The Long Shadow Of

Colonial Science
Museums and gardens must become
spaces that help us learn not only about
biological life and human history, but
also the colonialist and capitalist logic
that still governs our everyday lives.

Phoebe Johnson for Noema Magazine

BY S R I A C H AT T E R J E E < H T T P S : // W W W.N O E M A M AG .C O M
/AU T H O R / S R I AC H AT T E R J E E / >
MARCH 11, 2021

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CREDITS
With the humidity set to around 80%, the lush and dense interior of
the Palm House at London’s Kew Gardens offers a particular kind of
solace from the English winter outside. The air is warm, heavy and
infused with a muddle of earthy rainforest smells. Nestled within the
larger expanse of an impeccably tended garden landscape, Palm
House is, to many visitors, an escape within an escape: from the
placid English garden to the controlled wilderness of what David
Attenborough has called “a unique global rainforest.”

A large rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis, which is native to parts of the

Amazon basin and the Guianas, is a favorite with visitors here. Partly
that’s because of the obvious connection between a plant and objects
of daily use, and partly it’s because tourists from South America,
Africa and Asia have particular relationships with this tree.

Rubber trees came to Kew illegally. In the summer of 1876, after more
than a year in Brazil, the British explorer Henry Wickham returned to
England with 70,000 rubber tree seeds. In Brazil, Wickham had
declared to the authorities that the seeds were curiosities that he was
taking back for the queen. He was lying; in London, he delivered the
seeds to Joseph Hooker, the director of the botanical garden at Kew,
for the princely sum of £700 (more than £16,000 or $23,000 today).

Biopiracy was no small matter in the 19th century. A decade before

Wickham smuggled his rubber seeds back from Brazil, the
government of Bolivia tortured and killed Manuel Incra Mamani, an
Aymará Indian, for a similar crime. Mamani was accused of helping a
British alpaca farmer, Charles Ledger, find a more potent variety of
the Cinchona plant (the source of quinine, which cures malaria) and
helping him smuggle its seeds back to Britain. But Wickham’s story,
on the other hand, was celebrated as one that changed the modern
world.

In Kew’s hothouses, less than 4% of Wickham’s rubber seeds

germinated. But that was enough to transform vast tracts of land in
British colonies in South and Southeast Asia into large-scale rubber
plantations. British Malaya (now Singapore and the Malaysian
peninsula) became the largest producer of rubber in the early 20th
century thanks to the efforts of Henry “Rubber” Ridley, the first
scientific director of the Botanical Gardens in Singapore, who worked
hard to introduce new plants in the colonies that would generate
profits back home.

Large rubber plantations required cheap land and cheap labor. For
land, the colonial state sought out virgin forest that was portrayed for
people back home as wild and unproductive. For labor, Britain relied
on its colonial network: Coolies were shipped in from the Indian
colonies, particularly the Madras Presidency in South India.

Clearing the land resulted in a series of short and long-term

ecological disruptions that displaced complex multispecies soil
ecologies and human settlement patterns. There is a perverse irony
in the fact that plantation workers in Malaya were subject to some of
the worst rates of malaria, because clearing the forest topsoil created
a particularly fertile breeding ground for malaria-spreading
anopheline mosquitos.

European colonies became the frontiers of exploration, extraction

and production of tropical plants. They also became captive markets
for exports, where colonial states were able to establish monopolies
and manipulate import-export taxes. The botanical sciences aided
the colonial enterprise and were, in turn, organized by it.

Global networks of botanical gardens emerged across the colonial

world. These gardens were not simply landscaped spaces of pleasant
greenery but experimental laboratories and way stations for colonial
bioprospecting routes. Bioprospecting — the systematic search for
useful products derived from bioresources like plants,
microorganisms and animals — in recent years has been the domain
of big multinational agro-industries and pharmaceutical companies.
Its roots lie in the early colonial period, however, and it follows a
similar extractive logic.

