The Botany of Empire in The Long Eighteenth Century

University of Dayton
eCommons
The Marian Library/International Marian Research
Marian Library/IMRI Faculty Publications
Institute
2017
The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth

Century
Yota Batsaki
Dumbarton Oaks
Sarah Burke Cahalan

University of Dayton, scahalan1@udayton.edu
Anatole Tchikine
Dumbarton Oaks
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Batsaki, Yota; Cahalan, Sarah Burke; and Tchikine, Anatole, "The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century" (2017). Marian
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The Botany of Empire in the
Long Eighteenth Century
YO TA B ATS A K I
S A R A H BU R K E C A H A L A N
A N ATOL E TC H I K I N E
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection

Washington, D.C.
© 2016 Dumbarton Oaks
Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Batsaki, Yota, editor. | Cahalan, Sarah Burke, editor. | Tchikine, Anatole, editor.
Title: The botany of empire in the long eighteenth century / Yota Batsaki,
Sarah Burke Cahalan, and Anatole Tchikine, editors.
Description: Washington, D.C. : Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection,
[2016] | Series: Dumbarton Oaks symposia and colloquia | Based on papers presented
at the symposium “The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century,” held at
Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., on October 4–5, 2013. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2016001289 | isbn 9780884024163 (first cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: lcsh: Botany—History—18th century—Congresses.
Classification: lcc qk15 .b68 2016 | ddc 580—dc23
lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016001289
book and jacket design and typography:

Melissa Tandysh
frontispiece illustration:
Album of Chinese Watercolors of Asian Fruits (ca. 1798–1810), Rare Book Collection,
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
www.doaks.org/publications
CONTENTS
1 Introduction
The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century | 1
Yota Batsaki, Sarah Burke Cahalan, and Anatole Tchikine
PART I: BOTANICAL AMBITIONS

2 Botanical Conquistadors
The Promises and Challenges of Imperial Botany in the Hispanic Enlightenment | 35
Daniela Bleichmar
3 The Geography of Ginseng and the Strange Alchemy of Needs | 61

Shigehisa Kuriyama
4 Weeping Willows and Dwarfed Trees

Plants in Chinese Gardens under Western Eyes | 73
Bianca Maria Rinaldi
5 Echoes of Empire
Redefining the Botanical Garden in Eighteenth-Century Tuscany | 93
Anatole Tchikine
PART II: AGENTS OF EMPIRE?

6 The Politics of Secular Pilgrimage
Paul-Émile Botta’s Red Sea Expedition, 1836–39 | 131
Sahar Bazzaz
7 François Le Vaillant
Resistant Botanist? | 143
Ian Glenn
8 Thomas McDonnell’s Opium

Circulating Plants, Patronage, and Power in Britain, China, and New Zealand, 1830s–50s | 165
James Beattie
v
PART III: BOTANICAL ITINERARIES
9 On Diplomacy and Botanical Gifts
France, Mysore, and Mauritius in 1788 | 193
Sarah Easterby-Smith
10 From Local to Global

Balsa Rafts and a Bountiful Harvest from Ecuador | 213
Colin McEwan
11 “In Imperio Rutheno”

Johann Amman’s Stirpium rariorum (1739)
and the Foundation of Russia’s Botanical Empire | 235
Rachel Koroloff
PART IV: CULTIVATING IDENTITIES

12 Ornamental Exotica
Transplanting the Aesthetics of Tea Consumption
and the Birth of a British Exotic | 259
Romita Ray
13 Allegories of Alterity
Flora’s Children as the Four Continents | 283
Miranda Mollendorf
14 Ottoman Horticulture after the Tulip Era

Botanizing Consuls, Garden Diplomacy,
and the First Foreign Head Gardener | 307
Deniz Türker
15 Making “Mongolian” Nature

Medicinal Plants and Qing Empire
in the Long Eighteenth Century | 339
Carla Nappi
16 William Bartram’s Drawing of a New Species of Arethusa (1796)

