Botany of Empire

Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism

Banu Subramaniam author Banu Subramaniam editor Rebecca Herzig editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Washington Press

Published:25th Jun '24

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Botany of Empire cover

An accessible foray into botany’s origins and how we can transform its future

Colonial ambitions spawned imperial attitudes, theories, and practices that remain entrenched within botany and across the life sciences. Banu Subramaniam draws on fields as disparate as queer studies, Indigenous studies, and the biological sciences to explore the labyrinthine history of how colonialism transformed rich and complex plant worlds into biological knowledge. Botany of Empire demonstrates how botany’s foundational theories and practices were shaped and fortified in the aid of colonial rule and its extractive ambitions. We see how colonizers obliterated plant time’s deep history to create a reductionist system that imposed a Latin-based naming system, drew on the imagined sex lives of European elites to explain plant sexuality, and discussed foreign plants like foreign humans. Subramanian then pivots to imagining a more inclusive and capacious field of botany untethered and decentered from its origins in histories of racism, slavery, and colonialism. This vision harnesses the power of feminist and scientific thought to chart a course for more socially just practices of experimental biology.

A reckoning and a manifesto, Botany of Empire provides experts and general readers alike with a roadmap for transforming the colonial foundations of plant science.

"Provocative. . . The book challenges plant science to better see the ways in which it has been profoundly shaped by European colonialism and how imperial attitudes, theories and practices endure."

* Guardian *

"The field of plant-humanities includes botany, taxonomy and plant evolution on the one hand, and literature, law and the arts on the other. Recent publications have covered botanical histories, imperialist plant-collecting fervor, queer botany, botanical art and Indigenous methodologies associated with botany, to name just a few. What comes as a huge relief is a book weaving together these interconnected tendrils, while also blooming with personal anecdotes and even fictional stories."

* The Conversation *

"Botany of Empire will prove to be a valuable read for scholars and students of critical plant studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, ecofeminism, queer ecology and indigenous studies."

* South Asian Revi

ISBN: 9780295752457

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 590g

328 pages