Palm House at Kew Gardens in 2009. (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

When a small quantity of rubber first arrived in Europe as a curiosity

in the 1730s, it was called “caoutchouc.” The name means weeping
wood and was derived from Quechuan, a language family of the
Peruvian Andes. It was the British scientist Joseph Priestly who
noticed that the malleable latex that oozed from damaged bark on the
tree rubbed pencil marks off paper, so he introduced the name
“rubber.”

The European approach to rubber, as with other plant extracts, was

always use-oriented. The heroic history of science characterizes early
botany as a “pure” scientific pursuit, invested particularly in the
naming and classifying of plants and the order of nature. What is
often left unsaid is that early 18th-century botany as an academic
discipline existed only because knowledge about the properties of
plants for medicinal and economic purposes was important to
European states.

In time, the classification of plants became a natural stepping-stone

to a more sinister classification of humans. In 1758, the Swedish
botanist and taxonomist Carl Linnaeus — whose name lives on at the
Linnean Society of London, which prides itself as “the world’s oldest
active society devoted to natural history” — classified humans into
four groups that corresponded to the Americas, Europe, Asia and
Africa and were organized on the basis of color: red, white, yellow
and black. The color of skin was then made to correspond to the
“humors” — the four main fluids of the body that were thought in
medieval science to determine a person’s physical and mental
qualities.

This human taxonomy would have long-ranging impacts on the

emergence of the social category we now know as race. Caucasians
were characterized as white, sanguine and muscular and Africans as
black, phlegmatic and lazy. Skin color, of course, evolved
independently of other traits like mental abilities and behavior, and
there is no evidence to suggest that there are genetic differences
between populations.

Race science served the logic of colonialism in many ways. The

assumed superiority of Europeans legitimized the impulse to
dominate. It also allowed for the dismissal of indigenous systems of
cultivation and food systems as not agriculture. In other words, it
justified taking over land under the assumption that indigenous
communities were racially incapable of being stewards of it. This
colonialist (racist) logic was the same that was used to justify slavery
in the United States.

A rubber estate in British Malaya in 1908. (Hulton The Singapore Botanic Gardens. (Manfred
Archive/Getty Images) Gottschalk/Getty Images)

As natural history grew into a robust and profitable discipline in

Europe, its ties to the slave trade deepened. British naturalists such
as James Petiver and Dru Drury employed surgeons, most of whom
were trained in botany, on slave ships as proxy collectors. Petiver’s
collection was bought up by Sir Hans Sloane after Petiver’s death.
Sloane was among the most powerful men of science of the time, and
he is beloved for introducing drinking chocolate to Britain. Early in
his career, he worked as a medical doctor on plantations in the
Caribbean and used the labor and knowledge of enslaved West
Africans — Akan men and women mainly from present-day Ghana
and Cote d’Ivoire — to bring back more than 800 plant specimens
and other “curiosities.” These curiosities included skin and skull
specimens as well as nooses and whips used to punish fugitives.
When Sloane returned to London, he deployed a wide network of
Europeans in the slave trade to build on his nascent collection, which
now forms a large part of the Natural History Museum collection in
London.

Slave ships reached places others did not. Training enslaved people
as collectors became a practice in some parts. “Brutes are botanists
by instinct,” the British planter in Jamaica Edward Long wrote in
1774. Long went on to describe how Costa Rican monkeys applied
moss and chewed leaf poultices to gunshot wounds. Europeans were
explicitly derogatory toward the abilities of indigenous peoples, but
their knowledge helped shape much of the foundational directions of
European natural history.

Race science in the 19th century went beyond classifying people into
tiers of appearance and ability to the “measurement” of human
progress. The origins of human civilization and human progress were
becoming primary preoccupations at the time. Ethnology, a new
field, investigated the question of whether humans had a single origin
(monogenesis) or multiple origins (polygenesis) across the world.