Portrait of a Life | 351
Amy R . W. Meyers
Contributors | 381
Index | 385
vi co n t e n ts
1
Introduction
The Botany of Empire
in the Long Eighteenth Century
yota b ats a k i , sarah burke c ah al an , an d an atol e tc h ikin e
T he close relationship between botany and empire in the early modern period has
been the focus of scholarly attention for the past two decades. Drawing on Bruno
Latour’s notion of “centers of calculation,” David Miller and Peter Reill, in Visions of
Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (1996), demonstrate how a number
of eighteenth-century developments intensified the appropriation of natural resources for
exploitation: from Joseph Banks’s long career at Kew as the dispatcher of far-flung plant
hunters to the role of Linnaean taxonomy in standardizing and facilitating global informa-
tion exchange to new techniques of visualization and transportation that purported to erase
the distance between imperial centers and often contested territories and their resources.1
In Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (2007), Londa
Schiebinger and Claudia Swan further emphasize the central role of botany within the polit-
ical and scientific contexts of natural history, arguing that “the development of botany and
Europe’s commercial and territorial expansion were closely associated developments.”2 From
the perspective of art history, Therese O’Malley and Amy Meyers’s The Art of Natural History:
Illustrated Treatises and Botanical Paintings, 1400–1850 (2008) explores the overlap of aesthetic
and scientific values and techniques in the visualization of knowledge.3 Daniela Bleichmar’s
Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (2012)
focuses on the role of botanical illustration in validating and disseminating the joined sci-
entific and imperialist agendas of eighteenth-century Spanish expeditions.4 In recent schol-
arship, therefore, botanical science has been cast as complicit with the eighteenth-century
colonial enterprise, similar to academic geography and cartography as instruments of impe-
rialist expansion in the nineteenth century.
Building on this impressive body of knowledge, The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth
Century contributes to the ongoing investigation of the intersections between natural history
1
Figure 1.1
A world map colored to
show the five zones of
the earth in the classical
tradition. Europe is
graphically decentered: one
page shows the American
continent, while the
other shows the Indian
subcontinent in the center,
flanked by Africa and Asia/
Australia. John Martyn, The
Georgicks of Virgil (1741).
Rare Book Collection,
Dumbarton Oaks Research
Library and Collection.
2 b ats a k i, c a h a l a n , a n d tchikine
intro ductio n 3
and geopolitics in two principal ways. First, it con- connected to European networks and resistant
centrates on the long eighteenth century—a period to their strategies of control (such as visual and
that saw widespread exploration, an increase in the taxonomic conventions), The Botany of Empire
traffic in botanical specimens, taxonomic break- in the Long Eighteenth Century nuances the por-
throughs, and horticultural experimentation—to trayal of eighteenth-century naturalists as “agents
compare the impact of new developments and dis- of empire.”5 Moreover, the Eastern empires were
coveries across several regions. Second, it broadens not merely passive observers of Western colonial
the geographical scope to encompass powers that ambitions. Expansionist states such as Britain and
did not have overseas colonial possessions—such France did not operate in a world of their own
as the Russian, Ottoman, and Qing empires and but were obliged to compete or collaborate with
the Tokugawa shogunate—as well as politically regional or local powers. Consequently, this vol-
borderline regions such as South Africa, Yemen, ume also raises the question of the role of botany
and New Zealand. Our aim is to sketch an inclu- in constructing social and political identities within
sive and nuanced picture while avoiding predomi- empire—notably, within the multiethnic and
nantly Eurocentric interpretations of the meanings multilingual Ottoman and Qing empires—rather
of botany—and natural history more generally— than between competing empires. The notion of
during the period under consideration. empire that emerges from these different geograph-
Although botanical scholarship had global ical and cultural coordinates is, therefore, a provi-
aspirations at least as early as the sixteenth cen- sional and inherently differentiated category rather
tury (when it was still largely contained within than a coherent political formation with a uniform
the framework of medical theory), it was only in scientific or economic agenda.
the eighteenth century that it could encompass The roots of a global botany of empire have
the inhabitable world, as major colonial powers been traced to the 1670s, with the emergence of
became the main players in the field of botanical sugar plantations run on slave labor in the Carib
exploration (Figure 1.1). The chronological scope bean and South America—which, with specific
of this volume thus puts botany at center stage at reference to the Dutch colony of Suriname, were
the time when the knowledge and exploitation reviled for their inhuman labor conditions in
of plants becomes a fundamental instrument of Voltaire’s Candide (1759). Around the same time,
imperial expansion and government control. But France embarked on a “plan of state-run colonial
the volume also shows the necessity of expanding science” centered on the Académie Royale des
beyond the strict confines of the eighteenth century Sciences and the Jardin du Roi (Figure 1.2). Not to
if we are to comprehend the unfolding narratives of be left behind, by the period between 1770 and 1820
empire through, for instance, the radical transfor- Britain had 126 official collectors in the field and a
mation or demise of significant gardens in Tuscany, network of informal suppliers and transporters.6
Istanbul, or Beijing. Moreover, the long periodiza- Throughout the eighteenth century, competition
tion enables us to acknowledge the survival and between these two major powers continued to play
expansion of traditional practices and institutions, out in the colonial plantations of the Caribbean and
such as the role of learned societies, correspon- the slave trade that made sugar production possi-
dence networks, botanical gardens, and publica- ble. Far-flung territories were rendered subservient
tions in the circulation of botanical knowledge. to the metropolitan economy, either as suppliers
When one seeks to locate botanical practices of raw materials or as possible locations for the
within their historical contexts, “empire” provides transplantation and cultivation of lucrative crops.
a convenient and seemingly self-evident cate- The medicinal qualities of coveted plants, such as
gory of analysis. And yet the meanings and aspi- cinchona, were expected to assist European colo-
rations of empire in the long eighteenth century nization in tropical regions (Figure 1.3). The con-
were multiple and divergent, as were the polit- sumption of other botanical imports, such as tea
ical tools and human resources at its disposal. or ginseng, was a luxury that drained state coffers,
Through case studies of botanists who were both leading to the search for substitutes or plans to
Figure 1.2
Sébastien LeClerc’s depiction of Louis XIV with members of the Académie des
Sciences. This model of the learned academy was the practical and symbolic basis
for eighteenth-century state-run science. Nicolas Robert, Recueil de plantes (1788,
engraving dated 1671–76). Rare Book Collection, Dumbarton Oaks Research
intro ductio n 5
Figure 1.3
Cinchona trees, the source of antimalarial treatments, were an invaluable commodity
for empires, such as the British and the Dutch, that held tropical territories. Aylmer
Bourke Lambert, A Description of the Genus Cinchona (1797). Rare Book Collection,
grow them more cheaply in colonies. At a distance Within the framework of imperial competi-
from the plantation economies, imperial networks tion, scientific, economic, and political ventures
of botanical gardens served as laboratories for the were usually intertwined. To a large extent, increas-
acclimation and exchange of economically valu- ing plant traffic and commercial exploitation were
able plants—such as Chinese tea transplanted to made possible by the expansion of administrative
India—or temporary storage depots in the long networks and improved technologies of transporta-
and laborious process of their transportation. tion. Publications from that period often addressed
Botanical gardens were also occasionally enlisted such practical matters as shipping—as evidenced,
in attempts to break rival monopolies, as in British for example, by John Ellis’s instructions for how to
and French projects to grow clove outside the transport delicate plants on long sea voyages. His
Dutch-controlled Moluccas.7 instructions for carefully sealing seeds in individual
Figure 1.4
Methods of plant
transportation. Ellis’s
illustrations demonstrate
how to pack plants and
seeds securely for long
sea voyages. John Ellis,
Directions for Bringing
over Seeds and Plants
(1770). Rare Book
Collection, Dumbarton
Oaks Research Library
and Collection.
drops of wax or growing them in state-of-the- The increase in the flow of botanical speci-
art containers were published alongside a scien- mens also led to pressure to capture their variety
tific paper on the venus flytrap, with an attractive and incorporate new discoveries into the system
illustration of that plant—a new technology and of knowledge via precise systems of classification,
a novel plant published side by side (Figure 1.4).8 with Linnaean taxonomy arguably being the most
Ellis was keenly interested in economic botany; prominent. By the end of the eighteenth century,
appended to his Directions for Bringing over Seeds binomial classification provided a lingua franca
and Plants was “A Catalogue of Such Foreign to support the appetite for botanical specimens
Plants as Are Worthy of Being Encouraged in Our that, by then, spanned almost the entire globe
