'Alien' ecologies, the irony of a mutiny, and vegetation as an agent of Empire (Part 1): Bioprospecting for plants to stave off the "tide of revolution" in a global circuit

What must be one of the great “ironic twist” or “poetic justice” moments in Anglo-American historical narrativizing culminated in a little rebellion on a boat in 1789, and it implicated a big rebellion on Haiti and reverberated beyond in both space and time.

The frustrating antihero botanists of Britain in the 1770s—including most-notably Joseph Banks, “godfather of botany” and de facto founding naturalist of what would become the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the British Empire’s premiere botanical station—were simultaneously working on projects to naturalize/appropriate both breadfruit (encountered by the British in the South Pacific) and manoomin (appropriated from Indigenous communities in the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes regions).

Elizabeth DeLoughrey frames the story of breadfruit’s transplantation to the Caribbean. Plantation owners in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Anglophone Caribbean were scared about recurrent significant slave revolts from the 1760s to 1790s, and they solicited Joseph Banks (head of the Royal Society and a personal friend to the royal family) to find a way to “feed the slaves” to prevent unrest with the “exalted benevolence” of “colonial science.” (Of course, the “tide of revolution” would precipitate the slave revolts of the Haitian Revolution in those very years.) Thus, they sponsored a major plan to have Britain’s top botanists/administrators bring breadfruit from Polynesia to the Caribbean. They, at the time, were pretty explicit about this.

But the twist:

The very same British voyage dispatched to collect the breadfruit for that purpose had it’s own rebellion. The ship’s crew mutinied, and the event was so significant that we still remember it: The Mutiny on the Bounty.

And it gets more peculiar, too.

The commanding officer of the Bounty, who has since been a star character in the retellings in print and in dramatized movies, was Captain Bligh.

DeLoughrey draws more connections:

Bligh had no direct participation in the [slave] trade, but his uncle, Duncan Campbell (who helped commission the breadfruit journey), was a Jamaican plantation owner and had employed Bligh on multiple merchant ships in the Caribbean. Campbell was also deeply involved, with Joseph Banks, in transporting British convicts to the colonies of Australia. In fact Banks’ original plan for the breadfruit voyage was to drop off convicts in (the significantly named) Botany Bay, and then proceed to Tahiti for the breadfruit. Campbell owned a series of politically untenable prison hulks on the Thames which he emptied by shipping his human chattel to the Pacific. Banks helped coordinate these early settlements [...] to encourage white Australian domesticization. The commodification and rationalist dispersal of plants and human convicts, slaves, the impoverished, women, and other unwilling participants in global transplantation is a rarely told narrative root of colonial “Bounty.” (Elizabeth DeLoughrey. “Globalizing the Routes of Breadfruit and Other Bounties”. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History Volume 8, Number 3, Winter 2007. )

In Banks’s own words, describing the mission:

Ceres was deified for introducing wheat among a barbarous people. Surely, then, the natives of the two Great Continents, who, in the prosecution of this excellent work, will mutually receive from each other numerous products of the earth as valuable as wheat, will look up with veneration the monarch […] & the minister who carried into execution, a plan [of such] benefits.

The entanglement in the breadfruit case is staggering. By entanglement, I mean:

Banks was chilling with the royal family, facilitating the global transplantation of hundreds of species of “economically important” plants for use bolstering the Empire, and founding a global network of naturalization stations.

And he was being personally solicited by the nefarious plantation managers and land owners at the chattel slavery epicenter of Jamaica.

And he found a way to simultaneously implicate and appropriate from South Pacific ecologies and Polynesian peoples.

And the ship sent to bail-out the planters itself experienced its own mutiny.

And the guy who captained (until the mutiny, lol) the ship was the nephew of a guy who was not only a plantation owner in Jamaica but who also owned prison ships in metropolitan Britain.

And that guy with the prison ships also himself worked with Joseph Banks to send the prisoners to be exiled in the South Pacific/Australia.

And the whole point of the mission—to prevent slave rebellions in the Caribbean—was undermined in the most spectacular fashion when, only a couple of years after the mutiny, the Haitian Revolution erupted and put French imperial administrators (and their de facto British collaborators) to shame.

Britain encounters the Caribbean and the South Pacific, and, in a single plan, finds ways to screw them both over, while treating captive people like commodities and property (both the “domestic” prisoners of the Thames, and the slaves of the Caribbean).

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But this is merely one tale of the debacles of imperial bioprospecting and its attendant appropriation of Indigenous worlds. There are others of this nature, from sixteenth-century Iberian exposure to vanilla and maize in the “New World” to the eighteenth-century Dutch infighting over cinnamon gardens in Ceylon.

There’s broader and significant academic coverage of the role of botany in building of Empire/racial capitalism, including/especially in the late eighteenth century. Like Zaheer Baber’s “The Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens, Colonial Power and Botanical Knowledge” (2016); Schiebinger’s Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World; Lafuente and Valverde’s “Linnaean Botany and Spanish Imperial Biopolitics”; the anthology The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century; and two dozen others.

Similar to how DeLoughrey highlights that the breadfruit scheme was spurred by British anxiety about cultivating cheap food crops to prevent Black rebellions and slave insurrections in the Americas, Anya Zilberstein in “Inured to Empire: Wild Rice and Climate Change” shows that rebellions also factored into British fixation on cultivating manoomin.

I’m interested in what she describes as “history of science and empire”; also encountered her work through her association with the journal Arcadia/Environment and Society Portal. The way she makes connections between spatially-distant centres of calculation in British administration (London, Nova Scotia, Caribbean, etc.) reminds me of Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s similar tracing of the networks/routes of British and US ideas/material, especially the circulation of ideas about environment (so, appropriate that DeLoughrey wrote about breadfruit). But I do like this little nook focused on how British/US imaginaries of nineteenth/twentieth centuries inherited those frameworks/approaches in ways that still strongly persist today.

This also reminds me of Kirsten Greer’s work on the social and ideological connections among British administrators in Atlantic Canada and the Caribbean, and the crafting of a sort of allegedly-”universal” taxonomy of immutable differences between temperate regions and the mystified “exotic” tropics. If you’re into ecoregions generally but ornithology or birds specifically, might like Greer’s “Geopolitics and the Avian Imperial Archive: The Zoogeography of Region-Making in the Nineteenth-Century British Mediterranean.” However, she’s also got a recent book, Red Coats and Wild Birds: How Military Ornithologists and Migrant Birds Shaped Empire.

Uh… how about we add a “part 2” or whatever to this post. Where plants are perceived as even more “alien” and the role of popular metropolitan fantasies—colonial imaginaries of environment—are shown to have real material/physical affect.