Samuel Arnold, Spring 2024
The British Empire at its peak was the foremost political and economic power- house of the world. While attributed to many different factors, one of the largest involves the economic value of plants. From timber, cotton, spices, dyes, rubber, tea, and cinchona; the British colonial economy was reliant on the successful growth and exploitation of a diverse group of plants. In order to accomplish this, the British were reliant on their vast colonial network of botanic gardens and the means of transporting economically valuable plants between them, Wardian Cases.
The British and other colonial powers did not initially start with this system in mind, the first gardens came out of necessity. As European explorers expanded their realms, the need for fresh fruit and vegetables became moreapparent to combat scurvy [1]. As such, the first European garden outside of Europe was founded in 1652 in Cape Town by the Dutch East India Company [1]. Other European powers followed with the British founding the Calcutta Gardens in 1787 for a more specific purpose as well, introducing economic crops such as cloves, nutmeg, and other spices [1].
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a surgeon-naturalist went on each voyage and spurred a great interest in botany as a science and brought many exotic species back to England. George III was an avid collector and appointed Sir Joseph Banks as head of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew who sent out plant collectors for the king [2][3]. However, in 1841 Kew was made into a state institution with the goal of serving the Empire through the coordination of the colonial botanic gardens and the knowledge contained within them [2]. With the gardens establishing Herbariums, libraries, and labs [1][4]. These amenities became the training material for the network of directors, botanists, and curators that would expand and take over the colonial gardens [5][3]. With areas of study including: plant physiology, cytology, and genetics. They took this knowledge and used it for classifying as well as informing the public [2].
As the colonial gardens became more established, their goals became to acclimatize various plants for economic interests and became nurseries for public services and colonists [1]. For example, at Peradenya in Ceylon: gum, cinchona, and tea while in Lagos: coffee, cocoa, and cotton [1]. At other locations, the gardens also played a role in turning inhospitable areas into economically or strategically important ones, such as with the greening of Ascension Island overseen by Kew that provided a water supply and fresh foods by growing trees to stabilize the soil [5].
However, in order to accomplish this, the gardens needed a reliable way to transport these plants over such long distances. Wardian cases filled this need with their invention in the early 19th century. These closed terrariums were made after Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward discovered that moisture and pressure was able to be kept inside a closed glass container and allowed for plant growth protected from the elements [6]. In 1833, a test was conducted of sturdier cases in which ferns, grasses, and flowers were sent to Sydney. The plants were watered once and the cases were set out in the sun for the four month journey, flourishing on arrival [4][7]. A successful return trip was made in 1834 with an eight month journey, with conditions ranging from a foot of snow to the heat of the tropics [7]. After these tests, Wardian cases became the standard for long distance shipping of most plants, appearing in manuals for the collectors [4]. As soon as a few years later, hundreds of plants were being shipped from the EIC garden at Calcutta to Kew[8]. While many types of plants were being shipped around the world, there are three critical ones that were dependent on the Wardian case: tea, rubber, and cinchona.
Tea had long been a good that has been traded with and the Chinese had an almost exclusive hold on the crop. However, as European powers crept in on East Asia, the geographic monopoly would soon fall. After the defeat of China in the Opium War (1839-1842), five treaty ports were opened to Europeans in which the British East India Company took an opportunity [9]. Between 1848 and 1851, 2,000 tea plants and 17,000 tea seeds were brought out of China by botanist Robert Fortune and to India to begin cultivation with the help of Chinese experts [9]. Wardian cases were used to transfer the plants and many of the seeds planted in the cases began to germinate when they arrived in Calcutta [7][9]. By 1870, Britain was importing almost 150 million pounds of tea annually from India, specifically the regions of Darjeeling and Assam [10].
Another important good facilitated by Wardian cases is the hevea brasiliensis plant, which produces rubber. In 1876, Kew and the India Office jointly sponsored the removal of wild rubber seeds from Brazil hiring Henry Wickham to do so. Wickham successfully smuggled 70,000 seeds out of Brazil and presented them to Kew [2]. The plants were germinated in the greenhouses at Kew and 1,900 trees were sent to Peradeniya and 22 were sent to Singapore, the latter group became the parents stock of every one of the millions of rubber trees in Southeast Asia[2]. As the trees bloomed, research was being done at Ceylon and Malaya into improving yields. At Malaya, a Kew trained director named Henry ”Rubber” Ridley worked out more efficient and higher quality methods of tapping that led to a boom in production that resulted in the death of the Brazilian market by 1919 [2]. However, this consolidation of the market struck a crucial blow to the Allies in the Second World War when the Japanese Empire took over Southeast Asia, cutting off their natural supply.