American Colonies, for the Purposes of Medicine, (Figure 1.5). Again, key figures of botanical science,
Agriculture, and Commerce.” such as Banks and Linnaeus, were also involved
intro ductio n 7
Figure 1.5
A Linnaean binomial name added by hand, which extended the value of the
printed book at a time when the system of Linnaeus was becoming a lingua
franca. Johannes Burman, Rariorum africanarum plantarum (1738–39).
Rare Book Collection, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
in commercial ventures. Banks was the president Humboldt, plants resembled ruins in their capacity
of the Royal Society and a member of the Privy to evoke past empires, and he was poignantly aware
Council of Trade; as the director of the botanical of the historicity of his encounters with the flora of
garden at Kew, he acted as a mentor to younger bot- foreign places. In the gardens of Chapultepec, he
anists dispatched abroad in search of new plants. saw cypresses whose circumferences suggested
Linnaeus—hailed as the “father of modern taxon- they were planted by the Aztec dynasties; and in
omy” but also active as a practicing physician—was the midst of the forest, on the banks of the Río
at the same time a botanical opportunist preoccu- Cedeño, he found long-abandoned gardens con-
pied with the possibility of growing tea, as well as taining orange trees whose ancestors were brought
mulberry trees for silkworms, in Sweden to avoid over by Columbus.11 The responses of Aublet and
the loss of the country’s bullion to luxury imports. Humboldt exemplify the many eighteenth-century
While stressing the importance of economic meanings of “sensibility,” since they not only regis-
motives, The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth ter the aesthetic effects of landscapes and plants on
Century also highlights the plurality of philosoph- the enthusiastic naturalist but also refer to the eth-
ical and social agendas invested in the science and ical dimensions of botany. Both men, for example,
practice of botany. New plant discoveries circulated deplored the use of slaves to meet the profit exigen-
within parallel, often overlapping, systems of value: cies of colonial plantations.
the profit economy exemplified by the opium or While providing rich historical background,
sugar trade; the social economy of gentility repre- this volume also engages with influential theo-
sented by Chinese exotics or the elegant tea table; retical constructs that have informed important
the political economy represented by the ideology recent work on eighteenth-century natural history
of “improvement,” which spurred productivity and, more specifically, botany. A recurring theme
and competitiveness; and the prestige economy is the relationship between center and periphery
associated with publication in a scientific journal, as reinterpreted by Latour through his notion of
membership in a learned society, or the ability to “acting at a distance.” In practical terms, acting at a
cultivate an exotic plant in a new climate. Time and distance becomes possible through the formation
again, however, botanical narratives also convey the of networks that collect and transport “inscrip-
lingering romance of discovery, the enduring hold tions”—any significant data that can be textual or
of curiosity and surprise, and the possibility of sci- visual—from the periphery to the center in a grow-
entific and aesthetic disinterestedness, even as bot- ing “cycle of accumulation.” This cycle continues
any becomes enmeshed with economic profit and when the inscriptions are successfully appropriated
imperialist schemes.9 by the center, thus allowing for knowledge as rec-
Indeed, if we are to believe Jean Baptiste Fusée ognition even for the first-time traveler to a periph-
Aublet, the explorer of French Guiana, the botanist eral location. The more the cycle of accumulation
was the only traveler to the colonies who was not grows, the greater the size of the networks that
entirely moved by self-interest; for who in his right can be mobilized to further the center’s imperial-
senses, Aublet wondered, would brave the dangers ist ambitions and the greater the power asymmetry
of the jungle—snakes, sinkholes, fugitive slaves, dis- between the periphery and the center.12
ease, insects, and the insufferable climate—in pur- Latour’s privileged example of acting at a dis-
suit of uncertain discovery?10 Instead, botany drew tance is the eighteenth-century cartographic expe-
a very particular kind of person: one in possession dition by Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de La
of a strong constitution but also firmness, ardor, Pérouse, that “put” the island of Sakhalin on the
gaiety, finesse, and exquisite senses attuned to the world map. His concepts, however, apply equally
natural environment (Figure 1.6). Aublet, who left well to botany. “Expeditions, collections, and
his herbarium to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, paints a inquiries” were among the main strategies that
Romantic portrait of the botanist in the field that allowed a center to act successfully at a distance.13
recalls Alexander von Humboldt’s evocations of the In the field of botany, the “cycle of accumulation”
sublime in the equinoctial regions of America. For was exemplified by the botanical garden as a site of
intro ductio n 9
Figure 1.6
America depicted as an
Amazon, with a portrait of
Aublet on the medallion
at the lower right. Jean
Baptiste Fusée Aublet,
Histoire des plantes de la
Guiane Françoise (1775),
vol. 3, frontispiece.
collecting, exchange, communication, and experi- printing, back in the metropole, of books that could
mentation. Latour’s concept of science as the pro- be taken on subsequent expeditions. Improved tech-
cess of bringing inscriptions from the periphery niques for preserving and transporting plants, such
to the center is an apt description of the profu- as the ones described by Ellis, ensured the function
sion of eighteenth-century botanical practices that of botanical specimens as “immutable and com-
included plant collecting, note taking, and sketching binable mobiles” that could be archived, analyzed,
in the colonies and the subsequent engraving and and rendered useful by the metropole. At the same
time, the spread of Linnaean taxonomy facilitated compelling history of scientific images in almost the
long-distance comparisons and determinations. same period covered by this volume and describe
Lastly, Latour’s model—especially its emphasis on them as falling into the category of “truth-to-nature.”
the knowledge/power asymmetry between the cen- Drawing on an image from Linnaeus’s Hortus cliffor-
ter and the periphery—lends itself particularly well tianus, Daston and Galison take botany as the para-
to the description of colonial or imperialist enter- digmatic eighteenth-century science in which each
prises, within which botany was frequently embed- type represented in a scientific atlas aspired to be
ded in the long eighteenth century.14 “truer to nature—and therefore more real—than any
Nevertheless, the geographical and cultural actual specimen.”19 In the nineteenth century, how-
scope of this volume engenders diverse narratives ever, “truth-to-nature” gave way to “scientific objec-
that do not fit into a single paradigm. Even as he artic- tivity,” the pursuit of “knowledge . . . unmarked by
ulates the power of networks, Latour acknowledges prejudice or skill, fantasy or judgment.”20 Daston and
their limits and potential fragility. The staggering out- Galison demonstrate a close relationship between
put of eighteenth-century Spanish botanical expe- epistemology and aesthetics: “truth-to-nature” thus
ditions in the New World, for instance, reveals that signifies not only a historically specific understand-
the mass of inscriptions—botanical illustrations— ing of how to synthesize knowledge from discrete
generated could be beyond the center’s actual particulars but also a metaphysical aspiration to
capacity to process and instrumentalize.15 Ruptures “a reality accessible only with difficulty.” The ideal
can occur not simply due to technical problems of eighteenth-century naturalist, therefore, combined
transmission but also under the influence of local “sharp senses” with a “capacious memory, the abil-
pressures or power dynamics that fall beyond the ity to analyze and synthesize impressions, as well as
reach or awareness of the center.16 Dissatisfaction the patience and talent to extract the typical from
with the prevailing technology of inscription—for the storehouse of natural particulars.”21 This portrait
instance, the two-dimensional nature of botanical emerges from our case studies and is further sup-
illustration—may lead to alternative techniques of ported by many of the images in this volume. It is
representing natural resources in the periphery.17 If worth adding, however, that representational con-
on eighteenth-century American maps cartouches ventions were also informed by practical concerns
announce the possession of American territories by such as the expense and limitations of printing tech-
European powers, on a map of South Africa offered nologies, which are explored in the final section of
to Louis XVI the cartouches and papillons serve this introduction. Moreover, they were also embed-
instead to place plants and animals in their local eco- ded in larger philosophical and political ambitions
systems and to memorialize, as it were, the impor- that drove eighteenth-century scholarship.
tance and opacity of local knowledge—while at the If botany is exemplary of an eighteenth-century
same time eschewing Linnaean nomenclature.18 aspiration to “truth-to-nature,” as Daston and Gali
Above all, the prevailing characterization of the son argue, its practices nevertheless encompassed
botanical explorer as an “agent of empire” overlooks a wider range of what we have come to regard as
a wide range of motivations that influenced collect- epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic drives of
ing in the field: personal interests and choices, gov- the Enlightenment. A little-known utopian proj-
