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Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism
An accessible foray into botany’s origins and how we can transform its future
Colonial ambitions spawned imperial attitudes, theories, and practices that remain entrenched within botany and across the life sciences. Banu Subramaniam draws on fields as disparate as queer studies, Indigenous studies, and the biological sciences to explore the labyrinthine history of how colonialism transformed rich and complex plant worlds into biological knowledge. Botany of Empire demonstrates how botany’s foundational theories and practices were shaped and fortified in the aid of colonial rule and its extractive ambitions. We see how colonizers obliterated plant time’s deep history to create a reductionist system that imposed a Latin-based naming system, drew on the imagined sex lives of European elites to explain plant sexuality, and discussed foreign plants like foreign humans. Subramanian then pivots to imagining a more inclusive and capacious field of botany untethered and decentered from its origins in histories of racism, slavery, and colonialism. This vision harnesses the power of feminist and scientific thought to chart a course for more socially just practices of experimental biology.
A reckoning and a manifesto, Botany of Empire provides experts and general readers alike with a roadmap for transforming the colonial foundations of plant science.
Colonial ambitions spawned imperial attitudes, theories, and practices that remain entrenched within botany and across the life sciences. Banu Subramaniam draws on fields as disparate as queer studies, Indigenous studies, and the biological sciences to explore the labyrinthine history of how colonialism transformed rich and complex plant worlds into biological knowledge. Botany of Empire demonstrates how botany’s foundational theories and practices were shaped and fortified in the aid of colonial rule and its extractive ambitions. We see how colonizers obliterated plant time’s deep history to create a reductionist system that imposed a Latin-based naming system, drew on the imagined sex lives of European elites to explain plant sexuality, and discussed foreign plants like foreign humans. Subramanian then pivots to imagining a more inclusive and capacious field of botany untethered and decentered from its origins in histories of racism, slavery, and colonialism. This vision harnesses the power of feminist and scientific thought to chart a course for more socially just practices of experimental biology.
A reckoning and a manifesto, Botany of Empire provides experts and general readers alike with a roadmap for transforming the colonial foundations of plant science.
328 pages, Paperback
Published May 16, 2024
29 people are currently reading
1006 people want to read
About the author
Banu Subramaniam
11 books8 followersBanu Subramaniam is a professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Originally trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, she writes about social and cultural aspects of science as they relate to experimental biology.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 4, 2024
Absolutely brilliant and necessary book, recommend this to everyone interested in understanding how colonialism violently shaped relationships to the natural world, through turning plants into commodities, epistemicide and concepts of the natural/foreign and more.
Writer's voice is great, good balance of human storytelling and academic insights. Really glad this book exists.
Writer's voice is great, good balance of human storytelling and academic insights. Really glad this book exists.
Read
March 2, 2025This is an excellent introduction to a lot of topics I've already thought about intensely, also a great resource for further reading material and such! I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in the relationship between us and nature and how it has been impacted by our narratives and, particularly, impirialism/colonialism. (Unfortunately, because I'm already quite well-versed on the subject, this was a tiny bit too superficial for me. I would have loved if Subramaniam dove deeper into either history/botany/environmental narratives. But I'm glad to have read this book either way.)
The one thing that I didn't like outright was the little chirp net narrative. It's not particularly well-written and I ended up skipping most of them.
The one thing that I didn't like outright was the little chirp net narrative. It's not particularly well-written and I ended up skipping most of them.
October 18, 2025
Banu Subramaniam draws on fields as disparate as queer studies, Indigenous studies, and the biological sciences to explore the labyrinthine history of how colonialism transformed rich and complex plant worlds into biological knowledge. Botany of Empire demonstrates how botany's foundational theories and practices were shaped and fortified in the aid of colonial rule and its extractive ambitions. We see how colonizers obliterated plant time's deep history to create a reductionist system that imposed a Latin-based naming system, drew on the imagined sex lives of European elites to explain plant sexuality, and discussed foreign plants like foreign humans. Subramanian then pivots to imagining a more inclusive and capacious field of botany untethered and decentered from its origins in histories of racism, slavery, and colonialism. This vision harnesses the power of feminist and scientific thought to chart a course for more socially just practices of experimental biology.
