The resettlement of plants during the famine period significantly shaped the conditions of early colonialism in India. These botanical efforts were grounded in the perception of the tropics and its agriculture as poor, leading to projects of colonial “improvement.” This paper examines how colonial famine interventions led to a project of transforming the tropics through Botanical Gardens. The study uses imperial and local archives to analyze the early material and cultural spaces produced and circulated by the British Botanical Gardens to argue that the Botanical Gardens emerged as two types of infrastructures. As physical infrastructures, the Botanical Gardens transformed the environment through plant resettlements, violently forcing new relationships into the environment at the micro-climatic level. As micro-climatic knowledge infrastructures, the gardens revealed gaps in micro-climatic knowledge and later filled the early knowledge gap through failed plantation trials. The spatial mobilities of plants these gardens set in motion constructed “micro-climatic” infrastructure for altering the landscape of subsistence with cash crops exacerbating famines in the long term.
ArnoldD (1988) Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change. Oxford, UK; New York, NY: B. Blackwell.
2.
ArnoldD (1998) India’s place in the Tropical World, 1770–1930. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History26(1): 1–21.
3.
ArnoldD (2005) Agriculture and “improvement” in early colonial India: A pre-history of development. Journal of Agrarian Change5(4): 505–525..
4.
ArnoldD (2006) The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze : India, Landscape, and Science, 1800-1856. Seattle: University of Washington Press (Culture, Place, and Nature).
5.
AxelbyR (2008) Calcutta Botanic Garden and the colonial re-ordering of the Indian environment. Archives of Natural History35(1): 150–163.
6.
BaberZ (2016) The plants of empire: Botanic gardens, colonial power and botanical knowledge. Journal of Contemporary Asia46(4): 659–679.
7.
BennettBM (2014) The origins of timber plantations in India. The Agricultural History Review62(1): 98–118.
8.
BhattacharyyaD (2018) Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
9.
BonneuilC (1997) Crafting and disciplining the tropics: Plant science in the French colonies. In: KrigeJPestreD (eds) Science in the Twentieth Century. Charlotte: Harwood, pp.77–96.
10.
BrockwayL (1979) Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens. New York: Academic Press (Studies in social discontinuity).
11.
BrownRM (2005) Paṭnā’s Golghar and the transformations of colonial discourse. Archives of Asian Art55: 53–63.
12.
CohnBS (1996) Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
13.
CrosbyAW (2004) Ecological Imperialism the Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, 2nd ed.Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press (Studies in environment and history).
14.
DavisM (2001) Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London; New York: Verso.
15.
DraytonRH (2000) Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press.
16.
D’SouzaR (2016) Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press (Oxford India Paperbacks).
17.
EdneyMH (2009) Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
18.
ForthA (2017) Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903.Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
19.
GhoshKC (1944) Famines in Bengal, 1770-1943. Calcutta: Indian Associated Publishing Co.
20.
GroveR (1995) Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press (Studies in environment and history).
21.
HerbertEW (2012) Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India, 1st ed.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture).
22.
HulmeM (2017) Weathered: Cultures of Climate. London: Sage Publications Ltd.
23.
KennyJT (1995) Climate, race, and imperial authority: The symbolic landscape of the British Hill Station in India. Annals of the Association of American Geographers85(4): 694–714.
24.
KumarP (2012) Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
25.
LuddenD (ed) (1994) Agricultural Production and Indian History, 1st ed.Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press.
26.
McCrackenDP (1997) Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian British Empire. London; Washington, DC: Leicester University Press.
27.
PhilipK (2004) Civilizing Natures Race, Resources, and Modernity in Colonial South India. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
28.
RossC (2017) Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire: Europe and the Transformation of the Tropical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
29.
RoyT (2000) De-industrialisation: Alternative view. Economic and Political Weekly35(17): 1442–1447.
30.
RudgeA (2022) Cultivating “care”: Colonial botany and the moral lives of oil palm at the twentieth century’s turn. Comparative Studies in Society and History64(4): 878–909.
31.
SangwanS (1983) Plant colonialism (1786-1857). Proceedings of the Indian History Congress44: 414–424.
32.
SchiebingerL (2004) Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
33.
SenA (1981) Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
34.
SharmaJ (2011) Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
35.
TavolacciL (2019) Vegetable gardens versus cash crops: Science and political economy in the agricultural and horticultural society of India, 1820–40. History Workshop Journal88: 24–46.
36.
ThomasAP (2006) The establishment of Calcutta Botanic Garden: Plant transfer, science and the East India Company, 1786-1806. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society16(2): 165–177.
37.
WhiteheadJ (2010) John Locke and the Governance of India’s landscape: The category of wasteland in colonial revenue and forest legislation. Economic and Political Weekly45(50): 83–93.
