The East India Company and the Natural World

V. Damodaran, A. Winterbottom, A. Lester, V. Damodaran, A. Winterbottom, A. Lester

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137427274
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Geografia

This book is the first to explore the deep and lasting impacts of the largest colonial trading company, the British East India Company on the natural environment. The contributors – drawn from a wide range of academic disciplines - illuminate the relationship between colonial capital and the changing environment between 1600 and 1857.

1

Botanical Explorations and the East India Company: Revisiting ‘Plant Colonialism’

Deepak Kumar

The concepts and the practices of colonialism and imperialism have fascinated scholars for almost a century and their relevance continues. They have myriad shades and have shaped human life as nothing else has done so far. Concepts such as modernity, new socio-economic forces, techno-scientific changes and globalization are in some way or another related to these phenomena. It is no coincidence that during the era of the Scientific Revolution, different trading companies were established to undertake colonial expansion. Flag followed trade and both recognized the relevance of techno-scientific knowledge. The era of exploration had its own romance. Later on, institutions were established and professionalization gradually came. It was a long and arduous process. The colonizer and the colonized cannot be seen only in terms of binaries. How should one characterize this delicate and dialectic relationship: in terms of core–periphery, network, web, circuits, persuasion – coercion, ‘gentlemanly’, ‘traditional’ imperial history or ‘new’ imperial history? Historical facts, dug honestly from different sites, do not seem to support deterministic or essentializing understandings. The very nature of historical construction invites one to look at cross-currents and fluidity. Colonialism as a process is no exception to this. Similarly, scientific knowledge, like colonialism itself, is no monolith: both needed and aided each other.

One can ask how a science like botany or geology functioned in a colonial setting or how far it succeeded in ‘straddling the spatial and epistemological divide’ between the metropolis and the colony. Was this a one-way transfer? One can add, was this merely knowledge or largely derivative? Did peripheral creativity lead to peripheral enrichment? Could it produce autodidacts or intellectual-migrants who could hold their own? How should one link the local and particular (both metropolitan and colonial) with the general and universal (e.g. imperialism)? How should one conceive of both the differences and the connections between Britain and its various colonies?¹ What was the indigenous component? Is indigenous ‘original and unsullied’ to be seen mostly in opposition to modern/scientific knowledge? Could they interact? Could they change? Was a synthesis or co-production possible?

Numerous such questions have long engaged the attention of scholars and several plausible explanations have been offered. The seminar at which this chapter was originally presented talked of ‘trans-cultural cooperation under the premise of imperialism’. Some scholars deny the idea of cooperation; they argue things were imposed from above. Many others try to soften the sting of imperialism and try to project it in terms of collaboration. This chapter will try to address these questions with the help of some relevant examples from botanical explorations in early British India. It is not without reason that colonies were often referred to as plantations. After all, it was the knowledge of and commerce in botany that propelled the growth of merchant capitalism.

The discursive terrain

Discussions on colonialism are probably as old as the colonial process itself. Shakespeare had reflected upon it in the early seventeenth century. His Tempest has all the ingredients of the real drama that colonization played in different parts of the world. It has voyage, discovery, oppression, collaboration, intrigues and, above all, the magic of knowledge. Till the end of the eighteenth century, the travellers, the traders, the officials, the military and the missionaries remained busy in building up the colonial project, and they emerge as the major, if not, the sole informants on what was happening. Later, the recipients also became very curious of what was happening around them. They were no longer passive and, at least in some areas, colonialism became a joint project. Out of this encounter, the seeds of decolonization sprouted and this was followed by long years of contestations, struggle and, finally, independence for the colonized. In the postcolonial decades, scholarly attention has naturally reverted to the fascinating and penetrative game-changer that colonialism was. Its myriad shades have now been dissected in terms of power, culture, imposition, contestation, metropolis, periphery and what not. The diffusionist perspective and the centre–periphery model had held sway for a long time. The model had its own advantages and did succeed in explaining the phenomenon to a large extent. The relationship between the metropolis and the colony was not merely geographical or political; it was also socially constituted, and as such ‘represented the combined effects of social, political, and economic relations among different cultures and peoples’.² So to discard the core–periphery explanation would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater! But the new post-colonial scholarship rightly points out the disjunctions, the ruptures and the ambivalences that the earlier explanations had left out or ignored. Can both be taken together?

