportation.
The bark was gathered by forest Indians, who felled the trees before stripping the bark.
European observers were convinced that this practice was destroying the industry, a charge
that still appears in the literature (Blunt 1978:131; Kew Bulletin 1931:117; Klein 1976:18
writes "it becomes clear that the fever bark tree had to be grown as a plantation crop"). Ac-
tually, the barkless trunks would be eaten by insects and the roots would put out new
shoots which were ready for harvesting in six years (W. D. Hooker 1839:15).10 But Euro-
peans used the charge of wasteful harvesting as a justification for contravening the laws of
the republics. In 1854 Justus Charles Hasskarl, superintendent of the Dutch Botanic
Gardens on Java, traveled incognito in Bolivia and smuggled out seeds of cinchona, which
turned out to be of such low quality that the Dutch temporarily lost interest in growing cin-
chona (Duran-Reynals 1946:174).
The next attempt was the joint Kew Gardens-India Office expedition of 1860-1861,
which was composed of three principal collectors, each having a budget of ?500 and each
going to a separate region or country, plus two Kew gardeners as assistants (Parliamentary
Blue Book, Cinchona, 1852-1863). Clements Markham-who in Peru used guile and subter-
fuge to obtain and ship out his plants, and was chased out of the Caravaya region near the
Bolivian border by "jealous" local authorities-did not carry out his plan to enter Bolivia
(Markham 1880:200-202). The following year, Robert Cross, after consulting with the British
vice-consul, blandly disregarded the Bolivian laws of May 1861 and proceeded to gather
and ship out cinchona seeds (Parliamentary Blue Book, Cinchona, 1852-1863:170).
However, the most successful of the Kew collectors, the noted botanist Richard Spruce,
seems to have been technically within the law in shipping on December 31, 1860, out of
Guayaquil, Ecuador, 100,000 dried seeds and 637 young plants. He had raised the plants
himself in a primitive camp high in the Quitonian Andes and rafted them down the river,
hampered by the terrain and by armed bands of soldiers and revolutionaries (Spruce
1908:260-309). In its laws of May, 1861, Ecuador had locked the barn door after the horse
was stolen.
from wild to cultivated
All these seeds and seedlings of different varieties of cinchona, collected in 1860 and
1861 from Peru and Ecuador and a few years later from Colombia, were shipped to Kew.

Some were transshipped immediately to India, and others were held at Kew as an ex-
perimental and reserve supply. A special heated greenhouse was erected at Kew for the
propagation and study of the cinchona seedlings. At one point in 1861, it held over ten
thousand of them (Parliamentary Blue Book, Cinchona, 1860-1897; J. D. Hooker 1902). In
the first flush of excitement, seeds and seedlings were presented to the French and Por-
tuguese heads of state and to Emperor Maximilian for use in Mexico. The botanic gardens
in the British West Indies, Ceylon, and Mauritius received seeds (Kew Bulletin 1931:117),
but the major development work was carried out in India.
For twenty years the Botanic Garden at Ootacamund in the Nilgiri Hills of South India
and the Calcutta Garden, which established plantations in the Sikkim Himalayas near Dar-
jeeling, carried on experimental work on species selection, planting and harvesting
methods, and the manufacture of quinine powders (Parliamentary Blue Book, Cinchona,
1860-1897). In the Nilgiris, convict labor was used to clear the forests for planting the cin-
chonas; the jail was later used as a drying shed for the bark. Canarese and Tamils were
brought up from the plains to tend the trees and harvest the bark. Local Badaga men were
also employed as laborers. The Badagas were an agricultural people long settled on the
Nilgiri plateau. Badaga women traditionally worked their farms, both home plots and swid-
den. The Badagas were therefore able to prosper under the British regime because of their
added income from wage labor. But the unfamiliar cold damp climate of the hills, where
the cinchona trees thrived under conditions similar to those of their native habitat in the
Andes, caused many of the lowland workers to sicken and die in their barracks (H. B. Grigg
1880).
