Botany and Empires across the Oceans

Bernhard Struck
Thursday 30 March 2017

As part of our Research Seminar series Dr Sarah Easterby-Smith (St Andrews) will be speaking on: “Gathering green gold. Botany and the French Empire in the eighteenth-century Indian Ocean”

Time and Venue: Monday 3 April 2017, 4.30pm, room 1.10, St Katharine’s Lodge, School of History

Abstract: Botany is a brilliant subject for global history. Enlightenment botanists were

Hand coloured plate from Johann S Kerner’s eighteenth-century book ‘Beschreibung und Abbildung der Bäume und Gestrauche’.

fixated on transferring information and objects across large distances and they forged connections with a wide array of practitioners in order to do so. Plants, too, were considered central to economic development, and botanical collectors were often commissioned to work on schemes intended to further imperial aspirations. This paper discusses two aspects of eighteenth-century botanical collecting. Firstly, it assesses the activities of French botanical collectors in the Indian Ocean, examining their work in relation to that of other imperial powers. Secondly, the paper considers the examples discussed above from a historiographical perspective, to question what (if anything) microhistorical studies can offer more broadly to global history.

 

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