 Kew became a clearinghouse for the exchange of plant information and a depot for the

interchange of plants throughout the empire; it sent plants wherever it saw commercial
possibilities. With one foot in the tropics of each hemisphere-with colonies in both wet and
dry environments, at sea level and in the Himalayas-Britain could shuffle plants at will. Often
these plants were new and improved varieties, from seeds grown experimentally at Kew.
Tea plants and seed were sent from India to Jamaica, where nutmeg was also introduced;
tobacco was sent to Natal, South Africa; papyrus, ipecac, and mahogany to India; Portuguese
cork oaks to Australia and Punjab; Liberian coffee grown from seeds at Kew to both the East
and West Indies; West Indian pineapples to the Straits Settlement; and rubber-yielding vines
from Assam to West Africa.

 Plant transfer is as old as the practice of agriculture, but it had never before been
undertaken on such a scale. Seeds are among the most precious and easily transported
cultural artefacts. Europeans brought wheat to make their daily bread, grapes for their
wines, olives for their oil, vegetables like lettuce and cabbage, and temperate fruits like
apples and peaches. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the British acquisitions in
India were still governed by the British East India Company, which had traditionally been
more interested in trading than in planting. But having despoiled India's home industries,
which produced the fine textiles and other luxury goods that had attracted it to India the
company was then starting to turn India into a source of raw materials such as cotton,
indigo, hemp, and salt. It sent India's peasant-produced raw cotton to Manchester and
brought back Lancashire's machine-made goods to Calcutta. Until 1834, the company also
had a monopoly in British ports on imports of tea, China was then the sole source. The
demand for tea was high, but how was the company to pay for it without losing precious
silver to China?

In 1827 and again in 1834 a prominent company botanist, superintendent of the Saharanpore
Botanic Garden, reported that India's Himalayan foothills would be suitable for tea growing (Royle
1834). But Europeans were not allowed to go beyond the confines of their warehouses in Canton, so
they could not go in search of tea plants, and they had only the sketchiest notions of tea processing,
not even realizing that green tea and black tea were processed from the same plant.7 The defeat of
China in the Opium War (1839-1842), which opened up five treaty ports to Europeans, gave the
company the opportunity it sought regarding tea. In 1848-1851 it brought off a great plant transfer,
whose success guaranteed that it would be repeated: under the auspices of the British East India
Company a plant collector named Robert Fortune brought 2000 tea plants and 17,000 tea seeds out
of China. He also brought Chinese experts in tea cultivation to start the tea industry in India. At the
same time, the company began cultivating the wild tea bushes of Assam as a plantation crop. Tea,
one of the hottest commodities in international trade and already the British national beverage,
would no longer ha Some were transshipped immediately to India, and others were held at Kew as
an experimental and reserve supply. A special heated greenhouse was erected at Kew for the
propagation and study of the cinchona seedlings. At one point in 1861, it held over ten thousand of
them In the first flush of excitement, seeds and seedlings were presented to the French and
Portuguese heads of state and Emperor Maximilian for use in Mexico.

The botanic gardens in the British West Indies, Ceylon, and Mauritius received seeds but the major
development work was carried out in India. For twenty years the Botanic Garden at Ootacamund in
the Nilgiri Hills of South India and the Calcutta Garden, which established plantations in the Sikkim
Himalayas near Darjeeling, carried out experimental work on species selection, planting and
harvesting methods, and the manufacture of quinine powders (Parliamentary Blue Book,
Cinchona,1860-1897).

 In the Nilgiris, convict labor was used to clear the forests for planting the cinchonas; the jail
was later used as a drying shed for the bark. Canarese and Tamils were brought up from the
plains to tend the trees and harvest the bark. Local Badaga men were also employed as
laborers. The Badagas were agricultural people long settled on the Nilgiri plateau. Badaga
women traditionally worked their farms, both home plots and swidden. The Badagas were
therefore able to prosper under the British regime because of their added income from
wage labor. But the unfamiliar cold damp climate of the hills, where the cinchona trees
thrived under conditions similar to those of their native habitat in the Andes, caused many
of the lowland workers to sicken and die in their barracks. The common people of Asia,
Africa, and Latin America could not afford this drug. Quinine stockpiled by the British
government in India in 1942 was not released to the Indian population suffering the worst
combined famine and malaria epidemic of modern times that resulted in three million.

Grown on British soil rubber transfer of 1876 was in many respects a reprise of the cinchona
transfer, but it was an unqualified commercial success. In the opening years of the twentieth
century, 98 percent of the world's rubber came from Latin America. Long before the arrival of
Europeans, indigenous peoples had discovered the elastic properties of the latex of certain trees and
shrubs and the smoke-ball method of processing the latex. The bulk of this crude rubber, and the
best quality rubber, came from the latex of Hevea species found throughout the Amazon basin.
Rubber was first used in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States for rainwear and machine
belts and rollers. The invention of the bicycle and the automobile greatly increased the demand for
the substance. The wild rubber industry underwent several successive booms, and in the years 1909-
1913, exports of rubber brought Brazil more revenue than coffee exports and made the port cities of
Para (now Belem) and Manaus opulent cities. This prosperity was built on the shaky foundation of a
natural monopoly of the highly desired Hevea species. But in 1876 Kew Gardens and the Research
and development work on these rubber seedlings was undertaken at the botanic gardens on Ceylon
and with greater success in Malaya, under a Kew-trained director named Henry Ridley, called
"Rubber Ridley" or "Mad Ridley" because of his persistence. By 1897 Ridley had worked out the
"wound response" method of tapping, which yielded quantities of latex without injuring the tree,
and John Parkin on Ceylon had discovered the acid method of coagulating the latex, which gave a
cleaner rubber than the smoke process. India Office had jointly sponsored the removal of wild
rubber seeds from Braz Between the two world wars, Singapore was the rubber capital of the world.
The British had under their political, administrative, and judicial control a vital commercial and
strategic resource that was profitable in peacetime and indispensable in wartime. Java and Sumatra
also had large plantings of the best plantation rubber, and Dutch botanists contributed a bud-
grafting process to the scientific improvement of the valuable cinchona trees and the most valuable
rubber trees occurred naturally in the Andean montane forests and the Amazon basin, respectively,
both regions of low population density. During the rubber booms, the labor shortage in the Amazon
basin was such, that many Amazonian Indians were pressed into involuntary servitude as rubber
tappers, and many tribes, for example, the Huitotos, the Boras, and the Andokes were decimated by
the abuses they suffered at the hands of armed guards hired by the rubber barons. This genocide
was partially documented in the British Government Blue Books of 1912 and 1913.11. British capital
was movable; plants are transferable. The British simply moved the plants to a labor-abundant area
under their direct political control. In these circumstances, the formal empire served them better
than the informal control through the capital investment that they exercised in Latin America. But
botanic gardens, like other institutions, mold themselves to the functional requirements and the
ethos of their cultural era, and botanic gardens had a period of intense activity in the service of
Western colonial expansion. Through the exercise of sheer power as well as their scientific expertise,
they increased the comparative advantage of the Western core of nations over the rest of the world.
The alliance of science, capital, and political power had systemic results that we still wrestle with.