Young cinchona trees were widely distributed to private planters in South India and
Ceylon. In 1887 Ceylon alone produced thirteen million pounds of the red bark, Cinchona
succirubra (Duran-Reynals 1946:207). But thereafter British commercial output was
eclipsed by a superior strain (Ledger species) of cinchona grown by the Dutch on Java. The
seeds for these high-yielding species had been smuggled out of Bolivia by the Aymara ser-
vant of a British trader, who sold one pound of seed to the Dutch government in 1865. In-
tensive development work by Dutch botanists at the Buitenzorg Gardens on Java improved
their natural high yield of quinine. The Ledger species were grafted onto the hardier red cin-
chona roots, and the plants carefully tended to prevent damage from disease. A Dutch
cartel formed in 1892 captured the cinchona bark market and kept its virtual world
monopoly until the Japanese overran Java in 1942. The cartel sold the bark at auction in
Amsterdam at artificially high prices (Allen and Donnithorne 1962:93).
quinine, the arm of empire
Richard Klein has written that the British propagation of the red cinchona was a com-
plete and costly fiasco (1976:18), but Klein ignores the noncommercial features of the cin-
chona experiment that were of paramount importance to the British government. The
Dutch could afford to pursue the commercial goal with a single mind because they did not
have to maintain a large army in the tropics, but protecting the health of their troops was
the prime British concern. Government manufactories in Bengal and in the Madras
Presidency of India produced a cinchona bark compound, totaquine, that was much
cheaper than pure quinine but almost equally effective. It was distributed to military per-
sonnel, civil servants, and large planters for mass treatment of their coolies (Parliamentary
Blue Book, Cinchona, Madras, 1860-1897).
In Bengal some totaquine was put on the general market and could be bought at any
postoffice for a penny a packet-as the Kew historians loved to boast-highlighting only

this aspect of the cinchona transfer (Markham 1880; J. D. Hooker 1902; Kew Bulletin 1931;
Bingham 1975). But the supply never began to meet the needs of the Indian people (Bidie
1897). This great public health tool was allowed to lapse, and this humanitarian gesture
amounted to little more than tokenism. However, in guarding the health of the military and
the bureaucracy, the main purpose of the cinchona transfer had been accomplished: the
British raj was strengthened and India secured to the empire. George Bidie, Surgeon-Major
of the British Army, went to the heart of the matter in stating:
to England, with her numerous and extensive Colonial possessions, it [cinchona bark] is simply
priceless; and it is not too much to say, that if portions of her tropical empire are upheld by the
bayonet, the arm that wields the weapon would be nerveless but for Cinchona bark and its ac-
tive principles (Bidie 1897:15).
What of the Andean republics and their trade in cinchona bark? By producing nine
million kilograms of bark in 1881 (Duran-Reynals 1946:207), they showed that European
predictions of the exhaustion of wild cinchona bark "because of wasteful harvesting
methods" were unfounded. But thereafter competition from the colonial plantations drove
Andean bark off the market. Andean production was near zero when it was revived momen-
tarily in World War II by a heavy influx of American capital in a frenzied effort to find
enough quinine to protect American troops fighting in malarial zones (Fosberg 1946; Taylor
1943). Then came the synthetics.
European scientific expertise allied with European capital and political power had driven
a native industry off the market in favor of a vast plantation-based industry completely
controlled by Europeans, which produced a modern drug mostly consumed by Europeans.
The common people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America could not afford this drug. In fact,
quinine stockpiled by the British government in India in 1942 was not released to the Indian
population suffering the worst combined famine and malaria epidemic of modern times
that resulted in three million deaths (Taylor 1943:4; Biswas 1961:76).
the rubber coup
The rubber transfer of 1876 was in many respects a reprise of the cinchona transfer, but it
was an unqualified commercial success.
In the opening years of the twentieth century, 98 percent of the world's rubber came
from Latin America. Long before the arrival of Europeans, indigenous peoples had
discovered the elastic properties of the latex of certain trees and shrubs and the smoke-ball
method of processing the latex. The bulk of this crude rubber, and the best quality rubber,
came from the latex of Hevea species found throughout the Amazon basin. Rubber was
first used in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States for rainwear and machine
belts and rollers. The invention of the bicycle and the automobile greatly increased the de-
mand for the substance. The wild rubber industry underwent several successive booms, and
in the years 1909-1913, exports of rubber brought Brazil more revenue than coffee exports
and made the port cities of Para (now Belem) and Manaus opulent cities (Wolf and Wolf
1936:48).
