Collection and Discovery: Botanical Collection in South and Southeast Asia, 1754-1885

Carey Kathleen McCormack

This study explores new modalities of scientific agency, and, in doing so, uncovers new historical agents during the second age of exploration in the mid-eighteenth century as science drove British expansion more deeply into South and Southeast Asia. The act of collecting and documenting the natural world developed in the eighteenth century into a vast network of scientists by the late nineteenth century who attempted to categorize and understand nature. This process of collecting plants and exchanging knowledge about the natural world included a wide array of individuals. Early British accounts of these interactions included local and indigenous knowledge of nature, but as exploration led to colonial expansion and botany became professionalized as a science, local and indigenous knowledge moved to the periphery of British botanical writing. Cultural exchange between British explorers/collectors and local peoples abounded even though British collectors claimed the act of discovery exclusive to men trained as botanists and not the person who provided the specimens and information. Western scientists determined which people could produce knowledge even though the historical record reveals that collecting, classifying, and discovering the uses of plants was not the discovery of this small handful of men, but the biopiracy of indigenous botanical knowledge and specimens from the region. Each chapter focuses on categories of people such as indigenous agents (guides, collectors, artists), colonial wives, British soldiers, and Chinese immigrant laborers to emphasize the important contributions these people had in creating scientific knowledge about South and Southeast Asia even though they were not technically professional botanists. By analyzing a wide range of sources, this dissertation addresses three major shifts between science and the British Empire: the age of exploration and collection; the age of ordering nature; and the age of extracting resources. The creation of scientific knowledge, while codified as Western knowledge, was really a cultural exchange between British collectors and indigenous experts. This study combines a discussion of exclusion based on colonial categories with a discussion of environment degradation and ecological destruction as a result of exchanging plants across the Empire.

Collection and Discovery: Botanical Collection in South and Southeast Asia, 1754-1885

Files and links (1)

Abstract

Metrics

Details