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OFFICIAL and UNOFFICIAL BOTANICAL GARDENS on ILE DE FRANCE and ILE DE BOURBON UNDER the FRENCH REGIME, 1735-18 10 by Stewart John Muir

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OFFICIAL and UNOFFICIAL BOTANICAL GARDENS on ILE DE FRANCE and ILE DE BOURBON UNDER the FRENCH REGIME, 1735-18 10 by Stewart John Muir ECONOMIC BOTANY IN THE INDIAN OCEAN: OFFICIAL AND UNOFFICIAL BOTANICAL GARDENS ON ILE DE FRANCE AND ILE DE BOURBON UNDER THE FRENCH REGIME, 1735-18 10 by Stewart John Muir A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA August 1994 © Stewart John Muir, 1994 ____________________ ____________________________ In presenting this thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without written permission. my (Signature) Department of The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Date /y7 ECONOMIC BOTANY IN THE INDIAN OCEAN Page ii ABSTRACT France was late to enter the European race for empire in Asia, but it was the earliest nation to employ colonial research gardens to organize the push eastward. The French botanical vanguard settled on the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean where, beginning in the 1730s, a series of gardens contributed to France’s imperial fortunes and provided a model for later plant research networks in other European empires. In spite of past interpretations of French colonial science, there emergences a compelling argument that a dynamic interest in practical applications of scientific knowledge was present in the Indian Ocean region during this period. Botanical gardens on Ile de France and lie de Bourbon performed roles cen tral to the direction of overall French colonial activities. Applied botanical gardens helped develop colonial economies. They exchanged plants with other French colonies, notably in the West Indies. They also provided information and plants, for various purposes, to the metropole. The botanical gardeners of the Mascarenes also represented France to other nations, functioning on its behalf as botanical diplomats sharing knowledge and specimens with foreign countries. This period of economic botanizing ended, for France, in 1810 with the loss of its Mascarenes colonies to the British. ECONOMIC BOTANY IN THE INDIAN OCEAN Page iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Table of Contents iii Text: Economic Botany in the Indian Ocean 1 list of Sources 37 Appendix 42 Appendix 1: Map of ile de France (Mauritius) 43 Appendix 2: Map of ile de Bourbon (Reunion) 44 Appendix 3: “The house of Cére’ at Pamplemousses” 45 Appendix 4: “Jardin de Mon Plaisir” 46 Appendix 5: “Mon Plaisir” 47 Appendix 6: “Le Réduit” 48 Appendix 7: “The Garden at Leiden” 49 Appendix 8: “The Jardin du Roi at Paris” 50 ECONOMIC BOTANY IN THE INDIAN OCEAN PAGE 1 France was late to enter the European race for empire in Asia, but it was the earliest nation to employ colonial research gardens to organize the push eastward. The French botanical vanguard settled on the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean where, beginning in the 1730s, a series of gardens contributed to France’s imperial fortunes1and provided a model for later plant research networks in other European empires. Until the loss to the British in 1810 of France’s Indian Ocean possessions, Pamplemousses on lie de France and other gardens like it performed roles cen tral to the direction of overall French colonial activities. Applied botanical gardens helped develop colonial economies. They exchanged plants with other French colonies, notably in the West Indies. They also provided information and plants, for various purposes, to the metropole. The botanical gardeners of the Mascarenes also represented France to other nations, functioning on its behalf as botanical diplomats sharing knowledge and specimens with foreign countries. These three broad types of activity are diverse, but if any one term could be used2to describe the activities of these gardens, it could easily be “economic botany.” ‘The Mascarenes under French control consisted of lie de France (now Mauritius), lie de Bourbon (now Reunion), and Rodrigues — the last never the scene of any significant colonial activity during the French period. 2Lucile Brockway, in Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (Studies in Social Discontinuity, New York: Academic Press, 1979), seems to have been the first to use the term but she did not elaborate it beyond identifying “an era of economic botany” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when “the usefulness of new plants to the national economy [of Britain] was prominent in the minds of all but the purest taxonomists.” (p. 75) James E. McClennan III, in his 1992 work (Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) went much further by describing an eighteenth-century economic botany where “without plant transfers and government policies promoting the cultivation of economically useful products, Saint Domingue and other similar colonies