This prosperity was built on the shaky foundation of a natural monopoly of the highly
desired Hevea species. But in 1876 Kew Gardens and the India Office had jointly sponsored
the removal of wild rubber seeds from Brazil. Henry Wickham, a plant collector in their
employ, succeeded in smuggling out seventy thousand Hevea seeds from under the nose of
the custom's officer in Para City and proudly presented them to Joseph Hooker at Kew
Gardens (Wickham 1908). Orchids were turned out of the greenhouses at Kew to make way
for the rubber seeds. Of those that germinated, nineteen hundred young trees were sent to
the Peradeniya Gardens on Ceylon, which sent twenty-two specimens on to Singapore. This

was the parent stock of every one of the millions of rubber trees that were eventually
planted in Southeast Asia.
Research and development work on these rubber seedlings was undertaken at the
botanic gardens on Ceylon and with greater success in Malaya, under a Kew-trained direc-
tor named Henry Ridley, called "Rubber Ridley" or "Mad Ridley" because of his per-
sistence. By 1897 Ridley had worked out the "wound response" method of tapping, which
yielded quantities of latex without injuring the tree, and John Parkin on Ceylon had dis-
covered the acid method of coagulating the latex, which gave a cleaner rubber than the
smoke process. Almost twenty years of experimental work went into Hevea before Ridley,
dispensing seedlings and giving planting advice, persuaded a few planters in Malaya to
take up the new plantation crop. Their windfall profits in the rubber boom of the first
decade of the twentieth century started a stampede to rubber planting, with large infusions
of British capital raised on the London stock exchange. Tea bushes were ripped up on
Ceylon and large areas of the lowlands put into a plantation crop for the first time. By 1915,
Malaya had over 703,000 acres planted to the Hevea tree (Tinker 1974:33). Southeast Asia
production had overtaken Amazonian wild rubber on the world market; by 1919, the
Brazilian market was dead. In 1934, during the last decade of the colonial era, over
1,090,000 tons of crude rubber was coming from British, Dutch, and French plantations in
Southeast Asia, and only 14,000 tons from all other sources, including Brazil (Wolf and
Wolf 1936:151).
Between the two world wars, Singapore was the rubber capital of the world. The British
had under their political, administrative, and judicial control a vital commercial and
strategic resource that was profitable in peacetime and indispensable in wartime. Java and
Sumatra also had large plantings of the best plantation rubber, and Dutch botanists con-
tributed a bud-grafting process to the scientific improvement of rubber.
labor-scarce versus labor-abundant peripheries
The valuable cinchona trees and the most valuable rubber trees occurred naturally in the
Andean montane forests and the Amazon basin, respectively, both regions of low popula-
tion density. During the rubber booms, the labor shortage in the Amazon basin was such,
that many Amazonian Indians were pressed into involuntary servitude as rubber tappers,
and many tribes, for example, the Huitotos, the Boras, and the Andokes, were decimated by
the abuses they suffered at the hands of armed guards hired by the rubber barons. This
genocide was partially documented in the British Government Blue Books of 1912 and
1913.11
By contrast, European planters in South and Southeast Asia could draw on the immense
pool of excess labor produced and reproduced in the old agrarian empires. Europe had
penetrated these empires in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, and had systematically
undermined their native industries, handicrafts, and trade. Under a system of indenture
that carried penal clauses for nonpayment of debt, that is, virtual debt slavery, Tamils from
South India emigrated to work the plantations on Ceylon and in Malaya. The system got its
start in the 1840s when coffee plantations were opened up on Ceylon. The government did
not intervene to protect the immigrants from working and living conditions that led to an
estimated death rate of 250 per thousand each year; instead, the first piece of labor legisla-
tion, Ordinance 5 of 1841, enabled the planter to hold the worker to his contract (Ludowyk
1967:196, quoting from an official dispatch from Tennant to Lord Grey, Colonial Secretary).
