Caroline Cornish (Kew), "Hidden hands and the development of economic botany"
Abstract:
Economic botany as a term first appeared in print in the early 19th century and is now generally understood by historians of colonialism as that set of extractive practices whereby plants with commercial applications were mobilised from their natural habitats to plantations within colonial territories; and where cheap labour – local or imported – was an essential element in the economic formula. The role of enslaved and indentured labour in this process is well documented, as is the role played by gardens such as the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which provided the botanical and horticultural expertise required to successfully identify, transport, and acclimatise plant species in this way.
In this paper, however, I consider other forms of captive or coerced labour – including prisoners, the mentally ill, and child vagrants - who were deployed in the creation of items in Kew’s Economic Botany Collection. Taking an object-based approach I examine who was involved, and how, and what this can add to our knowledge of economic botany as it evolved over the 19th and early 20th centuries.