ernment or institutional agendas, interactions with ect from the very end of the eighteenth century,
local political agents, reliance on local knowledge, which straddles theory and practice, the national
and strategies of self-promotion. and the universal, encapsulates many of the ways
Some of the most interesting recent work in the in which botany was understood as a fundamental
history of science has dealt with strategies of visual- Enlightenment science. While throwing light on
ization. In its attention to the production, use, and the desire for accurate and enduring representa-
meanings of botanical illustrations, The Botany of tions of nature that were clearly recognized at the
Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century also enters into time—mediated not by an individual artist’s skill
dialogue with this body of scholarship. In Objectivity and imagination but by what was then seen as a
(2007), Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison offer a cutting-edge technology—this contemporary voice
intro ductio n 11
also succinctly summarizes the central themes and the proposed cabinet would usher in “a new epoch
preoccupations of our volume. in the History of human knowledge.”26
Jauffret’s text is also paradigmatic of how
•
eighteenth-century botany was adopted by pro-
In October of 1790, on the cusp of political and ponents of national improvement. Without doubt,
cultural change in Europe, Louis-François Jauffret Jauffret argued, painters and illustrators would
(1770–1840)—a writer, pedagogue, and popularizer benefit from having accurate models at hand, yet
of science, as well as a contemporary and associate the manufacture of artificial plants would not only
of taxonomists and naturalists Antoine-Laurent stimulate the disinterested pursuits of art and sci-
de Jussieu and Georges Cuvier—presented to the ence but also facilitate their practical applications.
French National Assembly a project for establishing While he gave medicine pride of place, Jauffret was
a national manufacture of artificial plants following also interested in the applied arts and crafts, antici
the method of Thomas Joseph Wenzel, florist to pating the market prospects for French luxury
Queen Marie Antoinette.22 The project, which was embroidery or textiles and wallpapers with floral
also presented to the Academy of Sciences, pro- motifs. Equally important, he calculated that the
posed the establishment of a cabinet des plantes that actual manufacture would provide employment
would contain exact replicas—manufactured using for four thousand people at a time of significant
Wenzel’s innovative technique—of the twenty-five disorder and uncertainty in the French capital.
thousand plant species that were, by Jauffret’s calcu- And such a cabinet would not fail to attract visitors
lation, then known to science. Jauffret envisaged this from abroad, thus contributing to the national pres-
cabinet as an “immense temple of Nature, wherein tige. Yet Jauffret’s was more than a national or even
the eye could encompass in a single view the entire imperial vision: it also alluded to the public sphere
plant creation.”23 This encyclopedic view would of knowledge as shared and open to examination.
double as a triumph of scientific representation, for Jauffret saw the cabinet as fulfilling the promise
plants would be captured in three dimensions, in all of the eighteenth century, transcending artificial
their structural detail and colorful beauty, and pre- systems and cultural differences to provide direct
served for eternity. Science would no longer be ham- access to the multiplicity of natural objects “in a
pered by the shortcomings of the colorless, decaying, public space that would soon become a resplendent
partial herbarium specimen; the distortions and rep- sanctuary of knowledge/enlightenment.”27
resentational conventions of botanical illustrations;
the “arid descriptions”24 or the complexity of multi-
ple nomenclatures and taxonomies in which “chaos Chapters
march[ed] hard on the heels of all those variations.”25 The volume is divided into four parts that highlight
Jauffret’s proposal conveyed a desire for a different aspects of the relationship between botany
global collection of plants, accurately represented and empire across various regions during the long
and available to scientists and the public alike. eighteenth century. The first section, “Botanical
Botanical knowledge would no longer be limited by Ambitions,” introduces the principal themes of
a dependence on the exertions of colonial agents the whole volume, setting them within the global
dispatched to collect specimens but often produc- mosaic of botanical exploration and exchange.
ing disappointing results due to their indolence or
incompetence. Observers would be able to make Botanical Ambitions
immediate comparisons between different plants Daniela Bleichmar opens the discussion by empha-
and to detect patterns that would yield new infor- sizing, in “Botanical Conquistadors: The Promises
mation about the effects of climate and region or and Challenges of Imperial Botany in the Hispanic
practical and scientific applications. The utopian Enlightenment,” that botanical exploration was a
vision inspired by Wenzel’s creation was, thus, a cri- global enterprise with high economic stakes that
tique of existing methods of botanical description relied on institutional networks and received
and representation and led to Jauffret’s claim that strong state support in the quest for new raw
Figure 1.7
Ginseng, captioned in
Latin, German, French,
and Russian, from a
series of illustrations
of medicinal plants
dedicated to Emperor
Alexander I P. M. Gofman,
Collection de curiosites
du royaume des plantes
(1797–1810). Rare Book
Oaks Research Library and
Collection.
materials. Concentrating on the Spanish expedi- of longstanding Spanish imperial techniques.” Yet
tions, Bleichmar stresses the discourse of utility despite these expeditions’ impressive visual out-
that summed up their aspirations and stoked their put, they were relatively unsuccessful in fulfilling
interest in the economic value of colonial flora. At their immediate political and economic motives:
the same time, she demonstrates that the Spanish Spain, a colonial empire on the wane, offered a foil
expeditions were attempts to revive an illustrious to the ascendancy of France and England on the
imperial past: “The role of imperial institutions in world stage.
supporting scientific investigations and the appeal Shigehisa Kuriyama’s account of the global for-
to colonial administrators for information were tunes of ginseng, “The Geography of Ginseng and
not Enlightenment novelties but rather extensions the Strange Alchemy of Needs,” raises provocative
intro ductio n 13
Figure 1.8
Frontispiece, showing the
allegorical uncovering of
China to the Macartney
mission to China. George
Staunton, An Historical
Account of the Embassy
to the Emperor of China
(1797). Rare Book
and Collection.
questions about historical connection, analogy, the British scheme of transplanting Chinese tea to
and accident. A Jesuit account of Chinese gin- Indian colonial plantations; both, however, served
seng published in Paris and read by a missionary a similar purpose in addressing the balance of trade.
in Quebec prompted the unlikely discovery of Kuriyama’s chapter attests to the serendipitous
this plant in North America. At around the same power of printed text and image; it also questions
time, China’s neighbor Japan resorted to “botani- our fixed categories of space and time by tracking
cal piracy” to manage the cultivation of ginseng at their duplication and transposition in ginseng’s
home, thus staunching the flow of bullion to China global fortunes (Figure 1.7).
via Korea. The Japanese solution of growing gin- In “Weeping Willows and Dwarfed Trees:
seng at home was a locally feasible alternative to Plants in Chinese Gardens under Western Eyes,”
Bianca Maria Rinaldi tracks how European views whom work in the field could be a stepping-stone
of Chinese gardens reflected changing attitudes to to a secure professional appointment, tried to mar-
the Qing empire. Just as Chinese plants and the ket their services and skills and embraced personal
distinctively “naturalistic” approach to landscaping objectives that often coincided but occasionally
were becoming increasingly common in European conflicted with imperial agendas. Even as the net-
gardens, Rinaldi argues, early Jesuit accounts cast works of learned societies, government authorities,
the Chinese garden as the product of an enlight- and botanical gardens in the metropolitan centers
ened empire, worthy of imitation due to its informal sought to order and exploit botanical exploration,
aesthetic and low cost (in contrast to the ruinously conditions on the ground often interfered with
expensive formal French garden as an expression of or modified the expected outcome. This section,
absolutism). By the turn of the nineteenth century, therefore, highlights complex interactions between
however, the same aesthetic (now viewed as the mainstream and vernacular botany, bringing into
artificial and perhaps even perverse miniaturiza- prominence the uses and adaptations of local—
tion and manipulation of nature) was taken as evi- that is, non-imperial—botanical dialects.
dence of an enervated and decadent society whose Sahar Bazzaz’s chapter, “The Politics of Sec
political and moral degeneration implied European ular Pilgrimage: Paul-Émile Botta’s Red Sea Expe
superiority and advanced European commercial dition, 1836–39,” takes us to the end of our period.
agendas (Figure 1.8). Bazzaz tracks the botanical pilgrimage of an
Anatole Tchikine’s “Echoes of Empire: Redefin early nineteenth-century explorer who followed
ing the Botanical Garden in Eighteenth-Century in the footsteps of Peter Forskål (1732–63), the
Tuscany” transports us to a small Italian state on Swedish/Finnish naturalist, apostle of Linnaeus,
the periphery of the Habsburg empire, where the and leader of the famous but unsuccessful mid-
botanical garden was arguably born. This chapter eighteenth-century Red Sea expedition. Botta trav-
takes a retrospective approach to offer a concise eled to the Arabian Peninsula with directives from