The tea, cinchona, and rubber plantations that later spread over Ceylon were largely work-
ed by Tamils.12 The recruiting was done by kanganies, originally family heads sent into

South India by the managers of plantations; debt was the joint responsibility of the
kangany's family. But as the demand for labor increased, kanganies recruited wholesale,
becoming gang bosses who often cheated their wards by piling up large debts in their name
on the company books (Wolf and Wolf 1936:198).
In Malaya, Chinese coolies were imported to work tin and to clear the forests for the rub-
ber plantations, work too arduous for Tamils, who became the permanent force of tappers
and weeders. By 1915, there were 144,000 Indians on the Malayan rubber estates (Tinker
1974:33); in 1927, the peak year, 120,000 Indians were brought to Malaya to work rubber
(Cady 1964:449). Javanese were the principal tappers on Sumatra and Borneo. The old
agricultural empires, India and China, had men to spare, and Java had recently undergone
an agricultural involution under the Dutch Culture System (1830-1870) that resulted in a
fourfold increase in population in three generations (Geertz 1963:69-70). Labor was cheap,
plentiful, and above all, mobile.
British capital was movable; plants are transferable. The British simply moved the plants
to a labor-abundant area under their direct political control. In these circumstances, formal
empire served them better than the informal control through capital investment that they
exercised in Latin America.
sisal and information dispersal
After the rubber coup, Kew Gardens did not take part in any more seed-smuggling
expeditions, but it continued to gather information on economically useful plants, even in
"protected industries," instructing British consuls to send specimens and reports, as in the
case of the Mexican sisal industry (Kew Bulletin 1892:22-23). In the late nineteenth century
Yucatan was the world's only supplier of sisal, a hard fiber used for binder twine. Farmers in
Europe as well as on the continental plains of the United States, which had just come into
large-scale wheat production, needed sisal twine to bind their wheat.
In 1892, the Kew Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information published a series of articles on
all aspects of the Mexican sisal industry. It was expected that this information would help
the Bahamas, other islands in the British West Indies, Mauritius, Fiji, and perhaps India, to
establish sisal industries. The Royal Botanic Gardens of Trinidad and St. Vincent and St.
Lucia had already found a supplier of a closely related sisal species in Florida. The name of
the nurseryman was printed in the Kew Bulletin reports (1892:34).13
Scientific information travels easily across international boundaries to peoples culturally
prepared to receive it. The Kew Bulletin articles let the genie out of the bottle. A German
agronomist working for the German East Africa Company was looking for a suitable crop to
develop in the dry areas of the new German colony. He read the Kew Bulletin reports,
ordered sisal bulbils from Florida, and soon had established a modern, rationalized sisal in-
dustry in German East Africa (Lock 1969). The British inherited this sisal industry after the
German defeat in World War I, when they acquired the German colony (renamed
Tanganyika; now Tanzania).
Meanwhile, Kenya had started its own sisal industry from purchases of German bulbils;
other East African colonies took up sisal, and Java added it to its long list of plantation
crops. The European sisal plantations had the advantage of modern scientific research and
modern machinery. In 1966, henequen, the Mexican variety of sisal, accounted for only 12
percent of the world's hard fibers, while Agave sisalana, the variety developed by Euro-
peans, accounted for 75 percent (Lock 1969:326).
Not all A. sisalana was plantation produced, however. In the years of high demand
created by World War II, peasants in arid northeastern Brazil switched to sisal. But lacking

machinery, capital, and effective organization or political power, they were the first to suf-
fer when prices fell. With their land locked into sisal (the tough plants cannot be uprooted
without bulldozers), they could not return to subsistence farming. Many of them wound up
as laborers on sisal decorticating machines, dangerous and energy-depleting work, at
wages that would not allow their families a minimum life-sustaining diet (Gross 1970; Gross
and Underwood 1971). The East African plantations had had a labor problem initially, but
the colonial powers solved it for the planters by land alienation and the imposition of a
head tax on African tribesmen (Wolff 1974).
