Whereas European gardens with organized assortments of plants and herbs are not a specific colonial invention as such (so-called ‘physic gardens’ were built in medieval Europe for the study and use of plants with medical properties), [1] botanical gardens as we know them today came into existence through colonial efforts. The years following Columbus’ first transatlantic colonial mission in 1492 led to a global displacement of plants and seeds, as European colonizers became highly interested in the tropical flora they encountered. Philosopher and historian Carolyn Merchant notes in Reinventing Eden that these colonizers thought to have arrived at the actual remnants of Eden when they arrived at the mild climate and lush and green lands of (what is now known as) South America. Moreover, because the belief was that the garden of Eden had grown medical plants for all ails and illnesses, they intended to take promising ‘new’ plants back to Europe. [2] Here the role of gardens for colonial conquest emerges. Besides religious views on the biblical garden that implicitly shaped how colonizers plotted the land and mapped out natural resources, botanical gardens proved to be concrete infrastructural necessities to start transporting plant specimens around the globe. The following subsection will explain how botanical gardens became entwined with colonial journeys.

The vital role of botanical gardens for colonial expansion was not merely related to the physical transportation of plants. In order to facilitate the circulation of plants between continents, European powers not only needed plant specimens, they had to acquire knowledge about the plants involved. With the instatement of plantation economies in the Americas especially, it became of economic and commercial value to learn about ‘profitable’ plants and their environments. For example, European states had to acquire knowledge about the properties of flora they encountered on colonized land, the transportation of these plants, and their acclimatization to the ecological conditions of plantation colonies. As such, a system to identify and classify ‘valuable’ plants became essential.

Importantly moreover, botanical knowledge in this period was (more than today) obtained from actual living plants, which entails that gardens to grow plants and study and experiment with them were essential. For this reason, botanical gardens developed into formal scientific institutions geared towards generating knowledge about the identification, transportation, cultivation, and adaptation of productive plants. [9] Schiebinger refers to botanical gardens as ‘the laboratories of colonial botany’: [10] experimental stations to cultivate plants that were essential for colonial trade and the plantation economy. In similar lines, Baber argues that botanical gardens ‘constituted one of the key sites […] in which colonial power was literally rooted’. [11] Botanical gardens grew the plants that generated the knowledge needed for the construction of colonial plantations and the global trade of botanical goods.

What this entails is that the rise of botany as a science is tightly linked to the colonial enterprise. ‘Botany’ was not a distinct science yet in early modern Europe, but as Baber explains: the time of European expansion was ‘roughly the period during which the structural and cultural conditions of possibility for modern rational science – as distinctive form of knowledge, practice and institutions – was in the process of being constituted and stabilised’. [12] The expansion of colonial empire was conjoint with an upsurge in botanical knowledge production within Europe, and it was this proliferation of knowledges about plants that led to the eventual solidification of botany as a distinct modern science. [13] This, Schiebinger states, affected the way botany was done: ‘The botanical sciences served the colonial enterprise and were, in turn, structured by it.’ [14] Schiebinger traces how eighteenth-century botany was different from its current counterpart: one of the defining characteristics of botany in this period was that it did not prioritize ‘pure’ systems of classifications and taxonomies, but ‘utility’ was the principal objective of the study. Research served primarily to develop knowledge about the ‘useful qualities’ of plants. ‘Utility’, then, became increasingly understood in terms of the economic value of plants. [15]

For example, Schiebinger notes how the famous Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) ‘often saw his taxonomic innovations as secondary to his many economic schemes’. [16] Many botanists at this time, Schiebinger elaborates, saw their work as a contribution to the state and national wealth. As colonial possessions and the production and trade of ‘tropical goods’ were believed to generate a maximum of profit for European nation states, this entails that the economic schemes of botanists were tied to colonial efforts. Similarly, Baber traces how Linnaeus’s ideas were enmeshed with imperialist beliefs and considerations of state power. Linnaeus envisioned to acclimatize valuable tropical plants to the colder European soil, so these goods could be grown directly in Sweden. This way, the state could create a monopoly of botanical goods without the risks and dangers of long voyages. [17] Schiebinger concludes therefore that eighteenth-century botanists were ‘“agents of empire”: their inventories, classifications, and transplantations were the vanguards and in some cases the ‘instruments’ of European order’. [18] Botanists directly and indirectly facilitated the expansion of colonial empire.