The third botanical good crucially shipped by the British is cinchona. The bark of cinchona trees contains a compound called quinine, a bitter alkaloid that falls into a similar category as morphine, caffeine, and cocaine. The trees originally were grown in the Andes and were known to indigenous peoples by the time of European arrival and by the time of colonization were being harvested to send around the world [10]. Quinine was explained as an anti-malarial agent by harming the minute parasites within human blood while leaving the host alone [11]. Pure quinine was separated from cinchonine in 1820 and began a fresh interest in the compound as well as becoming the pharmaceutical standard to be compared to [12][13]. William Dawson Hooker, son of one Kew director and brother to the next wrote his inaugural dissertation on cinchonas arguing that modern chemistry was the past forward to understanding the barks [13]. This resurgence in interest led to more criticism being levied on the harvesting techniques of the Andean republics that Britain had been purchasing from, labeling them as unsustainable [14][2]. Leading to multiple attempts at gathering cinchona from the Andes and establishing them elsewhere, an early British expedition was disrupted by a Bolivian saboteur while a Dutch expedition succeeded, but was eventually abandoned due to wrong type of cinchona gathered [12]. However later British attempts succeeded and cinchona calisaya were gathered and brought to Kew and India in Wardian cases [12][14]. In India, many of the cinchonas were grown in alpine environments similar to the Andes such as Ootacamund, Darjeeling, as well as in more experimental places such as Ceylon, Burma, and Jamaica [10][2]. After the Dutch purchased some plants from the British, cinchona production like with rubber, passed it’s native area production and by 1922 Java and India accounted for a majority of the world’s production [12][15][2]. The massive increase in production allowed for the greater use by the British in keeping their colonial armies healthy and was extensively used in many bush wars, regional wars, and later the World Wars [2]. When the cinchonas were first being brought over, one of the collectors, Clements Markham, thought of this transfer as being a symbolic gesture of the benevolent transition of power from the East India Company to the Crown after the Sepoy Rebellion, imagning himself as engaging in a service to the colonial poor in India [14]. Despite this, quinine was not immediately spread to the general public, generally reserved to military personnel and colonial governments [2].
As just shown with quinine, the large successes seen in this plant transfer were not evenly applied to all populations involved and often provided a supremacist outlook even in some aspects to this day. Botanic gardens became centers of European power projection within the colonies [1]. As early as the first voyage of the Wardian cases, it was wondered how the sight of British plants in these foreign colonies might help uplift the spirits of the European colonists [7]. These gardens could provide a safe space for sociability to combat homesickness and provided reminders of the orderliness of European parks [1]. As a result of the ”civilizing” of these foreign colonies, the botanic gardens were targets of theft and destruction by the oppressed local populations [1]. However, this criticism is not just unique to the past the botanic gardens today are still grappling with their imperial legacies in regards to how they present their information. While many ethnographic and art museums are working on highlighting the impacts of colonialism on their collections, botanic gardens such as the ones at Kew and Oxford do not contain the same critical self-reflection [16]. They often leave out much of the context behind how and why they got their esteemed botanic collections as well as some indigenous knowledge regarding the plants before Europeans arrived[16].
Bibliography
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(4) Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, ., Wardian Cases. General file, 1847-1953.
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(12) King, G., A manual of cinchona cultivation in India; Office of the Super-intendent of Government Printing: Calcutta, 1876.
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(15) Wellcome, H. S., Souvenir Cinchona tercentenary celebration and exhibition at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum London; London : The Wellcome Foundation Ltd, 1930: 1930.
(16) Nielsen, V. The colonial roots of botany – legacies of empire in the botanic gardens of Oxford and Kew. Museum Management and Curatorship 2023, 38, 696–712.
(17) United States. Bureau of Entomology., ., Bulletin; Washington, G.P.O, 1883-1904: 1913, p 78.
(18) Yungjohann, J. C., White Gold: The Diary of a Rubber Cutter in the Amazon 1896 – 1906 ; Synergetic Press: 1989.
(19) Jackson, M., Sir W. Denison and others planting the first quinine tree in the Neilgherry hills, India. London: Illustrated London News: 1862.
(20) Ross, R., The prevention of malaria; London: John Murray: 1910
(21) Dorsett, P. H.; Collection of the Archives of the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden: 1932.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the University of Alabama in Huntsville's Honors College for their funding support for this study abroad project. Special thanks to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Library and Archives staff for helping me on such a short notice. Additional thanks to the Oxford Bodleian libraries for granting me access to their general resources.