Sisal prices, like those of other primary products, have been kept low through economic
and political pressure exerted by the metropolitan core and have not reflected the true
costs of production in human energy. Consumers of cereals and meat in the developed
countries have benefited from the underpaid labor of East Africans, Yucatan Indians,
Brazilian peasants, and Indonesians. Sugar, coffee, tea, cocoa, cinchona, and rubber have
similar histories of labor exploitation. This extraction of energy from the colonial areas of
the world and its transfer to the metropolitan account has been one of the sources of
wealth necessary to underwrite the budgets of Western scientific institutions.
conclusion
In this study, Kew Gardens and its colonial affiliates emerge as a vital capital
transforming knowledge into profit and power for Great Britain. The Dutch botanic
played a similar role for the Netherlands, helping that nation to remain a stron
merical power long after its political power had waned. Botanic gardens are genera
by the public as beautiful green enclaves planted with rare trees and flowers, w
laboratory where botanists pursue the mysteries of plant cytology, or nowaday
ecology of the biosphere.
But botanic gardens, like other institutions, mold themselves to the function
quirements and the ethos of their cultural era, and botanic gardens had a period o
activity in the service of Western colonial expansion. Through the exercise of shee
as well as by their scientific expertise, they increased the comparative advantag
Western core of nations over the rest of the world. The alliance of science, cap
political power had systemic results that we still wrestle with today.
notes
1 I am grateful to Daniel Gross, Joan Mencher, Joyce Riegelhaupt, Jane Schneider, Charles
and Paul Wheatley for helpful comments on a previous version of this paper. The research was
out during my graduate studies at City University of New York.
2 Kew Gardens was the center of an informal network of British domestic and colonial bo
gardens, numbering about thirty. Each colonial garden was funded by and was nominally un
jurisdiction of its particular colonial government, but the director of Kew Gardens had de facto p
to choose their directors and could command their participation in any project he undertook
The dates 1841-1941 are approximate, representing the period from the establishment o
Gardens as a state institution up through the last year before Southeast Asia fell to the Japa
World War II, when the flow of tropical products to the West ceased.
3 "A planter is a person who gets someone else to plant for him" (Anonymous).
4 These voluntary associations filled a gap left by the English universities, temporarily sun
lethargy, little more than finishing schools for the sons of the peerage and gentry. Oxford an
bridge in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had a minimal interest in science; they di
consider it a gentlemanly pursuit. By contrast, the Scottish universities of Edinburgh and G
taught botany and had botanical collections. Edinburgh was second only to Kew in the num

trained botanists it sent to the colonies. After the midnineteenth century, Oxford and Cambridge em-
braced the scientific disciplines and again became leaders in the field. This change of attitude was un-
doubtedly spurred by the example of the German universities, which were so clearly contributing to
the rising power of Bismarckian Germany.
5 As assistant director at Kew, Thiselton-Dyer had been in charge of many of Kew's colonial ac-
tivities, including personal supervision of the introduction of rubber plants propagated at Kew to the
Peradeniya Gardens of Ceylon. During his tenure of office (1885-1905), the empire was at its peak. Bri-
tain's vital interests in her Asian colonies are shown by the choice, as his successor at Kew, of Col.
David Prain, a botanist whose career had been made entirely in the colonies. Prain came to Kew from
his post as director of the Calcutta Botanic Gardens and was the author of a botanical survey of the In-
dian subcontinent. There existed among insular Britons a prejudice that a career in the colonies,
however useful, was bound to be second rate. But "when... it is imperative to appoint technically
competent people to fill important positions, the ascriptive criteria for their selection will be de-
emphasized" (Wilkie 1977:69).
6 Of these crops, all were indigenous to Southeast Asia except coffee, a plant of the African
highlands domesticated and traded by the Arabs, until the Dutch East India Company introduced it to
Ceylon and Java in the late seventeenth century (Baker 1970:110).
7 One English tea collector got seeds from Fukien province, China, in 1834. Although they ger-
minated in the Calcutta Garden, they failed to survive transplanting (Fay 1975:205). In the tea transfer,
as in the later cinchona and rubber transfers, there were several failures before success came. The
Dutch had procured some tea seeds and plants in the late 1820s and had started a few tea plantations
in the Javanese highlands. The British were aware of this but considered it a failure (Royle 1834).