I enjoyed some of this immensly, while I found other sections quite borign and a bit dry but without hundreds of facts.
My favourite chapter was Chapter 3 The Categorical Impurative: Names Norms, Normings. This chapter goes into the categorisation and naming of nature as a colonial pursuit and arm of power and control.
Quotes:
“The colonists rapidly named their "discoveries" in the colonized worlds, cre-ating a virtual "new Babel." But the problem for colonists was that the same plant or animal had different names in different parts of the colonies. How to tell if the aromatic spice in one region was the same as the one in another?
By the eighteenth century, the colonists felt the urgent need for a consistent system. After all, how could they exploit natural resources efficiently if they did not know what plants existed where? Might they be able to grow these in their homelands? This created the grounds for a botanical nomenclature system with standardized names, well-developed life history details, good ecological plant characterizations, and a standardized hierarchical system of organization. Eventually a scientific infrastructure of botanical nomenclature emerged-standardized diagrams, herbarium sheets that displayed the plant with strict protocols, and key biological and contextual knowledge about the plant. The herbarium sheets traveled to find homes in colonial institutions, where they often remain to this day.”
• Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778). “In 1735, he published the Systema Naturae, where he organized biological life into a hierarchical set of groups-species into genera, genera into orders, orders into classes.” “This method, called binomial nomenclature, gives each species a unique, two-word name consisting of the genus and species name…Today, the rules by which we name plants still depend largely on Linnaeus, although for plant families, A. L. de Jussieu's classification in his Genera Plantarum of 1789 remains import-ant. ^ By 1799, there were fifty-two different systems of botany, each taxonomy emphasizing a different part of a plant or plants' geography.* Ultimately, by the end of the eighteenth century, the Linnaean system beat out the others and emerged as the norm.** Despite the advent of evolutionary methods and DNA technologies, and despite its many critics and shortcomings, Linnaean classification remains remarkably resilient.
Empires, especially the Spanish, embraced the Linnaean system. Further,
as King astutely argues, it seemed functional precisely because it relied on a 1
social understanding of marriage and normative modes of sexuality." Linnae-uss analogies between plants and humans, particularly about sexuality and the distinctions between male and female, made his work accessible.”
• (A Botanist in Lapland): “As Prosek reflects, "I think what bothered me was his hubris. ... Plants and animals already had names in indigenous languages, and Linnaeus, in a show of imperialism, renamed them with his Latinisms. He believed he could take nature-holistic, fluid and constantly changing and fragment, label and systematize…”Linnaeus mythologized his sub-Artic travels into a formative encounter with an Edenic "wild nation" (Sami reindeer herders) and a cross-cultural encounter between "high" and "folk" science. He then used this performative narrative to enter Dutch learned circles. Yet the Lapland journey was also part of the colonization of "our West Indies," as Scandinavians termed their Artic frontier. And this colonial venture in turn was predicated on erasing indigenous culture, as the "wild" Sami and their herds were chained to the engines of cameralist industry.”
“Academies and their focus on phylogenetic relationship don't always see eye to eye with applied botanists outside of academia.”
“Boranical nomenclature has never been fully aligned with botanical clas-sification. Decisions on nomenclatures are not arbitrary but are regulated by the taxonomic community through a "family planning" committee that meets regularly." In 1982, for example, International Botanical Congress in London adopted a set of basic rules. To quote Gledhill, they included the following:
1. One plant species shall have no more than one name.
2. No two plant species shall share the same name.
3. Ifa plant has two names, the name which is valid shall be that which was the earliest one to be published after 1753.
4. The author's name shall be cited, after the name of the plant, in order to establish the sense in which the name is used and its priority over other names.”
2 interesting cases of academia vs in the field naming of species: “Some systematists in 1999 proposed that the tomato should move from the genus Lycopersicon to the genus Solanum.8 While this change may satisfy academics, for seed companies, the costs of relabeling, repackaging, and advertising could run in tens of millions of dollars. A debate ensued. Ultimately, the tomato was renamed from L. esculentum to S. lycopersicum. If this happens repeatedly, costs can be considerable. For the buyer and seller of tomatoes, does the scientific nomenclature matter? Should it?
