Scientists as agents of empire and the significance of Madras as a British 'centre of calculation' in the late eighteenth century

(Winterbottom excerpt originally posted elsewhere on 2 August 2023. Kathirithamby-Wells excerpt originally posted elsewhere on 12 August 2023.)

Two excerpts which work in conversation. Is the influence of Madras (and Malaya) “outsized” in the history of British power consolidation in South and Southeast Asia?

From scholars Anna Winterbottom and Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells:

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Madras [...] [was] the English East India Company (EIC)’s most important settlement on India’s Coromandel Coast [...]. [T]he town’s survival as an EIC colony often depended on the deployment of medical and natural historical knowledge in regional diplomacy during a critical period of its existence. [...] By 1695, Samuel Baron described it as ‘the most considerable to the English nation of all their settlements in India whether ... in reference to the trade to and from Europe, or the Commerce from one part of India to the other’. The later attempts to establish trades to China and Japan, to resettle the Indonesian archipelago, and to gain a foothold in Bengal, were all directed from Fort St George. […]

Browne [an English surgeon] used his patrons in the Mughal establishment and the Company hierarchy to build up a lucrative business supplying drugs to the camps of the Mughal generals. Browne’s contacts in the Mughal army were also useful for the Company [...].[D]uring the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Madras was in a difficult position. [...] Again, Company officials turned to the network of surgeons with access to the Mughal hierarchy [...]. In 1707, the year of the Emperor Aurangzeb’s death and a time of political unrest in the Mughal Empire, Bulkley was sent to Arcot on a mission that combined medical and diplomatic aims. […] The network of contacts that could be built up between physicians, who had the advantage of close personal access to those at the centre of power, was an important way to exchange information and gifts. [...] Knowledge of plants and the means of employing them was thus crucial to establishing the East India Company’s position in India [...]. The web of contacts that the two surgeons maintain within the colonial world of the Indian Ocean were invaluable because they provided them with the materials necessary to make Madras a ‘centre of calculation’ […].

The networks of doctors had been crucial diplomatic actors in a critical period during which many believed that Madras was fated to be eclipsed altogether. [...] It was the new relationship with the rulers of Arcot established by these doctors that eventually enabled the Company to consolidate its base at Calcutta. […] The collections of these two surgeons, who were key players in the transformation of politics and botany in the region, straddling local and international concerns, in many ways provide the perfect portal through which to view Madras as it was transformed from a trading post subservient to the interests of regional powers to a major player in British colonial expansion.

Text above by: Anna Winterbottom, “Medicine and Botany in the Making of Madras, 1680-1720,” in The East India Company and the Natural World, edited by Vinita Damodaran, Anna Winterbottom, and Alan Lester (2014).

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Peninsular Malaysia made a significant contribution to natural history and, thus, to colonial science. [...] Botanical and zoological collections from insular Southeast Asia were of seminal importance, for example, to the pioneer studies of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. [...] Garcia D’Orta (c. 1501/2-68), a Spanish physician who served several viceroys in Goa, established the botanic garden near Bombay [...]. His Aromatum Historia (1563) [...] has been described as ‘a landmark in the history of civilization’. [...] Hendrik van Rheede’s ground-breaking 12-volume Hortus Malabaricus (1678-1703) [was] based on [...] Ayurvadic knowledge and the services of Ezhava collectors and tree climbers in the Malabar. [...] The person who brokered the link between desire for material wealth and the search for its location and procurement overseas was the indomitable and widely influential [Joseph] Banks, President of the Royal Society (1778-1820) and, from 1773, de facto director of the Royal Botanical Gardens. Also a member of the Privy Council Committee for trade – the organization most directly concerned with augmenting wealth and self-sufficiency -- he used his influence with the Royal Institution and the Board of Agriculture to forge a successful link between science and empire. [...] Carolus Clusius who held the Chair of Botany in Leiden (1592-9) reputedly obtained ‘Malaysian’ specimens from Sir Francis Drake. Again, following the death in 1695 of the VOC [Dutch East India Company] botanist, Paulus Hermann, his notes and manuscript [...] were acquired and used by William Sherard (Sherwood), founder of the Chair of Botany in Oxford.

In 1778, the English East India Company (EIC) appointed J.G. Koenig, a pupil of Linnaeus, as ‘Professor of Botany and Natural History’ in Madras. [...] His appointment, believed to have been initiated by Banks, firmly established colonial science within the purview of imperial economic policy. [...] Koenig worked in the private gardens [...] in Melaka and conducted the earliest and largest botanical survey of the west coast of the Peninsula (1778-9). Bengkulen (Bangkulu), [...] where pepper cultivation was extensively researched, was declared a Presidency [...] with the express aim of developing its full economic potential. To help fulfill this objective, Philip and Charles Miller, sons of the well-respected gardener at the Chelsea Physick Garden, were engaged as botanists [...] [T]he EIC envisaged expanding the range of Benkulen’s exports by the introduction of tea, ginger, turmeric and mulberries. [...] These efforts prefigured experiments in spice cultivation at the Calcutta Botanic Gardens [...]. Newbold took his knowledge of the tropical environment in the [Malayan] Straits Settlements to Madras, where he earned a reputation as a naturalist and an Orientalist [...]. His lecture to the Bengal Asiatic Society in 1846 [...] was hugely influential and put the Peninsula at the heart of the emerging discourse on tropical ecology. [...] [T]hose [tropical botanic gardens] established by the EIC in Penang (1794) and Singapore (1822) were integral to its commercial aims for extending the chain of ‘tropical Edens’. As centres for the [...] assemblage of exotic crops [...], botanic gardens were perceived as symbols of scientific progress and imperial might.

Text above by: Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, "Peninsular Malaysia in the context of natural history and colonial science," New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 11, no. 1 (June 2009).

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