trajectory of the development of the botanical gar- the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (for-
den as an institution dedicated to preserving and merly the Jardin du Roi) in Paris to document,
advancing the knowledge of natural history, yet describe, and collect samples of flora. Yet Botta’s
invested with different and sometimes conflicting success was predicated not on the instructions he
agendas: medicinal, scholarly, didactic, and, ulti- received, but on his knowledge of area languages
mately, economic. By focusing on the Giardino dei and geopolitics and his ability to establish local
Semplici in Florence, Tchikine demonstrates strong connections and navigate local conflicts. These
continuities from the sixteenth into the eighteenth qualities later enabled Botta to serve as diplomatic
century in botanizing trips, correspondence net- envoy to the Ottomans in Mosul, where he engaged
works, and gift exchange, while emphasizing the in the archaeological excavations for which he is
local effects of the rise of learned societies and the most famous. This chapter and those that follow
ideology of improvement. The new kind of botany highlight the extent to which botanical practices
that emerged in the eighteenth century, Tchikine were still enmeshed in other areas of expertise or
argues, required a new type of botanical garden not scholarly investigation—here, archaeology and
only as a repository of knowledge but as a direct diplomacy; elsewhere, entomology, ornithology, or
response to pressing economic and political needs. medicine—right on the cusp of the professionaliza-
tion of these disciplines in the nineteenth century.
Agents of Empire? In “François Le Vaillant: Resistant Botanist?”
The second section focuses on the complex figure of Ian Glenn addresses an even less mainstream botan-
the botanical explorer. Through a series of individ- ical explorer. Born in Surinam, Le Vaillant explored
ual case studies, often from the margins of empires, South Africa as an ornithologist and ethnographer
this section scrutinizes the notion of the botanist first and as a “resistant botanist” second, before
as “agent of empire.” These amateurs and entrepre- striving to make a name for himself as an author
neurs, scientists, explorers, or simply eccentrics, for and collector of Cape flora in French natural history
intro ductio n 15
circles. A pioneer of naturalistic museum displays, alike have identified as the deployment of knowl-
Le Vaillant was critical of botanical illustration for edge as an instrument of power. Botanical itiner-
its two-dimensionality; this impoverishment of aries grew more numerous and productive due to
the spatial dimension signified to Le Vaillant not government-sponsored voyages of exploration,
only the loss of fundamental plant qualities, such ongoing exchanges within state-administrated net-
as color and scent, but also a deplorable neglect of works of botanical gardens, the rapidly growing
the local knowledge of indigenous ecosystems. If volume of cartographic information, and evolving
Linnaean binomial taxonomy served as a common ways of overcoming distance through print and
currency that facilitated the decontextualization communication technologies. This section outlines
and objectification of plants for economic or polit- some of the challenges confronted by botanists in
ical ends, then Le Vaillant’s reluctance to embrace the course of their travels and shows how they drew
binomial classification was also a form of resistance on metropolitan, personal, and local resources to
to imperialist systems of order and control. achieve their aims (Figure 1.9).
Although metropolitan centers have been con- Sarah Easterby-Smith’s chapter, “On Diplomacy
strued as loci for the ordering of colonial flora, and Botanical Gifts: France, Mysore, and Mauritius
magnets for botanical specimens, and dispatch- in 1788,” explores the mobility of people and plants
ers of imperial agents, from another point of view requested by Tipu Sultan of Seringapatam, India,
they connected—rather than organized—activ- via a diplomatic mission to France. Tipu Sultan’s
ities that took place largely on the periphery. In deputies came with a catalog of gifts requested of
“Thomas McDonnell’s Opium: Circulating Plants, Louis XVI; among the desired offerings of Sèvres
Patronage, and Power in Britain, China, and New porcelain and French armaments were native plants
Zealand, 1830s–50s,” James Beattie tracks the career and, in addition, three spices not native to France:
of Thomas McDonnell, whose areas of collecting nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon. Easterby-Smith
encompassed India, China, and New Zealand. traces the complicated trajectory of the French
McDonnell illustrates the ways in which the over- botanical gifts and the contradictory administrative
lapping economies of eighteenth-century botany exchanges between the metropolitan authorities in
continued into the nineteenth century. While mak- Paris and the local director of the botanical garden
ing his fortune as an opium trader and honing his in the Île-de-France. Eventually, the plants were
local status in New Zealand as a collector of exotic released to Tipu’s emissaries and the French gar-
Chinese and Indian flora, he nonetheless sought deners accompanying them, who continued their
scientific recognition through his publications, in sea voyage plagued by cramped quarters, a scarcity
London, on the unassuming plants that grew out- of water, and ravenous vermin. While exploring the
side his garden at Horeke. Beattie concludes by on-the-ground difficulties of plant travel, this chap-
arguing that the cultural practices around “science ter taps into broader practices of botanical reciproc-
making” and the associated patronage networks it ity in the period, such as diplomatic gift exchange
established conferred differing levels of respectabil- and the actual operation of networks of colonial
ity on McDonnell, dependent on the specific social botanical gardens.
and political contexts of Britain and Australasia. In “From Local to Global: Balsa Rafts and a
Bountiful Harvest from Ecuador,” Colin McEwan
Botanical Itineraries takes us to the banks of the river Guayaquil in South
The impulse to survey, map, and collect was closely America. McEwan draws our attention to local
linked to imperial ambition. The disciplines of nat- transport solutions as witnessed and recorded by
ural history and cartography had much in common Alexander von Humboldt. In his Personal Narrative
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: both of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America,
were fueled by the desire to explore and master During the Years 1799–1804, Humboldt notes the
“new” territories, both benefitted from technolog- paucity and difficulty of roads in South America
ical and administrative developments, and both and goes so far as to suggest the importation of
exemplified what historians of empire and science camels to aid with transportation of goods and
improve transcontinental trade. Yet camels proved
harder to transport than plants, and Humboldt’s
maps pay attention instead to river networks. His
travels through the Andes must have sharpened his
appreciation of the role of rivers in enabling local
communications and trade, as well as access to
the coast. McEwan’s close reading of an image of a
balsa raft, loaded with fruit, on the river Guayaquil
sketches for us the contemporary conditions of
riverine and oceanic trade, while also demon-
strating Humboldt’s reliance on the accounts of
earlier travelers. Firmly rooted in local traditions
and itineraries, the image also suggests incipient
connections to the global trade of mass commodi-
ties (such as cotton), which were of interest to the
European empires.
Rachel Koroloff, in her chapter “‘In Imperio
Rutheno’: Johann Amman’s Stirpium Rariorum
(1739) and the Foundation of Russia’s Botanical
Empire,” analyzes how Russian imperial strategies
and aspirations were embodied in the first com-
prehensive flora of the Russian empire. Such car-
tographic and botanical contributions, she argues,
primarily reflected the empire’s preoccupation
with its southern and eastern borders. Russia’s ten-
uous hold on the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea
was mediated by the collection and description of
their natural resources and their carefully curated
presentation in European diplomatic and scien-
tific contexts. The legacy of seventeenth-century
Russian expansion—characterized by special atten-
tion to the southern Caspian regions, the need to
control the steppes populated by nomadic peoples,
and the concern over the Ottoman and Safavid
empires—continued to exert a direct effect on the
botanical expeditions undertaken in the 1720s and
1730s, which relied heavily on local resources and
government infrastructure: roads and postal sta- Figure 1.9
tions as well as administrative networks. Indeed, Dedicatory page expressing the author’s gratitude
one’s ability to obtain passage into these regions to Hans Sloane. Philip Miller, Gardeners Dictionary
signified a modicum of imperial control. Koroloff ’s (1733). Rare Book Collection, Dumbarton Oaks
analysis contributes to the reassessment of the tra- Research Library and Collection.
ditional narrative of Russian science in the eigh-
teenth century, away from a narrow focus on Siberia
and Western Europe and toward a broader assess-
ment of Russia’s imperialist aspirations, especially
where they came into conflict with its Ottoman and
Safavid neighbors.
intro ductio n 17
Cultivating Identities
This section explores the relationship between
botanical knowledge, self-representation, and
material culture, highlighting the important ways
in which eighteenth-century botany served as a
vehicle for the creation of social, political, or local
identities through art, garden design, manufacture,
publishing culture, and social ritual. The chapters
that follow locate plants as commodities within
their cultures of luxury and mass consumption;
they also explore the ways in which aesthetic con-
ventions and traditions inform the representations
of plants and make them stand in, metonymically,