The new science of botany, rather than coming into being as an ‘objective scientific exercise’, developed according to state objectives and as such arose together with the rise of European colonial empire. Arising systems of classifications were therefore far from neutral: they prioritized ‘useful’ plants that were essential for the wealth of the nation state and its colonizing efforts. [19] Botany was big business, politically and economically, and botanical gardens functioned as indispensable scientific institutions and experimental agricultural stations to make this business possible.

This second part will dive further into the study of botany and the way it relates to other arising systems of classification in modern Western Europe. Central to the solidification of botany as a formal science was the act of classifying, labelling, and naming plants, in a consistent and standardized way. To chart, exploit, and occupy colonial territory, categorizations were crucial: resource extraction and exploitation could only happen on the basis of systems of classification that ordered the ‘newly discovered’ natural environment. Important to note here is of course that this environment was only ‘new’ for European colonists, who imposed their grids of meaning and reality onto colonized lands. In this move, local worldviews, narratives, and knowledges – that were often oral traditions as well – were erased and rewritten to fit European epistemological frameworks.

The piece of art by the Japanese artist Rumiko Hagiwara exemplifies the modern European drive to order and classify their surroundings. [20] This picture, called Name Garden, shows a botanical garden in winter: ‘without any plants visible above ground, it looks like someone planted only name plates.’ [21] On the plates one can see that the plants have names that consist of two words. This binomial system of classifying nature, in which a plant is given one generic name and one specific name (as in Homo sapiens), has been established by Linnaeus, who sought to create a universal ‘science of names’. The rising science of botany became premised upon Linnaeus’s binomial nomenclature, and his system remains in use to this day. [22] Universalist ambitions notwithstanding, these systems of classifications were neither universal nor neutral, as the previous section explained: they derived from specific European perspectives with specific objectives at its root, often related to the maximalization of profit and power. The way plants became named, demonstrates the specificity of emerging scientific systems. In line with his goals concerning plant transfers to Swedish soils, Linnaeus’s system of naming disconnected plants from their geographical and cultural context. As Schiebinger argues, colonisers brought plants to Europe to collect in museums and botanical gardens but discarded the cosmologies that were tied to those plants: ‘They collected the bounty of the natural world, but sent “narratively stripped” specimens into Europe.’ [23] In many Native American languages, for example, plants were named for their medical properties, biogeographical distribution, and cultural importance. Linnaeus’s naming procedure, on the other hand, was to name plants after prominent European botanists known to him. [24]

This not only erased the plants’ ‘biogeography’, but also contributed to the consolidation of Western hegemony. In Schiebinger’s words: ‘Naming practices celebrated a particular brand of historiography – namely, a history celebrating the deeds of great European Men.’ [25] Linnaeus’s system of naming enforced the idea that science is done by elite Europeans, and in his books he even defined who had the privilege to name, ‘regulating who could and could not do science’. [26] Women, for example, were formally excluded, as were young men, and anyone that was not from Europe. This was further enforced when the standardized language of botany was made to be Latin (the language of ‘educated European men’) – displacing all other languages. [27] The practice of naming, therefore, is highly political, and the birth of the formal science of botany was rooted in capitalist and imperialist motives.

The linkage of naming and colonial power can be placed in a wider context with decolonial theorist Aníbal Quijano, who makes explicit how European ‘modernity’ and ‘coloniality’ are inherently tied up and can only be understood in relation with each other. [28] Quijano uses the term ‘coloniality’ to refer to the structures of power and hegemony that emerged during the time of European colonial conquest, but that prevailed after colonialism as an explicit political order formally ended. [29] Inherent to the colonial project, he argues, was an epistemological imperialism that gave rise to a particular framework of knowledge, and then standardized this as the only real and reliable form of knowledge production. In other words: Western knowledges were regarded as objective, rational, and universalizable, while all other knowledges were relegated to the realm of subjectivity and irrationality. As such, European epistemologies produced an ‘epistemological cut’ [30] in the field of knowledge, that differentiates the European rational autonomous subject – active producer of knowledge – from the colonial Other who can only come into being as the passive, determined, ‘natural’ object of knowledge.

Modernity and coloniality form two sides of the same coin because modern systems of classification by definition excluded non-Western forms of knowledge-production.

Evidently, this has vast ramifications, not only epistemologically but also for the way non-Western humans are perceived and valued. As Jamaican writer and philosopher Sylvia Wynter argues: this epistemological cut ‘makes it normally impossible for them/us normally to see other human groups as fully – if differently – co-human’. [31] What Wynter specifically sheds light on, is that some people were never considered fully ‘human’ under the Western order of classification – which the following subsection will further explain.