In 1871, Charles Darwin (a biologist) published “The Descent of

Man,” which concluded that the human species had one common
ancestor and that humans evolved slowly, like all other forms of life.
This should have fundamentally settled the race debate, but it did
not. What it did instead was open the field to studying the gradations
of evolution within the human species. Human progress was seen as
something gradual, a continuing increase in rationality, with
(European) scientific thought replacing the world of myth and belief
systems. Into this, social and cultural evolutionism emerged as a new
anthropological direction.

Comparing different groups’ levels of civilizational development

became the cornerstone of various ethnographic museums in
Europe, among which the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of
Oxford stands out. The museum was founded in 1884 from the
collection of the elaborately named and wealthy archaeologist
General Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers, who had started
collecting objects to feed his interest in modern musketry and
expanded from there to anthropological and ethnographic areas.

Carl Linnaeus circa 1740. (Hulton Archive/Getty A bust of Sir Hans Sloane at the British Museum in
Images) 2020. (Chris Ratcliffe/Getty Images)

Pitt-Rivers claimed to have coined the term “typology” in his 1891

essay “Typological Museums.” Considering material culture the
“outward signs or symbol of particular ideas in the mind,” typological
displays placed artifacts of the same type from different cultures
together and arranged them from left to right to create a superficial
visual sequence in order of “primitiveness” to “sophisticated” and
“specialized” forms. Other ethnographic museums across Europe
took up such displays to position cultures in relation to others, with
Europe always at the apex of development.
For Pitt-Rivers, the concept of evolution as scientific truth justified
his politics. The theory of cultural evolution justified the existing
social order and the expansion of the British Empire. It also
encouraged a dangerous form of racism.

In an earlier essay, “Primitive Warfare,” Pitt-Rivers claimed that

civilization has always been “confined to particular races, whose
function it has been by means of war and conquest, to spread the arts
amongst surrounding nations, or to exterminate those whose low
state of mental culture rendered them incapable of receiving it.”
These were not unusual comments, nor were they merely academic.
Many anthropologists at the time were comfortable with the
genocide of Aboriginal Tasmanians in the 1820s and 30s. They were
convinced that Tasmanian society remained a paleolithic one and
thus its extermination was, in fact, necessary.

Pitt-Rivers relinquished decision-making powers over his collection

when he donated it to Oxford. Henry Balfour, who was hired as
assistant curator, followed Pitt-Rivers’ evolutionary approach.
Balfour was trained as an animal morphologist. He took design traits
to be analogous with cultural groups and sought to fit both into a
hierarchy of developmental stages. His role as curator was to fill in
the typologies and to create new ones as artifacts became available.

To this day, the Pitt Rivers Museum retains its typological displays.
The museum is often described by visitors as weird and wonderful, a
place stopped in time. Recently, student activists from the R h o d e s
Mu s t Fa l l < ht t p s : //r m fox fo rd .wo rd p re s s . c o m / > movement called
it a violent space. To enter, visitors walk through the more spacious
hall of the adjacent Natural History Museum, past a parade of
skeletons. The lineup of calcified bone is meant to reveal some of the
diversity of evolutionary adaptations in large mammals. This
evolutionary approach extends into the Pitt Rivers Museum, with
weapons, basketry and smoking pipes from different cultures, each
type of object crammed into its own vitrines. A violent history of
science and collecting, with many stories untold, hangs uneasily over
the space.

A rubber tree in Thailand. (Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

Minik Wallace arrived in New York City from Greenland with the
American explorer Robert Peary in 1897. Peary was bringing Minik,
along with his father Qisuk and others from their homeland, as living
specimens of Inuit culture. Qisuk contracted tuberculosis and died
shortly after they arrived. The museum curators staged a fake burial,
then de-fleshed his body and mounted his bones on an armature to
put on display. “You’re a race of scientific criminals,” Minik told
them. “I know I’ll never get my father’s bones out of the museum. …
I’m glad enough to get away before they grab my brains and stuff
them into a jar.” 