for the territories and cultures from which they
derive. Lastly, they show how botanical texts and
illustrations become vehicles for the construction
of individual as well as social—imperial or post-
imperial—identities (Figure 1.10).
The impact of botany on eighteenth-century
material culture and social customs is one of
the central themes in this volume. Romita Ray’s
chapter, “Ornamental Exotica: Transplanting the
Aesthetics of Tea Consumption and the Birth of
a British Exotic,” explores the cultural effects of
plants as commodities by focusing on tea con-
sumption in England. Alongside the economics
and aesthetics of tea, Ray also considers its central
role in the construction and performance of socia-
bility. Tea’s ambiguous effects on the body—as a
luxury commodity that promoted polite sociabil-
ity but also corrupt sensibility—were matched by
ambivalence about its effect on the national econ-
omy and the balance of trade. Ray explores the ways
in which “the cultures of natural history, ushered
through the channels of commerce, generated fresh
sensory experiences and, by extension, unique
Figure 1.10
ornamental objects and ornamental bodies.” At
The ability to cultivate a pineapple was a sign of one’s the same time, she maps an interesting triangulat-
botanical credentials. Johannes Commelin, Horti ing effect of empire: the transplantation of the tea
medici amstelodamensis (1697–1701). Rare Book plant from China to India to satisfy the economic
Collection, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and needs of Britain.
Collection. In “Allegories of Alterity: Flora’s Children as the
Four Continents,” Miranda Mollendorf examines
British botanist Robert John Thornton’s Temple of
Flora (1797–1812), a lavish publication described by
its author as “a Universal Empire of Love” that con-
tained the “choicest flowers of Europe, Asia, Africa,
and America.” The book, whose expense ruined
Thornton, presents plates of the flowers inscribed
within a landscape and accompanied by poetry. The
effect of both setting and accompanying text is to
“humanize” the flowers, in Mollendorf ’s argument.
Yet she also shows that Thornton’s personifications
draw on the traditional iconography of the “Four
Continents” to assign to each flower racial and cul-
tural characteristics associated with its territory in
a hierarchical scheme that privileges Europe as the
locus of culture and power. These ideological over-
tones are perhaps most striking in the sexual and
racial characteristics associated with flowers from
Africa, Asia, and America. Ultimately, Mollendorf
argues, Thornton’s Temple of Flora inscribes flow-
ers with colonial desire as commodities that can be
bought, collected, and exchanged within the covers
of a book (Figure 1.11).
The following chapter, “Ottoman Horticulture
after the Tulip Era: Botanizing Consuls, Garden
Diplomacy, and the First Foreign Head Gardener,”
takes issue with traditional accounts of Ottoman
imperial gardens in the eighteenth century as
simply representative of the desire to emulate
European models. Deniz Türker shows instead
that Ottoman taste for different gardening prac-
tices continued to be marked by sophisticated dis-
cernment and was attuned to local customs and
needs, as well as to broader cultural and political
concerns. By focusing on the court’s reception of
European diplomats’ gardens in the Ottoman capi-
tal and the figure of Jacob Ensle, the first European
head gardener of Topkapi, Türker demonstrates
that Ottoman attitudes toward French and Dutch
versus English landscape aesthetics were inter-
twined with contemporary geopolitics (not least
a resistance to the English picturesque so eagerly
embraced by Catherine the Great of Russia).
Figure 1.11
Türker also highlights Ensle’s role in building net- Title page showing the four continents. Michel
works of plant exchange, showing how his popular Angelo Tilli, Catalogus plantarum horti pisani (1723).
and exclusive garden tours became a conduit that Rare Book Collection, Dumbarton Oaks Research
brought global plants and trends into the palace— Library and Collection.
and, inversely, brought to learned European audi-
ences a more sophisticated picture of Ottoman
culture than the one to be found in conventionally
“Orientalist” accounts.
In “Making ‘Mongolian’ Nature: Medicinal
Plants and Qing Empire in the Long Eighteenth
Century,” Carla Nappi introduces us to ‘Jam dpal
intro ductio n 19
rdo rje, a Buddhist monk born in Inner Mongolia Library, and was designed to highlight the impor-
in 1792. His manuscript presents plant materials tance of material culture to eighteenth-century
alongside animals, metals, stones, and medical botanical practices. In order to be properly contex-
instruments in a compilation that will remind many tualized and understood, many of the stories told
readers of the European tradition of materia med- in this volume call for an awareness of print and
ica. Nappi focuses on a single botanical image anno- publication technologies, as well as conventions
tated in Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Chinese and innovations in botanical illustration. The col-
scripts. In contrast to the rise of Linnaean taxon- lection at Dumbarton Oaks has furnished examples
omy and its uses in Europe to promote scientific that have informed our discussions.
monolingualism at the service of scientific empiri- The very nature of international expeditions
cism, Nappi argues that the coexistence of alternate entailed coordination across different professions:
names within a single frame is a visual performance a voyage over the Atlantic or through the Middle
of the multiplicity of Qing identities. Ultimately, in East might include experts in astronomy, cartog-
transposing the long eighteenth century onto the raphy, and natural history. A well-known represen-
Qing empire, Nappi demonstrates that Qing bot- tation of such an expedition is the Description de
any was both visually and epistemically multiethnic l’Égypte (1809–28), which was an attempt at com-
and multilingual, even as later partial translations prehensive documentation of the geography, natu-
ascribe to the text specific ethnic identities (e.g., ral history, and archaeology of Egypt produced by
“Mongolian” or “Tibeto-Mongolian”). Napoleon’s savants as a complement to his 1798–
In the final chapter of the volume, “William 1801 expedition. A lesser-known undertaking is the
Bartram’s Drawing of a New Species of Arethusa earlier expedition by Guillaume-Antoine Olivier
(1796): Portrait of a Life,” Amy Meyers examines and Jean Guillaume Bruguière that was published
a botanical image through the lenses of autobi- between 1801 and 1807 as Voyage dans l’empire otho-
ographical definition and communal affiliation. man, l’Égypte et la Perse (Figure 1.12). Such projects
William Bartram’s drawing has often been read as were not always as explicitly imperial or encyclo-
an affirmation of republican exceptionalism, cast pedic in their intent as the Description de l’Égypte,
in the form of an explicitly American garden filled but they often drew together specialists of different
with rare New World species and located next to the national or professional backgrounds due to the
nation’s capital. For Bartram, however, the robust practicalities of international travel and scholar-
and varied community of plants contained in the ship. Olivier and Bruguière were physicians who
garden had historical associations that reached back documented the insects, plants, and mollusks of the
to the colonial period and long predated the estab- region in addition to mapping its coastline. Another
lishment of the nation. Meyers interprets Bartram’s example, Thomas Shaw’s Travels (1738), acquired
drawing as “a historical reflection reminding those by Dumbarton Oaks for its documentation of the
who might choose to interpret the young nation— archaeology and antiquities of North Africa and the
or the course of their own lives—as the product of Levant, includes illustrations and lists of local plants
a revolutionary break with the past that the present (Figure 1.13). Shaw also shared his botanical speci-
and the future are, in fact, embedded in historical mens with the botanist Johann Jakob Dillenius, who
relationships that are continuous and ever-binding.” identified hundreds of specimens, many of which
Botany is, thus, caught anew in the web of eighteenth- were new to Europe.28 In Engelbert Kaempfer’s
century history. Amoenitatum exoticarum (1712), we find detailed
engravings of the cities of Safavid Iran followed by
extensive descriptions of the flora of Japan; a con-
Material Cultures of Botany and the ventional botanical image of the tea plant is accom-
Dumbarton Oaks Rare Book Collection panied by an engraving of the instruments used for
The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century making and consuming the drink itself. Like many
began as a symposium that coincided with the fifti- authors of this period, Kaempfer, who worked as a
eth anniversary of the Dumbarton Oaks Rare Book surgeon for the Dutch East India Company, could
Figure 1.12
Oak specimen,
published alongside
mollusks, insects, and
detailed coastline maps.
Guillaume-Antoine
Olivier, Voyage dans
l’empire othoman,
l’Égypte et la Perse
(1801–7). Rare Book
and Collection.
be seen as a deliberate agent of empire—but, like while the plates themselves, as with Shaw’s Travels,
Shaw, he might be better understood as a self-fash- could each be dedicated to a specific subscriber. In
ioned collector, curating his discoveries in the con- addition to the author and publisher, we must also
text of a published volume (Figure 1.14). take into account printer, bookseller, patron, censor,
Kaempfer did not, of course, produce his vol- subscribers, and illustrator. Even to say “illustrator”
ume’s celebrated engravings; with some notable is to oversimplify the case: a botanical book typically
exceptions, authors seldom did, which brings us involved a painter who composed an image from a
to the complicated interplay of letterpress (i.e., the specimen, sometimes working under the watchful
printed word) and illustration. When we consider eye of the book’s naturalist-author. Another artist