In January 1985 an international seminar was held in Delhi under the broad umbrella title Science and Empire. It was hailed as a kind of ‘Delhi Declaration asking for re-examination of the role of the West in the scientific and technological backwardness of nations which in our world have been sadly divided into the rich and the poor’.³ The emphasis appeared to be more on the negative side of colonialism. Five years later a bigger conference on this theme was organized in Paris.⁴ Here a global context was taken into account without sacrificing the local. By this time many articles and books had already appeared delineating the different strands of the science–colonization links.⁵ The seeds of numerous future works were being sown simultaneously.

In undertaking such researches, the first port of call was obviously the archives pertaining to the trading companies who had initiated the colonial process in early modern times. These form an almost inexhaustible source of historical reconstruction. Next came the travellers’ and missionary accounts. And then of course were the numerous tracts, pamphlets, journals and reports written in both colonial and indigenous languages. Later researches, probably under the influence of postcolonial essayists, tend to undermine the significance of the so-called official sources even though they came from the horse’s mouth. To me, personally, it was rewarding to go through numerous, often contradictory, notes written by lower-rung officials filed between dusty covers. They give an idea of how a decision was arrived at, the tensions involved and the perceived threats. The files preserved in the colonial archives lay bare the inner thoughts of the official mind and show what went into the making of a particular decision. It may be erroneous to believe that the official sources give only a particular picture. Through them it is possible to know about the ‘other’ side as well. This, however, is not to underestimate the importance of ‘local’ sources, especially those written in their indigenous languages. In them one gets sharp critique of official policies and actions. Similarly, in private papers, several official participants appeared critical, outspoken and forthright. The letters written by colonial scientists to their peers in London and the replies they received make exceptionally interesting reading and reveal what is not normally available in official documents or contemporary publications. They often contradict what one finds in official records and give new insights.

This brief discussion on sources is important because they provide the foundation for a valid discursive terrain. Literary people and even anthropologists may have the liberty to ‘imagine’, but poor historians cannot afford such luxuries. So all our talk about ‘web’, ‘network’, ‘circulation’, ‘calculation’ and the like needs to be based on solid primary evidence. We would also be ill-advised to make generalizations on the basis of one or two solitary manuscripts or sources. On the basis of the available sources and the works published so far, one can reasonably assume that scientific and technological knowledge was closely woven into the whole fabric of colonialism. The colonial state claimed superiority in terms of structure, power and race, while modern science claimed superiority in terms of new knowledge. Both needed each other and moved hand-in-hand. Thanks to this relationship, the concept of a ‘state scientist’ emerged under which its practitioner would have the dual mandate to serve both the state and science simultaneously. The Jesuit missionaries also did the same. In China, they skillfully served the interests of both Versailles and the Forbidden City.⁶ In India, they moved with the Bible in one hand and an improvised telescope or microscope in the other. Both could be used convincingly to shatter or change the world views and cosmologies of the indigenous. Major exploratory works were undertaken by the medical men who travelled on every boat as ‘surgeon-naturalists’. In the initial years of colonization, the colonial scientist was, to a large extent, the master of his own agenda; and a whole new world of flora, fauna and minerals was open to him. This was a period when it was possible to forge a network or a web connecting them despite the tyranny of distance and initiate a far more liberal though limited circulation of ideas and materials. These ‘web-masters’ understood the significance of local knowledge. Bontius, for example, considered the knowledge of the Javanese superior to that of Greek and Roman authorities. He objected to the epithet ‘barbarians’ given to the locals in Batavia and argued that their knowledge of herbs ‘leaves our own far behind’.⁷ Similarly, many influential Europeans in India felt that local knowledge and its techniques could be put to constructive ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter: 1 Botanical Explorations and the East India Company: Revisiting ‘Plant Colonialism’
• Chapter: 2 Medicine and Botany in the Making of Madras, 1680–1720
• Chapter: 3 Robert Wight and his European Botanical Collaborators
• Chapter: 4 The East India Company, Famine and Ecological Conditions in Eighteenth-Century Bengal
• Chapter: 5 Colonial Private Diaries and their Potential for Reconstructing Historical Climate in Bombay, 1799–1828
• Chapter: 6 Mischievous Rivers and Evil Shoals: The English East India Company and the Colonial Resource Regime
• Chapter: 7 The Rafflesia in the Natural and Imperial Imagination of the East India Company in Southeast Asia
• Chapter: 8 ‘A proper set of views’: The British East India Company and the Eighteenth-Century Visualization of South-East Asia
• Chapter: 9 Unlikely Partners: Malay-Indonesian Medicine and European Plant Science
• Chapter: 10 Plants, Animals and Environmental Transformation: Indian–New Zealand Biological and Landscape Connections, 1830s–1890s
• Chapter: 11 St Helena as a Microcosm of the East India Company World
• Afterword
• Select Bibliography
• Index