Minik returned to Greenland around 1910, but a few years later went
back to the U.S. He died of influenza in the 1918 pandemic. In 1993,
in response to public pressure, the museum agreed to return the Inuit
remains it had held until then.

Does returning human remains or sacred objects mean erasing the

history that led to its acquisition in the first place? It shouldn’t.
Museums need to recognize these histories are an intrinsic part of
the stories they must be telling. The misguided and violent practices
of scientific inquiry are highly relevant for museum-goers — and now
more than ever, when, for example, members of the alt-right promote
ancestry-testing as a way to prove their whiteness.

In the last few years, the curators at the Pitt Rivers Museum have
instigated various small initiatives to “aad d re s s i t s l e g a c y o f
c o l o n i a l i s m < ht t p s : //w w w. p r m . ox . a c .u k /c r i t i c a l - c h a n ge s > .”
The “rre s t i t u t i o n o f k n ow l e d ge < ht t p s : //t w i t te r. c o m
/ b r u t i s h m u s e u m? l a n g = e n > ” project led by Dan Hicks, Monica
Hanna, Ciraj Rassool and Bénédicte Savoy is one of the more
substantial undertakings. It “aims to build and share knowledge of
incidents of looting during military expeditions, and to document
connections between these events and objects in European museums
to inform and support restitution.” Similarly, the Natural History
Museum in London has initiated p ro j e c t s <
ht t p s : //w w w. n h m . a c .u k /c o n te n t /d a m /n h m w w w/d i s c ove r
/s l a ve r y - n a t u r a l - wo rl d /c h a p te r -2 - p e o p l e - a n d - s l a ve r y. p d f > to
study its colonial legacies and its relationship to slavery; curators
such as Miranda Lowe and Subhadra Das have w r i t te n <
ht t p s : //n a t s c a . o r g /a r t i c l e/ 2 5 0 9 > about how the collections
preserve colonial ideologies and narratives, and how they can be
used to recontextualize natural history collections.

Museums and botanical gardens are starting to invite contemporary

artists working with archives and research-based practices to stage
interventions in the museum space. These often serve as powerful
ways to highlight the histories of colonial collections and the voices
that remain absent. The Mexican-born artist Mariana Castillo
Deball’s exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, for example, works to
rediscover individuals who have been written out of history in
traditional museum displays and archives. One such figure is
Makereti, who was born to a Maori mother and an English army
officer. She became an interpreter for Maori culture and often
escorted visitors through the Whakarewarewa geyser valley on New
Zealand’s North Island. In 1924, Makereti enrolled as a student of
anthropology at the University of Oxford and donated her personal
collection of Maori possessions to the Pitt Rivers Museum. Stories
such as Makereti’s serve to muddy the waters of ethnographic study
and collecting, where the line between the observer and the observed
is crossed, as it so often is in the study of people and cultures.

At Edinburgh Printmakers, which was previously home to the North

British Rubber Company, the 2019 exhibition “Transparency” is
another example of artists looking forward and backward in time,
connecting what is often thought to be disparate bits of botanical,
industrial and military history. A film by the Barbadian-Scottish
artist Alberta Whittle, “What Sound Does The Black Atlantic
Make?,” was part of the exhibition. Through the rubber Wellington
boots produced in Scotland and used in trench warfare in the First
World War, Whittle links rubber manufacturing in Scotland to
colonial plantations and African regiments involved in the war effort.
Products of European oppression as they may be, museums are
uniquely placed to honestly reflect the colonialist and
capitalist processes that continue to shape our everyday lives.
Multispecies storytelling in botanical gardens makes visible the lives
of plants, animals and microorganisms beyond the taxonomic frames
into which they have been organized, and they help us discover the
diversity of connected life. These connections extend far beyond
biological life, of course, and it is museums and gardens that can
enlarge our awareness of the complex colonial histories of scientific
collections. We are poised at a moment at which there is a
tremendous surge of energy among young scholars and curators
towards making such changes and telling such stories.

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