the production of such books, we should keep in would design the intaglio plates—although the
mind the number of professionals involved, a num- engraving and etching of the same plate might be
ber that could easily double if the printed product the job of two different professionals—while the
was enhanced with illustrations. The title and ded- engraver’s workshop, which was typically a different
icatory pages of any given volume tell part of the operation from the letterpress workshop where the
complicated story of the many parties involved, text was printed, would print them. In some cases
intro ductio n 21
a b
Figure 1.13 a colorist, working with variably accurate instruc- fifteenth century. In the eighteenth century, how-
Egyptian antiquities (a), tions, might add color by hand.29 ever, printmakers developed a number of hybrid
and Egyptian plants (b). Philip Gaskell observes of letterpress printing: strategies. Combining engraving with etching to
Thomas Shaw, Travels, “From 1500 to 1800 printers everywhere handled produce so-called line engravings, for example,
or Observations Relating closely similar tools and materials in closely similar saved work and, therefore, money. For similar rea-
to Several Parts of ways [and] all made the same sort of arrangements sons, a switch was made from copper plates to steel
Barbary and the Levant for fitting the individual processes together into plates in the early nineteenth century. Copper was
(1738). Rare Book complete patterns of work.” These tools and materi- easier to work, but steel could last longer and make
Collection, Dumbarton als were, of course, manipulated by hand; paper was for a more lucrative run of prints.31 Other innova-
made from rags and printed on handpresses until the tions in image production included mezzotint and
and Collection.
early nineteenth century.30 This conservative pro- aquatint in the late seventeenth century and lithog-
cess defined the printing of words on blank pages; raphy introduced at the very end of the eighteenth
the production of illustrations, however, changed century, followed by chromolithography in the
significantly over the long eighteenth century. early nineteenth century. Methods to create color
The process of engraving a metal plate with a prints prior to the development of chromolithog-
burin and then printing the image created by the raphy included hand-coloring black-and-white
ink that filled the carved lines dates back to the images, as seen in Mark Catesby’s Natural History
Figure 1.14
Instruments for making
and consuming tea.
Engelbert Kaempfer,
Amoenitatum
exoticarum (1712).
Dumbarton Oaks
Research Library
and Collection.
(1731–43); inking a plate in a color other than black, given image in order to keep costs in check and
as in Constantine Rafinesque’s Medical Flora (1828– avoid the bankruptcy that seems to have been a
30); and inking a plate with several different col- relatively common occurrence among naturalists.
ors of ink à la poupée, as seen in the work of Elisha To a certain extent, then, “truth-to-nature” is also a
Kirkall in John Martyn’s Historia plantarum rario- symptom of the economy of book publishing at the
rum (1728–37; Figure 1.15).32 These printing tech- time. Moreover, the period also offers some striking
niques offer some interesting counter-examples examples of the attempt to capture individual spec-
to Daston and Galison’s juxtaposition of “truth- imens in all their specificity.
to-nature” and “scientific objectivity.” As these A first edition of Botanica in originali pharmacev-
authors acknowledge, eighteenth-century atlas tica das ist: Lebendig officinal-kräuter-buch, published
makers were reliant on the artists and publishers in 1733 by Johann Hieronymus Kniphof (1704–63),
with whom they contracted. The financial impli- is important both to the history of plant illustration
cations of such a network of contributors (and and the history of printing practices. The book is a
the great expense of many illustration techniques fascinating experiment in nature printing, a term that
before the introduction of lithography and pho- refers to a number of different methods for produc-
tography) meant that it was necessary to show as ing an image from an actual specimen. In Kniphof,
much accurate information as possible within a we find an early example of a naturalist choosing one
intro ductio n 23
Figure 1.15
Elisha Kirkall, Cassia
bahamensis, color
mezzotint. John Martyn,
Historia plantarum
rariorum (1728–37).
Dumbarton Oaks
Research Library
and Collection.
specimen to serve as an illustration for many, rather of leaves and the texture of roots and tendrils. This
than distilling the observation of many specimens method of producing a two-dimensional image
into one generalized image. Kniphof coated plants from a three-dimensional object does not always
with printing ink and printed directly from the do justice to plant parts such as flowers and fruits,
plant onto paper by means of a press. This process which may be one reason it has often been used with
made for a very limited print run due to wear and non-flowering plants such as ferns. Nature printing
tear on the specimens (a drawback that Benjamin can draw attention to details that are not otherwise
Franklin turned into an advantage by using nature visible, such as sporangia on ferns and mosses. More
prints on currency to stymie counterfeiters). The importantly, nature printing as an attempt to portray
real strength of nature printing, however, is in how the particularity of an individual plant runs against
the technique captures detail, such as the venation the notion of the type as the ideal of botanical
Figure 1.16
Nature printing from the
early eighteenth century,
complicating the timeline
of objectivity in scientific
illustration. Johann
Hieronymus Kniphof,
Botanica in originali
pharmaceutica (1733).
representation. The work of Kniphof hints at the botanical illustrations seem essential in publications
wide variety of illustration techniques used in the on natural history, Linnaeus famously pronounced
eighteenth century and extends our understanding them unnecessary to the specialist: “I do not recom-
of the ways in which fidelity to nature was conceived mend drawings to determine genera, in fact I abso-
in that period (Figure 1.16).33 lutely reject them, although I confess that they are of
Since the early days of printing, adding images great importance to boys and those who have more
to a book had entailed additional expense often brainpan than brain; I confess that they convey
borne by the author or shared by the subscribers. something to the unlearned.” 34 Perhaps Linnaeus’s
This pattern held in the eighteenth century, but, aim was not so much to disparage images as to dis-
as we have seen, illustrations became less expen- tinguish his Genera plantarum (1737) from the sort
sive due to changing technologies. Although to us, of books designed for “boys”—or, for that matter,
intro ductio n 25
Figure 1.17
The systems of Linnaeus
and Tournefort illustrated
side by side, ostensibly
for the education of
children. Pierre Philippe
Alyon, Cours de botanique
(1787–88). Rare Book
and Collection.
a b
nonexperts in general. Such decisions about illus- The distinction between different audiences Figure 1.18
trations usually depended on the book’s intended raises the issue of genre: what was being written a) Balthasar Cattrani,
audience. Pierre Alyon’s Cours de botanique of 1787, a and for whom? The holdings of the Dumbarton Collection de botanique
volume in the Rare Book Collection at Dumbarton Oaks Rare Book Collection demonstrate the vari- (ca. 1780); and b) Pierre
Oaks that includes extensive illustrations of the clas- ety of books produced in this period. In addition to Joseph Redouté, Les
sification systems of both Linnaeus and Tournefort, the expedition volumes discussed previously there roses (1817–24). Rare
was purportedly written for the children of the Duc were, for example, luxurious works by authors such Book Collection,
d’Orléans (Figure 1.17). Or, as Isabelle Charmantier as Pierre Joseph Redouté, Étienne Pierre Ventenat, Dumbarton Oaks
argues, Linnaeus may not have meant his opinion and Balthasar Cattrani, which continued the old Research Library
and Collection.
on illustrations to extend to anything other than tradition of recording prestigious collections of
the specific topic of Genera plantarum, that is, des- plants cultivated in particular gardens that were as
ignating differences in plant genus.35 Regardless, important for the decorative arts as they were for
Linnaeus himself did not always abide by this con- the study of natural history (Figure 1.18).
troversial recommendation—which he made early Some books were small and designed for use in
in his career, when money for images was not so the field; for example, the well-annotated copy of
readily forthcoming—and his books make frequent Charles Plumier’s Nova plantarum americanarum
use of images and diagrams. genera (1703) at Dumbarton Oaks is small enough
intro ductio n 27
Figure 1.19
An annotated book,
perhaps for use in the
field. Charles Plumier,
Nova plantarum
americanarum genera
(1703). Rare Book
and Collection.
to bring on ship with ease and was one of the books One fascinating example among many is a
frequently consulted and cited by subsequent trav- late eighteenth-century manuscript by Aloysio
elers to the Americas (Figure 1.19). Other books Cabrini in which he copied the images from Paolo
told official versions of important diplomatic mis- Boccone’s Museo di piante rare (1697). Cabrini’s
sions, such as George Staunton’s account of the manuscript has added binomial names and, in some
British embassy to China, or presented highly indi- cases, morphological details such as the flower or
vidualistic attempts at biogeography, such as the the calyx of a plant, demonstrating his adherence
works of Alexander von Humboldt. to Linnaeus’s system of classifying plants based
Figure 1.20
a) Manuscript copy of Boccone’s illustrations:
Aloysio Cabrini, Boccone Museum rariorum
plantarum (1791); and b) Paolo Boccone, Museo
di piante rare (1697). Rare Book Collection,
on their floral parts. On the one hand, Cabrini’s

