The Politics of Botanical Objecthood in Nineteenth Century Correspondence Networks

In December of 1822, Danish naturalist Nathaniel Wallich (1786-1854) left his home in Kolkata, and visited British colleagues in Bengkulu and Singapore on a collecting mission that was designed to unite the flora of the East Indies and India. During his months abroad, Wallich collected thousands of plants in the East Indies, transported them both alive and dead back to India, and shipped out sample sets and descriptions to Britain, France, and the Netherlands. Wallich’s objectification of these tropical plants functioned as a way of managing and facilitating global trade, even amidst the Napoleonic Wars, which enabled him to continue building natural history institutions within South and Southeast Asia. The process both exploited and complicated colonial competition. The history of botany has largely been told as a circulation of goods between “center and periphery” or, in more recent studies, between colonial botanic gardens that upheld imperial structures. The realities of collecting in situ, however, present a far more complicated story: one in which middle-class practitioners worked across national alignments, sometimes double- and triple-timing their patrons in supplying rivals with duplicates and triplicates of specimens. Indeed, many of these “professional” collectors occupied liminal spaces alongside their indigenous colleagues, acting as political prisoners, commercial nurserymen, and illustrators for hire. Pairing circulating herbarium specimens with correspondence records and the glass and paper technologies that accompanied them, I trace the complex networks of “global” botanical transfer and communication across the Indian Ocean in the early-nineteenth century.