More recent is the case of the genus Acacia, a massive cosmopolitan genus across Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australia. Growing genetic evidence suggested that the genus was not monophyletic (that is, descended from a common evolutionary ancestor). Some proposed a split: one lineage in Australia and another in South Africa. But which would retain the name Acacia?
Which local species would emerge as the type species? Nature and nationalism aligned-both countries claimed the acacias. A passionate and contentious debate ensued with strong political and nationalist fervor. Ultimately, the 2005 International Botanical Congress in Vienna approved a decision to conserve the name Acacia for Australia while two pan-tropical lineages were named Vachellia and Senegalia. Interestingly, this was possible because the committee adopted minority rule even while the majority voted against this decision.
Arguing for a procedural violation, this issue was revisited in 2011 but with similar results.®7
Many professional and amateur botanists in Africa, Asia, and Central America were incensed by the decision, arguing that a well-financed, politicized campaign by Australia was behind it.88 It ignored the tree's African symbolism. Does retyping the genus signify "yet another act of economics and cultural pillage of the Third World by the First?" The website for the South African National Parks, under a banner headline "Africa to lose all its Acacias," pointed out that nine people had decided for the entire world. A newspaper in Nairobi expressed outrage in the headline, "Did you know it is illegal to call this tree Acacia? Australia claims exclusive rights to the name."*o So deep is the opposition that despite the decision, several authors writing about African acacias have pointedly retained the genus name Acacia.”
“The indigenous San peoples have long used Hoodia to reduce hunger, increase energy, and ease breastfeeding. In Reinventing Hoodia, Laura Foster chronicles how the plant was reinvented through law, science, and the marketplace and collaboratively repackaged as an appetite suppressant.”
“Young African taxonomists are frustrated about not being able to access, let alone maintain and expand, their work while European institutions grow moribund without functioning budgets or staff, "where valuable African specimens are deposited, uncurated and unused, running the risk of slow, inevitable decline, if not decomposition.'
" 12 In short, postcolonial
nations that have invested in expertise have no access to control the representations of flora of their own nations. An exception is an initiative, Flora of Ethiopia, where external research funding has worked alongside building local infrastructure.”
“The Rhodes Must Fall campaign, which started in Cape Town, South Af-rica, in 2015 and then spread across the world, has added urgency to these ques-tions. Cecil John Rhodes, a colonist, imperialist, and racist and "a symbol of the ruthless imperialism," has 126 plants (collected between 1899 and 1976) that bear his name. The name of Rhodes has been erased from the names of nations (Rhodesia), and the recent South African campaign challenged the presence of his legacy in the statues and in the names of institutions. Yet some activists astutely ask: why is he still celebrated in the botanical world?"* Rhodes is, of course, only one of many colonists who continue to be honored in the botanical imagination. During colonial rule, white colonists replaced local names with those of royal figures and the names of white botanists. Why should those names remain? Why should botany reinforce colonialism through a parade of western names? With the rise of digital media, change should be easy.
Many environmental organizations such as Sierra Club and the Audubon Society are reckoning with the nativist and racist beliefs of their founders.
The continued link of environmental groups to nativist and xenophobic ideas, dubbed the "greening of hate," is a reminder of enduring racist and colonial legacies. 15 While the national chapter of the Audubon Society has retained its founder's name, some local chapters have opted for new names. 116 The American Ornithological Society announced on November 1, 2023, that it would change the names of all bird species named after people. Further, it committed to involve a diverse representation of experts and the public in the process.”
“One of the problems with the taxonomic system is that it is not designed to be an information retrieval device. In folk taxonomies, names are practical and pragmatic-they provide contextual information to others who already share an understanding of the organism's cultural significance."
I enjoyed some of this immensly, while I found other sections quite borign and a bit dry but without hundreds of facts.
My favourite chapter was Chapter 3 The Categorical Impurative: Names Norms, Normings. This chapter goes into the categorisation and naming of nature as a colonial pursuit and arm of power and control.
Quotes:
“The colonists rapidly named their "discoveries" in the colonized worlds, cre-ating a virtual "new Babel." But the problem for colonists was that the same plant or animal had different names in different parts of the colonies. How to tell if the aromatic spice in one region was the same as the one in another?
