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Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World

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Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World Plants and Empire Plants and Empire Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World Londa Schiebinger Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England Copyright © 2004 by Londa Schiebinger All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2007 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schiebinger, Londa L. Plants and empire : colonial bioprospecting in the Atlantic World / Londa Schiebinger. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN-13 978-0-674-01487-9 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-10 0-674-01487-1 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-13 978-0-674-02568-4 (pbk.) ISBN-10 0-674-02568-7 (pbk.) 1. Pride-of-Barbados (Plant). 2. Herbal abortifacients—History. 3. Slavery—Caribbean Area—History. I. Title. RG137.45.S35 2004 581.6Ј34—dc22 2004047364 To the memory of the men and women whose knowledge of fertility control has been lost in the mists of time and to the ravages of history Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 “The Base for All Economics” 5 Plan of the Book 12 1 Voyaging Out 23 Botanistes Voyageurs 25 Maria Sibylla Merian 30 Biopirates 35 Who Owns Nature? 44 Voyaging Botanical Assistants 46 Creole Naturalists and Long-Term Residents 51 Armchair Botanists 57 The Search for the Amazons 62 Heroic Narratives 65 2 Bioprospecting 73 Drug Prospecting in the West Indies 75 Biocontact Zones 82 Secrets and Monopolies 90 Drug Prospecting at Home 93 Brokers of International Knowledge 100 3 Exotic Abortifacients 105 Merian’s Peacock Flower 107 Abortion in Europe 113 Abortion in the West Indies 128 Abortion and the Slave Trade 142 viii Contents 4 The Fate of the Peacock Flower in Europe 150 Animal Testing 153 Self-Experimentation 156 Human Subjects 159 Testing for Sexual Difference 166 The Complications of Race 171 Abortifacients 177 5 Linguistic Imperialism 194 Empire and Naming the Kingdoms of Nature 197 Naming Conundrums 206 Exceptions: Quassia and Cinchona 211 Alternative Naming Practices 219 Conclusion: Agnotology 226 Notes 243 Bibliography 286 Credits 298 Index 300 Acknowledgments This book was a pleasure to write. It took me to exotic places and brought me into contact with wonderful scholars from many parts of the globe. I thank Roy Vickery of the Natural History Museum, London, for kindly opening for me Hans Sloane’s herbarium (the first eight volumes contain Sloane’s plants from Jamaica). The staff of the Laboratoire de Phanérogamie, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, let me rum- mage through their many varieties of the Poinciana from specimen draw- ers stretching from ceiling to floor in room after room. I also thank John Symons at the Wellcome Library, London; the knowledgeable archivists and staff at the Bibliothèque Centrale Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris; the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence; and the National Library of Jamaica, Kingston, who helped with images and arcane materials. Numerous colleagues directed me at crucial mo- ments to valuable information. Jim McClellan generously shared his in- triguing archival find concerning “the potato with two roots”; in addition he read and helpfully commented on the manuscript. Sue Broomhall called Mme. Claude Gauvard’s work to my attention. Jerome Handler di- rected me to sources on midwifery in Barbados. Karen Reeds told me about Mark Jameson and his sixteenth-century garden of plants for gynecological complaints. Philip Boucher shared his expertise on various matters concerning Rochefort and du Tertre. Staffan Müller-Wille pointed me to Linnaeus’ evaluation of Dahlberg and kindly read Chapter 5. Roberta Bivins called Sir William Jones’s work to my attention. Claudia Swan shared information on the fascinating “root cutters.” Lee Ann Newsom helped with technical questions concerning the biogeographical origins of the Poinciana. Brian Ogilvie read and commented very helpfully on Chapter 5. Linda Woodbridge provided the lovely citation from Ben Jonson. Clem Hawes came to my aid when I required an expert on Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. Sue Hanley read sections of Chapter 3 and an- ix x Acknowledgments swered questions about French law. Matthew Restall provided informa- tion on Tabachin and all things Spanish. Minnie Sinha provided careful comments on the theories and practices of imperialism. Alan Walker of- fered splendid insights into current scientific naming practices. Barbara Bush, Richard Drayton, Pamela Smith, and Emma Spary all provided much-needed advice and materials on the history of medicine, natural his- tory, or the West Indies. Finally, a special thanks to Paula Findlen for her generous support for my many projects. Much of this book was written during my year at the Max-Planck- Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (1999–2000). Warm thanks to Lorraine Daston for her intellectual sparkle and kind hospitality. I also thank the Institute’s library staff for tracking down and photocopying nu- merous sources. Support for that year was provided by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. I was the first woman historian to win the Alexan- der von Humboldt Research Prize; I know there will be many to follow. Travel to archives and time for writing were also supported by the Na- tional Science Foundation and the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. I am also grateful for the generous support for my re- search provided by Dean Susan Welch and A. Gregg Roeber at Pennsylva- nia State University. A warm thanks to Elizabeth Knoll, my patient editor, who made the journey through press a pleasant one. My thanks, too, to my research assistants: Mary Faulkner, Sarah Goodfellow, and Katherine Maas—the book is better because of you. Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Ed Dumond who kept all my equipment running. Sections of various chapters appeared in Endeavour; Hypatia; Caroline Jones and Peter Galison’s edited volume Picturing Science, Producing Art; Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal’s Moral Authority of Nature; Pamela Smith and Benjamin Schmidt’s Knowledge and Its Making; my own and Claudia Swan’s Colonial Botany. I thank these journals, editors, and presses for permission to reprint those materials. Finally, it takes a village to sustain intellectual vigor. The students in my graduate seminar, “Colonial Exchange,” pored over my manuscript and offered many wonderful corrections and suggestions—thanks to them all. My colleagues and friends—Rich Doyle, Laura Giannetti, Amy Greenberg, Gillian Hadfield, Ronnie Hsia, Mary Pickering, Guido Ruggiero, Sophie de Schaepdrijver, Susan Squier, and Nancy Tuana—all provided warmth, chatter, food, and sometimes even dance parties at cru- cial moments. To Robert Proctor, Geoffrey Schiebinger, and Jonathan Proctor, my love. Plants and Empire Introduction The Indians, who are not treated well by their Dutch masters, use the seeds [of this plant] to abort their children, so that their children will not become slaves like they are. The black slaves from Guinea and Angola have demanded to be well treated, threatening to refuse to have children. In fact, they sometimes take their own lives because they are treated so badly, and because they believe they will be born again, free and living in their own land. They told me this themselves. In this moving passage from her magnificent 1705 Metamorphosis insec- torum Surinamensium, Maria Sibylla Merian recorded how the African slave and Indian populations in Surinam, a Dutch colony, used the seeds of a plant she identified as the flos pavonis, literally “peacock flower,” as an abortifacient.1 This luxuriant plant still grows wild and in hedgerows and gardens throughout the Caribbean, and continues today to be known to many herb women and bush doctors as providing effective brews for in- ducing abortion. Unlike the prolific peacock flower, Merian’s work is rare and remark- able. A celebrated artist, the German-born Merian was one of very few European women to travel on her own in this period in pursuit of sci- ence. Women naturalists rarely figured in the rush to know exotic lands: Johanna Helena Herolt, Merian’s eldest daughter, collected and painted insects and plants, much like her mother, in Surinam in 1711 when her husband traveled there to look after his business interests. Jeanne Baret became the first woman to circumnavigate the globe in 1776, but she sailed, disguised as a male, as an assistant to Philibert Commerson, the ship’s botanist and the father of her illegitimate child. In the nineteenth century, women like Lady Charlotte Canning did sometimes collect bo- tanical specimens, but almost always as colonial wives, traveling where their husbands happened to take them and not in pursuit of their own sci- entific programs.2 Merian’s passage is also remarkable for what it reveals about the geopol- itics of plants in the so-called “early modern world.” Historians have 1 2 Plants and Empire [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.] Figure I.1. Merian’s flos pavonis (literally, peacock flower), which she described as a nine-foot-tall plant with brilliant yellow and red blossoms. Note the hearty seed (shown on the right through the opening in the pod) with which Merian claimed Arawak and African slave women aborted their children. Various parts of this plant are still used in many places in the Caribbean today as an abortifacient. Introduction 3 rightly focused on the explosion of knowledge associated with the scien- tific revolution and global expansion, and the frantic transfer of trade goods and plants between Europe and its colonies.3 While much literature on colonial science has focused on how knowledge is made and moved be- tween continents and heterodox traditions, I explore here instances of the nontransfer of important bodies of knowledge from the New World into Europe. In doing so, I develop a methodological tool that Robert N. Proctor has called “agnotology”—the study of culturally-induced igno- rances—that serves as a counterweight to more traditional concerns for epistemology.4 Agnotology refocuses questions about “how we know” to include questions about what we do not know, and why not.
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