reliance on a century-old text indicates the tenac-
ity of a long tradition, glossed over as it may have
been with new vocabulary. On the other, these
additions demonstrate the author’s receptiveness
to the changes in plant identification and descrip-
tion that took place over the century between the
two books—and probably indicate Cabrini’s hope
to publish this book, as expressed in his introduc-
tion, despite his lack of a patron. The work, thus,
illustrates the interplay of continuity and change
in botanical practices of the period (Figure 1.20).
Dumbarton Oaks has several hand-painted
albums from the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries produced in Asia as souvenirs
for employees of the British East India Company.
Similar items that are now in Kew, Edinburgh, and
other important collections suggest the value of
a comparative study of the artists and workshops
that produced these books, not to mention the indi-
viduals who carried these images home with them
(Figure 1.21).
Other materials—for example, a small book of
illustrations evidently copied in part from William
a
Curtis’s Botanical Magazine and a number of items
with interesting additions including marginalia and
hand-drawn illustrations—likewise draw atten-
tion to the growing audience for botanical data.
The small collection of hand-painted Curtis cop-
ies was made by a clergyman (Reverend Robert
Bransby Francis) in Norfolk for a female relative
(“Mrs. Whyte”) who had expressed an interest in
botany. Such copied images and well-annotated
books are evidence of the widespread nature of
botanical knowledge that by the late eighteenth
century had penetrated different areas of cultural
life and was no longer limited to a small group of
professionals and their patrons.
The expanding audience for botanical im
ages was contemporaneous with the increasing
b
intro ductio n 29
Figure 1.21
Watermelon. Similar albums, made by hand but in a workshop for streamlined
production, can be found in libraries at Kew and the Royal Botanic Garden
Edinburgh. Album of Watercolors of Asian Fruits and Flowers (1800–50).
Rare Book Collection, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
availability of the plants themselves. Improved which survive due to the ephemeral nature of these
methods of plant transportation and cultivation, materials), by the late eighteenth century, nursery
such as the storage cases we have mentioned or the catalogs were increasingly aimed at the amateur
introduction of bark stoves to greenhouses, meant enthusiast gardeners of the growing middle class as
that plants could be moved over great distances opposed to the nobility and prominent botanists.36
and grown in previously inhospitable climates. In the early nineteenth century, nurseries such as
English and French nursery trade catalogs demon- the one run by Conrad Loddiges continued to stoke
strate this changing demand for plants. While late the enthusiasm for ornamental and exotic plants.
seventeenth-century catalogs by Pierre Morin or Loddiges also published the colorfully illustrated
John Rose supplied the lavish gardens of royalty, Botanical Cabinet, the title pages of which directed
with seed lists often printed as broadsides (few of readers to the nursery’s location in Hackney.
Objects that had been exotic in the late seven- proliferation of these publications attests to the
teenth century, such as hothouse plants or illus- intertwined passions for plants and botanical books
trated books, became increasingly familiar in the among the eighteenth-century reading public.
course of the eighteenth century. Illustrated garden
catalogs and publications, such as Curtis’s Botanical
Magazine or the Herbier général de l’amateur, accus- Acknowledgments
tomed readers to the material culture of plants and The editors would like to extend special thanks to
brought the work of prestigious artists—who had Jan Ziolkowski, Linda Lott, John Beardsley, Mark
previously illustrated luxurious volumes for a small Laird, Therese O’Malley, Michael Puett, Deirdre
audience—into the homes of a broader public. The Moore, Jasmine Casart, and our editor Sara Taylor.
Notes
1 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists 7 Jill H. Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization
and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
University Press, 1987); and David Philip Miller and 8 John Ellis, Instructions for Bringing over Seeds and Plants,
Peter Hanns Reill, eds., Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, from the East Indies and Other Distant Countries, in a State
and Representations of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge of Vegetation (London: Printed and sold by L. Davis, 1770).
University Press, 1996). 9 For a revisionist account of the role of the individual car-
2 Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, Colonial Botany: tographer within broader systems of knowledge and con-
Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World trol, see D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed:
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 3. Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago:
The literature on early modern science and empire is vast; University of Chicago Press, 2000), 11, where the explorer’s
see, for instance, John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of “active engagement with the land” and personal experience
Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State, and the Uses of Science in the field “promise . . . to unsettle the imperial territorial
in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University inscriptions” he is tasked to collect (12).
Press, 1998); Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, 10 Jean Baptiste Fusée Aublet, Histoire des plantes de la
Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Guiane Françoise (London and Paris: P. F. Didot jeune, 1775).
Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); and Roy McLeod,
11 Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Per
ed., Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise
sonal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
New Continent, during the Years 1799–1804, trans. Helen
3 Therese O’Malley and Amy R. W. Meyers, eds., The Art Maria Williams (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme,
of Natural History: Illustrated Treatises and Botanical Paint and Brown, 1814–29).
ings, 1400–1850 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of
12 Emma Spary combines Latour’s notion of the inscrip-
Art, distributed by Yale University Press, 2008).
tion with Simon Schaffer’s description of the disciplining of
4 Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions scientific vision, as well as attention to the lingering prac-
and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: tice of patronage, to analyze eighteenth-century botanical
University of Chicago Press, 2012). networks around the Jardin des Plantes. Emma C. Spary,
5 David Mackay, “Agents of Empire: The Banksian Col Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to
lectors and Evaluation of New Lands,” in Miller and Reill, Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000),
Visions of Empire, 38. Neil Safier has used the case of Joseph 51. David Philip Miller adopts the notion of “centers of cal-
de Jussieu to show how local contingencies can result in culation and accumulation” in “Joseph Banks, Empire, and
“thwarted” botanical knowledge that escapes the “imperial ‘Centers of Calculation’ in Hanoverian London,” in Miller
frame.” Neil Safier, “Fruitless Botany: Joseph de Jussieu’s and Reill, Visions of Empire, 21–37. See Latour, Science in
South American Odyssey,” in Science and Empire in the Action, 215–57. Daniel Baugh describes Banks as a “natu-
Atlantic World, ed. James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew ral resource imperialist” in “Seapower and Science: The
(New York: Routledge, 2008), 219. Motives for Pacific Exploration,” in Background to Discovery:
6 Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bio Pacific Exploration from Dampier to Cook, ed. Derek Howse
prospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Har (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 40.
vard University Press, 2004), 10. 13 Latour, Science in Action, 232.
intro ductio n 31
14 On the imperialist connotations of Latour’s model, see 28 George Claridge Druce, The Dillenian Herbaria: An
David Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Account of the Dillenian Collections in the Herbarium of the
Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (Chicago: University University of Oxford, Together with a Biographical Sketch
of Chicago Press, 2005), 111. of Dillenius, Selections from His Correspondence (Oxford:
15 See Bleichmar, chapter 2, this volume. Clarendon Press, 1907).
16 See Easterby-Smith, chapter 9, this volume. 29 Roger Gaskell, “Printing House and Engraving Shop:
17 See Glenn, chapter 7, this volume. A Mysterious Collaboration,” Book Collector 53 (2004):
229–32.
18 C. N. G. Clarke, “Taking Possession: The Cartouche as
Cultural Text in Eighteenth-Century American Maps,” Word 30 Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography
and Image 4, no. 2 (1988): 455–74; and J. B. Harley, “Maps, (1972; repr., New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 1995), 160,
Knowledge, and Power,” in The Iconography of Landscape, ed. 214, 253.
Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cam 31 Bamber Gascoigne, How to Identify Prints: A Complete
bridge University Press, 1988), 277–312. On the map of South Guide to Manual and Mechanical Processes from Woodcut to
Africa and its implications, see Glenn, chapter 7, this volume. Inkjet, 2nd ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004),
19 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Brook sections 9b and 12.
lyn, N.J.: Zone Books, 2007), 60. 32 For examples of the techniques employed by Catesby
20 Ibid., 17. and Rafinesque, respectively, see Meyers, chapter 16, and
Kuriyama, chapter 3, this volume.
21 Ibid., 58.
33 It is interesting to note, however, that according to
22 Louis-François Jauffret, Projet d’établir en France une
Jauffret’s text, cited earlier, not even Kniphof ’s nature
manufacture de végétaux artificiels . . . d’après les nouveaux
printing is deemed to do justice to the original: by press-
procédés de T.-J. Wenzel (Paris, 1790). We are grateful to Ian
ing actual inked leaves against the paper, he gave all plants
Glenn for bringing this work to our attention; see chap-
the same spinach-green hue. Tournefort’s work is the only
ter 7, this volume.
one that Jauffret singled out for praise, but it had cost enor-
23 Ibid., 8 (“un temple immense, élevé à la Nature, dans mous sums and was unique in Europe.
lequel l’oeil embrasseroit d’un seul regard toute la création
34 Quoted in Staffan Müller-Wille and Karen Reeds,
végétale rassemblée”).
“A Translation of Carl Linnaeus’ Introduction to Genera
24 Ibid., 30. Plantarum (1737),” Studies in History and Philosophy of the
25 Ibid., 32 (“le désordre marche à la suite de ses Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38, no. 3 (2007): 568.
variations”). 35 Isabelle Charmantier, “Carl Linnaeus and the Visual
26 Ibid., 8 (“qui peut faire époque dans l’Histoire des Representation of Nature,” Historical Studies in the Natural
connoissances humaines”). Sciences 41, no. 4 (2011): 367.
27 Ibid., 48 (“dans un foyer commun, qui deviendroit 36 John Harvey, “Introduction and Commentary,” in The
bientôt un foyer éclatant des lumières”). Georgian Garden: An Eighteenth-Century Nurseryman’s
Catalogue (Stanbridge: Dovecote Press, 1983).

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The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth

Sarah Burke Cahalan

Follow this and additional works at: http://ecommons.udayton.edu/imri_faculty_publications

Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

book and jacket design and typography:

PART I: BOTANICAL AMBITIONS

3 The Geography of Ginseng and the Strange Alchemy of Needs | 61

4 Weeping Willows and Dwarfed Trees

PART II: AGENTS OF EMPIRE?

8 Thomas McDonnell’s Opium

10 From Local to Global

11 “In Imperio Rutheno”

PART IV: CULTIVATING IDENTITIES

14 Ottoman Horticulture after the Tulip Era

15 Making “Mongolian” Nature

16 William Bartram’s Drawing of a New Species of Arethusa (1796)

yota b ats a k i , sarah burke c ah al an , an d an atol e tc h ikin e

on their floral parts. On the one hand, Cabrini’s

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