By the eighteenth century, the colonists felt the urgent need for a consistent system. After all, how could they exploit natural resources efficiently if they did not know what plants existed where? Might they be able to grow these in their homelands? This created the grounds for a botanical nomenclature system with standardized names, well-developed life history details, good ecological plant characterizations, and a standardized hierarchical system of organization. Eventually a scientific infrastructure of botanical nomenclature emerged-standardized diagrams, herbarium sheets that displayed the plant with strict protocols, and key biological and contextual knowledge about the plant. The herbarium sheets traveled to find homes in colonial institutions, where they often remain to this day.”
• Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778). “In 1735, he published the Systema Naturae, where he organized biological life into a hierarchical set of groups-species into genera, genera into orders, orders into classes.” “This method, called binomial nomenclature, gives each species a unique, two-word name consisting of the genus and species name…Today, the rules by which we name plants still depend largely on Linnaeus, although for plant families, A. L. de Jussieu's classification in his Genera Plantarum of 1789 remains import-ant. ^ By 1799, there were fifty-two different systems of botany, each taxonomy emphasizing a different part of a plant or plants' geography.* Ultimately, by the end of the eighteenth century, the Linnaean system beat out the others and emerged as the norm.** Despite the advent of evolutionary methods and DNA technologies, and despite its many critics and shortcomings, Linnaean classification remains remarkably resilient.
Empires, especially the Spanish, embraced the Linnaean system. Further,
as King astutely argues, it seemed functional precisely because it relied on a 1
social understanding of marriage and normative modes of sexuality." Linnae-uss analogies between plants and humans, particularly about sexuality and the distinctions between male and female, made his work accessible.”
• (A Botanist in Lapland): “As Prosek reflects, "I think what bothered me was his hubris. ... Plants and animals already had names in indigenous languages, and Linnaeus, in a show of imperialism, renamed them with his Latinisms. He believed he could take nature-holistic, fluid and constantly changing and fragment, label and systematize…”Linnaeus mythologized his sub-Artic travels into a formative encounter with an Edenic "wild nation" (Sami reindeer herders) and a cross-cultural encounter between "high" and "folk" science. He then used this performative narrative to enter Dutch learned circles. Yet the Lapland journey was also part of the colonization of "our West Indies," as Scandinavians termed their Artic frontier. And this colonial venture in turn was predicated on erasing indigenous culture, as the "wild" Sami and their herds were chained to the engines of cameralist industry.”
“Academies and their focus on phylogenetic relationship don't always see eye to eye with applied botanists outside of academia.”
“Boranical nomenclature has never been fully aligned with botanical clas-sification. Decisions on nomenclatures are not arbitrary but are regulated by the taxonomic community through a "family planning" committee that meets regularly." In 1982, for example, International Botanical Congress in London adopted a set of basic rules. To quote Gledhill, they included the following:
1. One plant species shall have no more than one name.
2. No two plant species shall share the same name.
3. Ifa plant has two names, the name which is valid shall be that which was the earliest one to be published after 1753.
4. The author's name shall be cited, after the name of the plant, in order to establish the sense in which the name is used and its priority over other names.”
2 interesting cases of academia vs in the field naming of species: “Some systematists in 1999 proposed that the tomato should move from the genus Lycopersicon to the genus Solanum.8 While this change may satisfy academics, for seed companies, the costs of relabeling, repackaging, and advertising could run in tens of millions of dollars. A debate ensued. Ultimately, the tomato was renamed from L. esculentum to S. lycopersicum. If this happens repeatedly, costs can be considerable. For the buyer and seller of tomatoes, does the scientific nomenclature matter? Should it?
More recent is the case of the genus Acacia, a massive cosmopolitan genus across Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australia. Growing genetic evidence suggested that the genus was not monophyletic (that is, descended from a common evolutionary ancestor). Some proposed a split: one lineage in Australia and another in South Africa. But which would retain the name Acacia?
Which local species would emerge as the type species? Nature and nationalism aligned-both countries claimed the acacias. A passionate and contentious debate ensued with strong political and nationalist fervor. Ultimately, the 2005 International Botanical Congress in Vienna approved a decision to conserve the name Acacia for Australia while two pan-tropical lineages were named Vachellia and Senegalia. Interestingly, this was possible because the committee adopted minority rule even while the majority voted against this decision.