Javanese tea had a poor reputation until 1877, when the Dutch called in experts in Indian tea cultiva-
tion (Allen and Donnithorne 1962:101). The British and Dutch in the South Asian colonies repeatedly
duplicated each other's efforts to procure and develop new plantation crops, but they sometimes ex-
changed information on the scientific level. However, the British consumer continued to prefer Indian
tea, and the Dutch specialized in coffee.
8 India was of course too large and complex a society to be primarily a plantation colony, as Ceylon
and Malaya were to become in the late colonial period. In India the plantations of tea, indigo, pepper,
coffee, cinchona, and rubber did not constitute the same high proportion of the gross national product
as in Ceylon and Malaya. But India functioned in the plantation economy as one of the chief suppliers
of plantation labor for Ceylon and Malaya, as well as for the sugar plantations of Mauritius, Natal, Fiji,
Trinidad, and British Guiana (Tinker 1974).
9 It is not known for certain whether or not malaria was present in the Americas before the Con-
quest, but following Frederick Dunn (1965), I doubt it was. However, even in the absence of positive
proof, I do not doubt that the anti-malarial properties of cinchona bark were first discovered by in-
digenous curers in the Andes sometime in the century between the Conquest (which took place in the
1530s) and the 1630s, when a written record of its marvelous cures appears in the chronicle of an
Augustinian order in Lima. A full-scale treatise on the curative properties of cinchona bark was
published in Latin by Sebastian Bolo in 1663 in Geneva and attributes the discovery to indigenous In-
dian curers (Jaramillo-Arango 1949:277).
10 William D. Hooker, eldest son of William J. Hooker, wrote a doctoral dissertation on cinchona
while he was a medical student at the University of Glasgow (1839). His understanding of the
harvesting methods exceeded that of any of his contemporaries, including his father. But he died
young of yellow fever in Jamaica, and his dissertation was presumably forgotten. In point of fact,
William Mclvor, the principal botanist to experiment with the trees when they reached India and
Superintendent of the Ootacamund Botanic Garden in the Nilgiri Hills, came by trial and error to favor
"coppicing," or cutting the trees back severely to allow the growth of new shoots, a method very
similar to the indigenous Andean practice. The new shoots were found to be higher in alkaloid levels
(Parliamentary Blue Book, Cinchona 1860-1897).
11 The British government was able to investigate and document the starvation, torture, and murder
carried out by armed guards against the Indians of the Putumayo region because some of the overseers
hired by the rubber baron J. C. Arana were from Barbados and were therefore British subjects. Arana
had also incorporated his company in London, put several prominent Britons on his board of directors,
and raised large loans from British banks. In the course of a parliamentary inquiry (British Government
Blue Book, Putumayo, 1912; 1913), the revelations of the excessive brutality of Arana's labor policy led
to the bankruptcy of his company, gave wild rubber a bad name among British investors, and influ-
enced the shift of capital toward the new plantations in Southeast Asia, where a milder debt coercion
supplied the labor force to tap the rubber. But of this coercion the public neither knew nor cared. Only
the worst excesses aroused its interest.
12 In 1977, there were riots in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) directed against the Tamils, descendants of these
plantation workers. Ethnic conflict is one of the legacies of the plantation economy.
13 There was no commercial sisal production in Florida, but plants were available, "escapees" from
a private botanic garden founded by Dr. Henry Perrine on Indian Key in the late 1830s. Perrine had

been given the sisal plants when he was U. S. Consul in Campeche, Yucatan. Perrine was killed in a
Seminole raid on Indian Key in 1840, and his plants abandoned. Perrine's plants were of the variety A.
sisalana, which turned out to be slightly superior, commercially, to the A. fourcroydes generally
cultivated in Yucatan. The European buyers of these Florida bulbils were luckier than they knew; they
were spared the long search, with false starts, for the very best variety-a search that so occupied the
botanists working on cinchona and rubber.
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Date of Submission: August 16, 1978
Date of Acceptance: September 27, 1978

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