would never have existed.” (p. 148) He continued, “as plantation systems and colonial economies developed in the eighteenth century, the great mercantilist powers invested significant resources in programs of applied botanical research and development. Following on initial botanical explorations of their territories, the French, the British, ECONOMIC BOTANY IN THE INDIAN OCEAN PAGE 2 Daniel R. Headrick, in The Tools of Empire, accounted for the success of the second British empire by crediting a number of European technological innovations — the breechloader, the machine gun, the steamboat and steamship, and quinine — with lowering the cost, “in both financial3and human terms, of penetrating, conquering, and exploiting new territories.” Similarly, the French in the Mascarenes employed an evolving technology of botanical gardening to investigate and assess potential and existing colonies. Once that was done, colonial gardens were used in research, communication, and diplomatic activities. Gardens were not a single, discrete technology in the exact sense that Headrick uses the term, but as technological agents they employed technologies and thinking that might be together termed economic botany to make good their missions. Headrick advances his case further by stating that European technology succeeded, in part, simply because it was an advantage other nations did not have. This, too, was the case with economic botany in the Mascarenes. Gardening on Ile de France and Ile de Bourbon has previously been studied by Mauritian scholar Madeleine Ly-Tio-Fane. She was described by a colleague in the preface to her 1970 work as “an historian, a historian of economics, and at the same time a historian of botany” who had produced model publications.4 Ho-Ty-Fane launched her career in 1958 while assistant and the Dutch actively sought to identify new, economically useful plant (and animal) products and to introduce them into large-scale production, as had been done previously with coffee and sugar.” (p. 147) Discerning a strong connection between colonial gardening activities and larger imperial agendas, McClennan observed that “Programs of direct applied botany sought to achieve an immediate or near-term economic benefit for the nation funding the enterprise, and in this area the knowledge of scientific experts promised great returns on the investment.” (p. 148) 3Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools Technology and European of Empire: Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 206. 4Madeleine Jean-Nicolas Ly-Tio-Fane, The Triumph of Céré and his Isle Bourbon collaborators, Documents Preceded by an Introduction, in series from &ole Pratique des ECONOMIC BOTANY IN THE INDIAN OCEAN PAGE 3 librarian at the Mauritius Institute in the capital, Port Louis. Her first book was a survey of archival documents about the beginnings of the Mascarenes 5 A second volume was published in 1970, this time with Fernand spice trade. Braudel’s support in the second series of Le Monde d’Outre-Mer Passé et 6 Ly-Tio-Fane’s Present, a project of the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes. research drew upon libraries and archives in Mauritius, Europe, and the United States. Her approach in both books was to illuminate the major personalities of the spice trade by presenting their selected correspondence and writing brief introductory essays. In neither case was gardening a primary topic of inquiry, but because her subjects were so closely connected to botanical enterprise the two books constitute a useful primary source in the study of economic botany in the Indian Ocean. Later articles to 1991 were more analytical than the archival collections and described the operations of colonial gardeners and plant collectors. In addition to casting light on a previously obscure area, Ly-Tio-Fane’s work may be viewed as an early challenge to the view that eighteenth century French botanical efforts were ineffectively devoted to colonial ends. Headrick advanced this argument in The Tentacles of Progress, stating that compared to Britain and Holland, France was not committed enough to international trade to exploit gardens effectively, did not possess an elite sufficiently interested in agriculture, and culturally was unable to see beyond the “purely scientific ap Hautes etudes — Sorbonne: Sixiéme Section: Sciences Economiques et Sociales entitled Le Monde d’Outre-Mer Passé et Present, deuxiéme série, Documents XIII, Paris and The Hague, 1970, op. cit., preface pp. 9 and 11. 5Madeleine Ly-Tio-Fane, Mauritius and the Spice Trade, 1. The Odyssey of Pierre Poivre, Publication No. 4 in Mauritius Archives Publication Fund series, Port Louis, (Mauritius): Esciapon Limited, 1958. footnote 4. ECONOMIC BOTANY IN THE INDIAN OCEAN PAGE 4 7 It is true that French applied science proach” of botanical research. stagnated in the nineteenth century, but the flaw in Headrick’s analysis is that he failed to note examples of prior success.
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