Indigenous Peoples and Eighteenth-Century Plant Prospecting

Abstract

Prospecting for medicinal and other useful plants was a major early-modern economic and scientific endeavor, whether at home or abroad. The Swedish botanist, Linnaeus, famously prospected for economically useful plants within his own country during trips to Lapland, Gotland and Öland. So economically important were plants that modern empires could not have arisen, much less survived, without them: quinine, tea, sugar, spices, etc. The acquisition of new plants came at a cost, however—above all a human one: large numbers of prospectors died in the process. A leading group of prospectors were trading company medical personnel, who were felled in vast numbers either by scurvy or by tropical diseases. Another category of prospecting victims has received less attention: the peoples who traditionally used these plants, and who often shared their knowledge with Europeans without credit, much less compensation. Scholars such as Raj, Grove, Schiebinger, and Cook have noted the persistent tendency to fail to acknowledge those who assisted European plant prospectors. Indigenes’ agency is denied; the local ‘go-between’ or conduit of critical plant knowledge is passive, unnamed, even omitted from the story. The resulting history is lopsided and inaccurate, yet acknowledging and compensating indigenous inputs is hardly a straightforward matter. For over twenty years development specialists, anthropologists, legal experts and others have debated what is meant by ‘indigenous knowledge’ (‘IK’). While the term IK might suggest a defined body of knowledge, one not subject to change, most knowledge systems are by their very nature changing, hybrid and owned by no one. Many plants may also be used by more than one group, as is the case with neem, widely used in South Asia. The fluidity of knowledge likewise destabilizes the notion of IK. It is the hitherto unplumbed depths of the concept of IK with respect to 18th c. plant prospecting that I aim to investigate in my paper. By examining the IK debate, we can consider the historical instances with a more sophisticated appreciation of the identities – both human and plant – implicated in eighteenth-century botanical prospecting.