Imperial botany/biopolitics in Latin America and racial hierarchy among Linnaeus and Darwin: 'Poor Chinese,' 'utter savages,' and body-as-Empire

(Originally posted elsewhere on 28 May 2020.)

Three excerpts, four scholars. In conversation! We’re looking at highly-influential European celebrity naturalists and their invocations of race/racial hierarchy (whether personally/explicitly or through their co-opting by their contemporaries).

Including: Linnaeus’s mention of the “Poor Chinese” and “treasures of Potosi”; Darwin encountering Yamana (of the Southern Cone) and feeling “utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage”; and “kingpin of botanical expeditions” Carimiro Gomez Ortega proposing that “all natural bodies form as it were an extended Empire.”

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Excerpt 1:

As a strong proponent of Cameralism, Linnaeus was opposed to trade driven primarily by colonial conquests, power and domination. Instead, he sought to deploy botany as a substitute or proxy for international trade and colonial conquests. Like many others of his time, he was outraged by the fact that Europeans “export [silver] to the barbaric countries of the distant East Indies and waste them there, bringing home in exchange dry leave of bushes and thin threads, spun by caterpillars” (cited in Koerner 1999, 136). […] While planning for massive tea plantations in the southern Swedish province of Skane, he expressed mock sympathy for the “Poor Chinese, they will only lose through this more than 100 barrels of gold a year” (cited in Koerner 1999, 136). He wrote and lectured extensively about the Dutch having broken the Arabian monopoly on coffee by growing it in the parts of Southeast Asia under their control and was confident that botanical science would aid in acclimatising the tropical tea plant to frosty Sweden. […] As Linnaeus put it: “We have discovered the silver treasures of Potosis [Bolivia], which we pry loose from the innards of the earth with great efforts, ship to Europe with great danger, and then, with no lesser risk, export to the barbaric countries of the distant East Indies and waste them here, bringing home in exchange dry leaves of bushes…let us bring the tea-tree here from China! If one used just half the money that in one year alone leaves the Realm for Tea, then one would without fail gain so much Tea through Tea plantations here in the Country that in the future not a pence would leave us for those leaves” (quoted in Koerner 1999).”

Text above by: Zaheer Baber, “The Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens, Colonial Power and Botanical Knowledge,” Journal of Contemporary Asia, vol. 46, no. 4 (2016), pages 659-679.

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Excerpt 2:

A key figure bridging the social formations and ecological assemblages of the South Atlantic and Southern Cone is Charles Darwin. In The voyage of the Beagle, Darwin ranked the Yámana of Tierra del Fuego as ‘man in his lowest and most savage state’ [...]. Unlike the Iroquois, Inca, or Aztec, whom colonizers viewed as civilizations worthy of limited diplomacy, Darwin considered the Yámana less intelligent or capable of semiotic communication than domesticated animals [...]. Reflecting on an encounter with a Yámana individual, he wrote: ‘[T]he native touched with his finger some cold preserved meat which I was eating at our bivouac and plainly showed utter disgust at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty’ (Darwin [1872]). [...] In 1833, just months after the British settled the Falklands permanently, Darwin visited the islands. Upon disembarking from his vessel, he found himself among a small population of Englishmen, gauchos – debt‐bonded cattle herders – and other ‘runaway rebels and murderers’ (Darwin [1839]). As in other cattle frontiers during this period, the largely mestizo (mixed‐race) gaucho workforce embodied barbarous danger and criminality for Darwin [...].

Text above by: James JA Blair, “Settler indigeneity and the eradication of the non-native: self-determination and biosecurity in the Falkland Islands (Malvinas),” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 23, no. 3 (2017), pages 580-602.

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Excerpt 3:

Science and Empire are cause and effect of one another: they are not identical; each determines and is defined by the other. [...] During the first half of the eighteenth century Spain hosted scores of institutions. However, these institutions were scattered throughout the country and, lying outside of any network, tended to function in line with age-old tradition and within a narrow range. Things were to change when the Spanish court came to view America again as Panacea, when, in other words, there was a change of scale at which social and political problems were considered. […] The overseas expeditions served as the mainstay for the metropolitan project. Institutions that understood these newly emerging requirements gained levels of influence and cultural profiles unthinkable a few decades earlier. Their function ceased to be courtly and became imperial. Their savants [their “scientists”] no longer resembled collectors or antiquarians, but became instead agents in charge of governing Nature. […] The plants themselves and not their products became the stuff of trade, and what circulated through the networks [...]. Botany began as a technoscope -- a way to visualize at-a-distance -- but, at the end of the eighteenth century, it was already a teletechnique -- a way to act at-a-distance. [...]

From the time of the Orinoco Expedition in 1752, in which Linnaeus’ disciple Pehr Lofling took part, all Spanish botanical expeditionaries adopted the Linnaean system. [...] For Casimiro Gomez Ortega, a strong supporter of Linnaeanism and the kingpin of botanical expeditions, there was no room for argument: “All natural bodies form as it were an extended Empire, governed by the unalterable laws imposed on them by the Creator.” [...] The Spanish doctor and academician Francisco Bruno Fernandez put it more clearly, distinguishing between Universe as the collection of natural beings and Nature as its sovereign. A very convenient distinction, since it ensured the viability of Spanish policies despite the great diversity in plants or peoples around the world. [...] Simply put, in this conception operating in the eighteenth century, there is no Nature without Empire.

Text above by: Antonio Lafuente and Nuria Valverde, “Linnaean Botany and Spanish Imperial Biopolitics,” in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, edited by Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).