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

In close alignment to the preceding paper of the panel (Krämer), this paper explores the entanglement of nineteenth-century natural and cultural histories further. Specifically, it traces how and why nineteenth-century botanists claimed a role for themselves in the writing of cultural history. Most importantly, botanists pointed to the fact that the history of human culture was intimately connected to the history of “agriculture” and the cultivation of plants. The beginning of culture in the sense of civilization was commonly linked to the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture. The history of cultivated plants, such as wheat, hence, was at the center of cultural history in this broader sense (which historians of science have so far ignored). This history was then mostly written based on philological methods; but this, botanists claimed, was insufficient. One had to study the actual object sources not only their names. The botanical study of plant geography, including the migration of plants over time and the search for their sites of origin – as in the case of the Urweizen – , was therefore of utmost importance to the history of human culture, so the argument went. The paper shows how, drawing on this tradition, botanists were eventually able to claim that without botanical expertise the study of cultural history was incomplete. Moreover, Schweinfurth even called for a radically altered understanding of “culture” that was no longer exclusively focused on written scholarship but acknowledged the growing importance of the sciences.