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Plantation Botany: Slavery and the Infrastructure of Government Science in the St. Vincent Botanic Garden, 1765–1820 s**

Plantation Botany: Slavery and the Infrastructure of Government Science in the St. Vincent... This essay examines the aims, labor regime, and workers of the St. Vincent botanic garden to highlight differences in the infrastructure of government‐funded botany across the British empire. It argues that slavery was a foundational element of society and natural history in the Anglo‐Caribbean, and the St. Vincent botanic garden was both put into the service of slavery and transformed by it. When viewed from the Caribbean context and the perspective of enslaved workers, the St. Vincent garden's affiliation with imperial improvement becomes less salient than its support of the status quo of slavery as a system and labor regime. The garden was dependent on enslaved laborers, yet the conditions of work and contemporary prejudices led superintendents to see them as undifferentiated labor. The politics of the archive make it impossible for historians to reconstruct the experiences of the garden's enslaved workers as individuals, including the specific labor that they performed or skills that they possessed. Plantation slavery's appropriation of and influence on the infrastructure of colonial botany through the St. Vincent botanic garden suggests that historians should center the local logics of the societies where scientific knowledge making took place to reveal the many meanings of science. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Berichte Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte Wiley

Plantation Botany: Slavery and the Infrastructure of Government Science in the St. Vincent Botanic Garden, 1765–1820 s**

Williams, J'Nese
Berichte Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte , Volume 44 (2) – Jun 1, 2021
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References (76)

Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
© 2021 Wiley‐VCH GmbH
ISSN
0170-6233
eISSN
1522-2365
DOI
10.1002/bewi.202100011
Publisher site
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Abstract

This essay examines the aims, labor regime, and workers of the St. Vincent botanic garden to highlight differences in the infrastructure of government‐funded botany across the British empire. It argues that slavery was a foundational element of society and natural history in the Anglo‐Caribbean, and the St. Vincent botanic garden was both put into the service of slavery and transformed by it. When viewed from the Caribbean context and the perspective of enslaved workers, the St. Vincent garden's affiliation with imperial improvement becomes less salient than its support of the status quo of slavery as a system and labor regime. The garden was dependent on enslaved laborers, yet the conditions of work and contemporary prejudices led superintendents to see them as undifferentiated labor. The politics of the archive make it impossible for historians to reconstruct the experiences of the garden's enslaved workers as individuals, including the specific labor that they performed or skills that they possessed. Plantation slavery's appropriation of and influence on the infrastructure of colonial botany through the St. Vincent botanic garden suggests that historians should center the local logics of the societies where scientific knowledge making took place to reveal the many meanings of science.

Journal

Berichte Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte – Wiley

Published: Jun 1, 2021

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