The East India Company and the Natural World

Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137-42726–7 Editorial matter and selection © Vinita Damodaran, Anna Winterbottom & Alan Lester 2015 Remaining chapters © Respective authors 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–137–42726–7 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137-42726–7 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137-42726–7 Contents List of Illustrations ix List of Tables xi Preface xii Anna Winterbottom Notes on Contributors xvii Introduction 1 New Imperial and Environmental Histories of the Indian Ocean Alan Lester 1 Botanical Explorations and the East India Company: Revisiting ‘Plant Colonialism’ 16 Deepak Kumar 2 Medicine and Botany in the Making of Madras, 1680–1720 35 Anna Winterbottom 3 Robert Wight and his European Botanical Collaborators 58 H. J. Noltie 4 The East India Company, Famine and Ecological Conditions in Eighteenth-Century Bengal 80 Vinita Damodaran 5 Colonial Private Diaries and their Potential for Reconstructing Historical Climate in Bombay, 1799–1828 102 George Adamson 6 Mischievous Rivers and Evil Shoals: The English East India Company and the Colonial Resource Regime 128 Rohan D’Souza 7 The Rafﬂ esia in the Natural and Imperial Imagination of the East India Company in Southeast Asia 147 Timothy P. Barnard 8 ‘A proper set of views’: The British East India Company and the Eighteenth-Century Visualization of South-East Asia 167 Geoff Quilley vii Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137-42726–7 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137-42726–7 viii Contents 9 Unlikely Partners: Malay-Indonesian Medicine and European Plant Science 193 Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells 10 Plants, Animals and Environmental Transformation: Indian–New Zealand Biological and Landscape Connections, 1830s–1890s 219 James Beattie 11 St Helena as a Microcosm of the East India Company World 249 A. T. Grove Afterword 270 Vinita Damodaran Select Bibliography 272 Index 285 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137-42726–7 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137-42726–7 Introduction: New Imperial and Environmental Histories of the Indian Ocean Alan Lester In line with the multi-disciplinary tenor of this volume, my aim in this Introduction is to weave between historiographical traditions that are often kept apart, focusing on the understandings that are gener- ated when they are brought together. Imperial history has a longer and, some would say, more venerable tradition than environmental history, but this volume suggests that more explicit attention to their interpenetration might be worthwhile.1 Both, in particular, are begin- ning to share certain spatial conceptions of networks, space and place; conceptions that also characterise recent histories of science and historical geographies. These more relative spatial conceptions lend themselves particularly to histories of knowledge, of cultural contact and trade, of botanical and artistic exchange, of shifting environmental management regimes, and of medicine, in which human and non- human entities combine to form dynamic assemblages. The East India Company itself was one such assemblage, constituted as much by the commodities, specimens and artefacts, and the regimes of knowledge that it shifted around and beyond the Indian Ocean as by the mer- chants, sailors, lascars, officials, bureaucrats and ships that sustained their movements. In recent decades the boundaries that used to delimit separate domains of British history, imperial history, area studies and the histories of former colonies have been traversed promiscuously. Where to limit certain avenues of historical investigation has become as significant as when. ‘New imperial historians’ have established that, in order to understand British history, one must imaginatively travel in and out of the British Isles, weaving imperial relations overseas into the fabric of the national story. Area studies specialists have been persuaded that we cannot fully understand colonial relations within any one region without tracing 1 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137-42726–7 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137-42726–7 2 Alan Lester entities that move in and out of that region. Historians of the former colonies have begun to think in terms of the trans-national processes which gave rise to their nation states. While, formerly, most historians had generally taken ‘social geographies … entirely for granted … view- ing space and place as a relatively passive backdrop’, increasing num- bers have now begun seriously to consider the issues that preoccupy geographers.2 With this ‘spatial turn’, concepts of place, space and scale now seem just as integral to British and imperial history as do those of chronology and periodisation, and spatial chains of causation just as relevant as temporal ones. Until the 1980s, imperial histories were premised on a basic spatial division between British core and colonial periphery. This convention served in unacknowledged ways to reproduce an imperialist view of the world, as empire was ‘figured as the means of diffusing modernity from the metropolis … outwards’. However, John MacKenzie’s work pioneered a means of bringing empire and Britain, periphery and core, as well as British and imperial historians, closer together. Rather than thinking of core and periphery as two interacting but discrete spatial containers, each maintaining its own essential identity, he saw that one of these containers was actually constituted by the other. MacKenzie’s challenge to the boundary between Britain and its empire has since been amplified and extended by the emergence of a large and still growing body of work now conventionally referred to as the ‘new imperial history’.3 The ‘new imperial history’ had quite different points of origin from MacKenzie’s project. It was marked by a feminist and a postcolo- nial orientation; it was inspired by work from disciplines other than History, and it had an explicit political agenda. Catherine Hall’s work, for instance, examined the dense set of connections between Britain and Jamaica which helped constitute the history of both sets of islands through a continual two-way traffic of people, ideas and policies. This traffic helped inform discussions of the limits of freedom and responsi- bility for working-class men and women in Britain as well as Jamaican former slaves. The ‘new imperial historians’ saw their work as having political relevance in the present as it helped shed new light on the past.4 As they criss-crossed between Britain and colonial sites, largely in the West Indies and India, arguing that the social formations of race, class and gender that defined Victorian power relations were mobile across an imperial terrain, they were breaking down taken-for-granted assumptions about both the maleness and the whiteness of the key actors within imperial and British history. Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137-42726–7 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137-42726–7 Introduction: New Imperial and Environmental Histories 3 At the same time, early environmental historians of empire were bringing new, non-human actors into a similarly spatially extensive colonial history. They showed how pathogens, plants and animals moved along imperial circuits as well as people and their ideas. Richard Grove in particular pioneered new conceptions of empire as an interconnected space that was vital in the making of the modern world. His Green Imperialism encompassed not just the British Empire, but also those of the Dutch and French. He showed that the notion of the oceanic island ‘Eden’ was a vehicle for new conceptions of nature that transcended imperial boundaries, and that the traffic in organisms, personnel and ideas that colonialism engendered played a central role in a growing recognition of the limitations of both local and global resources.5 Where new imperial histories of Britain, and these environmental histories of a wider spectrum of places converged, was in a new spatial conception

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