Speculative Biology: Uses for and of the World

How was knowledge about exotic drugs presented, consumed and contested in early modern print? Groves of large sassafras trees grew naturally in abundance in the English North American colonies, and the roots, leaves and bark were harvested for their medicinal virtues in treating the Pox, scurvy and women’s infertility. I consult 179 texts published in England between 1580 and 1680 that discuss sassafras, including letterpress books, pamphlets, serials, newspapers and other ephemera. These texts include literary, medical, religious and political writings that allow us to investigate sassafras’ reception as a cultural marker, economic commodity and medical drug. While physicians were the most common writers of works discussing sassafras, clergymen, poets, explorers and colonists were also engaged in sharing knowledge about sassafras. I find that sassafras was not regularly referred to immediately after its introduction, but rather after a concentrated effort to commercialise the drug seventy years after its first discussion in English print. After 1650, the frequency of discussions of sassafras and the diversity of diseases that it was recommended to treat increased significantly in scale. After sassafras was popularised, it was co-opted into contemporary debates, such as those between Galenic and chemical physicians, which had little to do with its status as originating from the New World.

In the nineteenth century, the British government supported the creation of botanic gardens throughout the empire, with over one hundred in existence by the century’s end. Colonial garden superintendents were expected to identify and cultivate economically and medicinally valuable plants and take part in global networks of plant exchange. As scientific institutions, the colonial gardens were sites for producing and disseminating plant knowledge. These practices placed the gardens within an imperial system directed toward profit and “improvement.” The superintendent at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, became the de facto head of this system after Kew transformed from a royal to a national garden in 1841.

The proliferation of colonial gardens suggests that the British government increasingly turned to them to handle a range of botanical projects. However, these services could have been delivered by other means. This paper takes a closer look at the establishment of a botanic garden in New South Wales to explore why a garden might be founded in a colony where government officials and private individuals were already acclimatizing, collecting, and exchanging plants. Scanty documentation on the garden's early years has led scholars to use circumstantial evidence to establish 1816 or 1818 as the founding date for the botanic garden in the Sydney settlement. By examining contemporary trends in colonial governance and administration, this paper offers a new interpretation of the Sydney garden's beginnings and illustrates the political stakes of government support for botanic gardens and scientific investigation across the British empire.

The early decades of the twentieth century were marked by widespread optimism about biology’s ability to improve the world, catalysed by promising new theories about inheritance and evolution (particularly Hugo de Vries’ mutation theory and Mendel’s newly rediscovered ideas). In Britain and the USA particularly, an astonishingly diverse variety of writers took up the task of interpreting these new biological ideas using a wide range of genres. They produced a new kind of utopianism – the biotopia – that embodied a confidence in humanity’s ability to reshape living things to meet our desires. Biotopias offered the dream of a perfect, post-natural world, or the nightmare of violated nature (often in the same text), but above all they conveyed a sense that biology was offering humanity unprecedented control over life. 
 
Biotopias often visualised the world as a garden perfected for human use, but their vision often entailed dispossessing, or even killing, “Mother Nature”. Influential examples include Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), H.G. Wells’ Men Like Gods (1923), and J.B.S. Haldane’s Daedalus (1924). These writings allowed biology to function as public culture, creating talking and thinking about biology continue to characterise today’s debates over the impact of new biological breakthroughs.

The Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) at Wakehurst place in West Sussex, England is the largest repository of plant genetics resources (PGRs) in the world. Founded in 2000, the MSB functions as a hub for a global partnership program between the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and local partners from over 80 countries. According to their self-published institutional history, the MSBP was created to take on the mantle of global biodiversity conservation at a moment of ecological crisis. I study the bio-politics of the recasting of Kew’s role as arbiter of colonial botanical knowledge to keeper of botanical futures through seed banking. While the MSBP is a part of Kew’s vision to stay at the cutting edge of conservation and environmental governance, its relationship to colonial botany and political economy must also be interrogated in the light of new regulations in intellectual property rights. How do institutions deeply implicated in the colonial control over the production and dissemination of knowledge continue to stay relevant in a post-colonial era. How do they maintain their access across less-porous boundaries? With institutional documents and oral histories gathered from founding employees of the MSBP, I revivify the origin story of the MSBP. I investigate Kew Gardens’ ‘rebranding’ as Kew Science and the MSBP to show an example of how one institution in a post-colonial era distinguishes itself from the colonial movement of botanical specimens for economic gains, but is, at the same time, an extension of a long tradition of plant exploration, accumulation, and exchange.