Botany and the Science of History I (ca. 1800-1900)

The boundaries between the humanities and the sciences have traditionally been seen as solid and more or less impenetrable; however, in view of the closely entangled developments of the history of (non-human) nature and the history of (human) culture they may not be as unproblematic as first thought. This paper, together with the following (by Nickelsen), traces this debate with a focus on the tradition of writing the history of culture and civilization in the nineteenth century. For the most part of the century, cultural history centered on the texts and objects studied by historians, philologists, and archaeologists. However, botanists were increasingly eager to bring their knowledge of seeds and plants into the discussion and to claim a place for these objects as key sources in the study of cultural history. They thus called into question the historical disciplines’ exclusive authority over human history. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates on “cultural history” were a hotbed of discussion on the epistemic value of different types of sources and the disciplines that were best equipped to interpret them. The paper examines in particular the attempts made by a group of Berlin-based botanists around Georg Schweinfurth (1836–1925). When this group claimed, in 1906, to have found the progenitor of cultivated wheat (Urweizen) in Palestine, Schweinfurth declared this the most important discovery of his lifetime. I argue that this cannot be understood without recourse to of the period’s burgeoning discourse on the origins of human civilization.