Botany of Empire” Review: How Plant Classification Shaped Colonial Power and Modern Biases

Two recent calamities, geographically distanced, began in the death of trees. A landslide annihilated two villages of Wayanad district in Kerala. Two oceans west, in Brazil, a new viral disease menaced pregnant mothers.

Many babies were born with small heads, brain damage, and blindness during the 2015 Zika fever outbreak in Brazil. When the congenital Zika virus syndrome spread globally, all attention was focussed on Aëdes aegypti, the mosquito vector. The context in which the disease had emerged was ignored. No wealthy “white” nation was hurt in the making of that disease, and the Zika virus was soon forgotten. And now, riding on an entirely different insect, here arrives Oropouche, an orthobunyavirus, which seems to have the same terrible impact on pregnant mothers. The context for this, for any arbovirus, outbreak is the same: deforestation. A cursory glance at the map is enough to discern this. Yet, since the Zika outbreak, deforestation has been ignored in strategies of disease control. Trees anchor land forms. The erasure of trees spells the erasure of human existence.

Anthropocentric vision of life

Our vision of life is eccentric and stubbornly anthropocentric until we are threatened by infectious disease. Then, we become madly zoocentric. Life, though, is verdecentric. A few extremophiles apart, all existence depends on photosynthesis. How many more pandemics or apocalyptic upheavals need to happen before we concede that human destiny is controlled by plants? We assume just the opposite from our gleeful manipulation of plant life. This goes back to a time when we imposed a new destiny on plants, conquered their wildness, and enslaved them. We called it domestication. Cosy, yes, but conquest still.

We have done it for 12,000 years, and every time we have crossed a line, nature has bitten back with disease and catastrophe. Banu Subramaniam’s Botany of Empire is a good place to begin if we want to review the violence of playing God. This book relates “Empire” to European conquest since 1492. To my mind the word is much more elastic. The conquests of capitalism are no less bloody, its impoverishments far more devastating, and its scars more permanent.

History is what happens at your doorstep and how you choose to remember it. The panoramic memory of the world is really contained in our own visual field, and this book urges us to notice this.

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In 1735, Carl Linnaeus published his Systema Naturae wherein he classified the plant kingdom. For reasons best known to himself, he picked the stamen as the basis for his classification. Fifty years earlier, in The Anatomy of Plants, the English physician and botanist Nehemiah Grew had already sexed stamens as male: “The blade [or stamen] does not unaptly resemble a small penis, with the sheath upon it as a praeputium, and the several thecae are like so many small testicles.” Grew extended the analogy. He surmised that the “attire”, as he termed the stamen, had the role of disbursing pollen, and though he is seldom credited for it, he pondered the coevolution of flower and pollinator. Linnaeus also did not discover the sexuality of plants. The credit for that goes to Sébastien Vaillant, who lectured so memorably on that subject to an avid audience of medical students at the Royal Garden of Paris on June 10, 1717, at 6 am that the moment is enshrined in history.

Linnaeus picked up all this and ran with it in his Systema Naturae. By classifying and naming plants with the binomials we still use today, Linnaeus tried to impose some sort of order on the information overload European botanists faced in the early 17th century.

Banu Subramaniam’s Botany of Empire is a good place to begin if we want to review the violence of playing God. 
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By Special Arrangement

The dedication of Grew’s book has a singularly cogent line: “…there are Terrae Incognitae in Philosophy, as well as Geography. And for so much, as lies here, it comes to pass, I know not how, even in this Inquisitive Age, That I am the first, who have given a Map.…”

Linnaeus’ cartography, unfortunately, spilled over more messily than he could have predicted. It made gender a definite binary and not just in plants. There was very little scientific evidence for that, and Linnaeus himself conceded that his system was an artifice. It raised a few sniggers and some academic ire in his time. He could not possibly have guessed that the future would cleave to his sexualised inventory so seriously. What made it percolate so deeply?

Linnaeus merely transposed the prevalent ideas of gender and sex on to botanical structures. The mores of human sexual anatomy were attributed to their botanical parallels. His language portrayed plants in sexual tableaux (albeit always within the bonds of marriage), and these were interpreted as Nature’s confirmation of societal ideals. Despite such appallingly adolescent silliness, it has remained entrenched thus for nearly 300 years.

There was, though, a more convenient fallout.

Linnaeus’ system could absorb the global scatter of plants. Explorers brought back forests entire, and here at last was a method to catalogue them. Once named, plants from anywhere became Europeanised as the rightful botany of Empire. Subramaniam examines this double-barrelled weapon of conquest: the appropriation of plants and botanical knowledge, and the oppressive racism and misogyny it fostered and still sustains.

The first part of the book has the author’s own ideas embalmed in academic aspic. Every statement seems to call for a Greek chorus of validation. It is a labyrinth, a library, it is the Chirp Net (read the book to discover)—but persist; the book is worth it.

Ideology, not science

Luckily, the writer soon tears off the straitjacket of academese and goes the mile alone in her own quirky, witty voice. She makes the pertinent point that the gender binary is not science but ideology. Between the enforced signposts of male and female, there swings an expanding rainbow, not just behaviourally but genetically, hormonally, and structurally. Ignoring that truth has led to enormities of cruelty and injustice. We know this well.

But can we blame these attitudes solely on the gendering of plants? The roots of misogyny go much, much, deeper. Also, annihilation is implicit to conquest and colonisation.

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Conquered lands literally stay terrae nullius (nobody’s lands), always empty to the colonial gaze. The crime is not what the conqueror or coloniser does. The very idea of conquest is a crime against humanity. Once committed, anything the conqueror does, no matter with what presumed benevolence, can only be an atrocity to the conquered and colonised land and to its life forms.

Sadly, the story is unchanged postcolonially: massacre, dispossession, dislocation, deprivation of targeted populations continue untrammelled within democracies.

We are still, to borrow a word frequent in this book, embrangled with the past, hopelessly mired in it. Add to this the toxic agnotology of standard narratives, and the past may be beyond salvage.

What of now and tomorrow?

Botany of Empire holds out dazzling possibilities, “vegetal sublimations” all. For anything that challenges and dares to break the continuum of hate: brava! 

Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed are surgeons who write together as Kalpish Ratna. They are the authors of Uncertain Life and Sure Death (2008); ROOM 000: Narratives of the Bombay Plague (2015), and The Secret Life of Zika Virus (2017).