Arguing for a procedural violation, this issue was revisited in 2011 but with similar results.®7
Many professional and amateur botanists in Africa, Asia, and Central America were incensed by the decision, arguing that a well-financed, politicized campaign by Australia was behind it.88 It ignored the tree's African symbolism. Does retyping the genus signify "yet another act of economics and cultural pillage of the Third World by the First?" The website for the South African National Parks, under a banner headline "Africa to lose all its Acacias," pointed out that nine people had decided for the entire world. A newspaper in Nairobi expressed outrage in the headline, "Did you know it is illegal to call this tree Acacia? Australia claims exclusive rights to the name."*o So deep is the opposition that despite the decision, several authors writing about African acacias have pointedly retained the genus name Acacia.”
“The indigenous San peoples have long used Hoodia to reduce hunger, increase energy, and ease breastfeeding. In Reinventing Hoodia, Laura Foster chronicles how the plant was reinvented through law, science, and the marketplace and collaboratively repackaged as an appetite suppressant.”
“Young African taxonomists are frustrated about not being able to access, let alone maintain and expand, their work while European institutions grow moribund without functioning budgets or staff, "where valuable African specimens are deposited, uncurated and unused, running the risk of slow, inevitable decline, if not decomposition.'
" 12 In short, postcolonial
nations that have invested in expertise have no access to control the representations of flora of their own nations. An exception is an initiative, Flora of Ethiopia, where external research funding has worked alongside building local infrastructure.”
“The Rhodes Must Fall campaign, which started in Cape Town, South Af-rica, in 2015 and then spread across the world, has added urgency to these ques-tions. Cecil John Rhodes, a colonist, imperialist, and racist and "a symbol of the ruthless imperialism," has 126 plants (collected between 1899 and 1976) that bear his name. The name of Rhodes has been erased from the names of nations (Rhodesia), and the recent South African campaign challenged the presence of his legacy in the statues and in the names of institutions. Yet some activists astutely ask: why is he still celebrated in the botanical world?"* Rhodes is, of course, only one of many colonists who continue to be honored in the botanical imagination. During colonial rule, white colonists replaced local names with those of royal figures and the names of white botanists. Why should those names remain? Why should botany reinforce colonialism through a parade of western names? With the rise of digital media, change should be easy.
Many environmental organizations such as Sierra Club and the Audubon Society are reckoning with the nativist and racist beliefs of their founders.
The continued link of environmental groups to nativist and xenophobic ideas, dubbed the "greening of hate," is a reminder of enduring racist and colonial legacies. 15 While the national chapter of the Audubon Society has retained its founder's name, some local chapters have opted for new names. 116 The American Ornithological Society announced on November 1, 2023, that it would change the names of all bird species named after people. Further, it committed to involve a diverse representation of experts and the public in the process.”
“One of the problems with the taxonomic system is that it is not designed to be an information retrieval device. In folk taxonomies, names are practical and pragmatic-they provide contextual information to others who already share an understanding of the organism's cultural significance."
August 10, 2025
Wow I wish this had been included in my university reading in any way. It would have been so incredibly useful in helping me articulate the underlying social issues that limit the biological sciences. It took me a while to finish, not being well versed in feminist academic works and wanting to take time to comprehend everything, but I'm so glad I pushed through and have the copy to read again, especially the sections on invasive species. Recommend 100%, especially for (white) biology students.
September 19, 2024
"Science is not a set of unbiased methods that produce truth about the world. Rather, it is a set of historically derived knowledge practices that help elucidate the workings of the world. Science is a process, it is constantly made and remade."
I think there's something especially valuable about a professionally trained botanist becoming a feminist STS academic.
This is a book that is truly interdisciplinary that presents a vision of what science could be, beginning with decolonisation.
If this was on first/second year ecology courses that would be just great.
I think there's something especially valuable about a professionally trained botanist becoming a feminist STS academic.
This is a book that is truly interdisciplinary that presents a vision of what science could be, beginning with decolonisation.
If this was on first/second year ecology courses that would be just great.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews