Broken World Botany: Slavery and Natural Knowledge in the West African Slave Trading Zones

Literature on the circulation of natural knowledge in the Atlantic world offers rich discussions regarding the significance of non-European peoples in the development of colonial and metropolitan science and medicine. The Americas has been a foundational geography in this scholarship. Historians have shown the intense epistemological struggles that ensued between Amerindians, Africans, creoles, and Europeans who lived, labored, and died together. However, one region that was pivotal in Atlantic knowledge networks remains largely absent — West Africa. This paper illustrates how the West African slave trading zones functioned as unique spaces in Atlantic itineraries of science and medicine. Frequently crumbling fortresses like Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast were transient, biocontact zones laced with violence, dehumanization, and disease. There were few long-term European residents; professional naturalists made only rare appearances; and bare-life existence often subsumed all else. As such, I argue that gathering natural knowledge was characterized by an eclectic empiricism that had limited institutional support and scarce resources. Using fragmentary evidence culled from travel narratives, correspondence, and merchants accounting records, I argue that slave traders often functioned as scientific scavengers, seeking to consume West African natural knowledge wherever such might exist – whether in the malnourished bodies of enslaved people who had been trafficked hundreds of miles, or among enslaved boys who grew physic gardens at slave factories. This paper problematizes early modern science and medicine by examining knowledge-making in a profoundly broken West African world.