Botany of Empire

An accessible foray into botany's origins and how we can transform its future

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.

Banu Subramaniam is professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of two award-winning books: Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (Washington, 2019) and Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (Illinois, 2014).Subramaniam Banu :

Banu Subramaniam is professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of two award-winning books: Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (Washington, 2019) and Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (Illinois, 2014).Herzig Rebecca :

Rebecca Herzig is professor of gender and sexuality studies at Bates College. She is the author of Suffering for Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America (Rutgers University Press, 2006) and the coeditor of The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics (MIT Press, 2009).

Banu Subramaniam is professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Holy Science and Ghost Stories for Darwin.

"Botany of Empire will prove to be a valuable read for scholars and students of critical plant studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, ecofeminism, queer ecology and indigenous studies."

"The field of plant-humanities includes botany, taxonomy and plant evolution on the one hand, and literature, law and the arts on the other. Recent publications have covered botanical histories, imperialist plant-collecting fervor, queer botany, botanical art and Indigenous methodologies associated with botany, to name just a few. What comes as a huge relief is a book weaving together these interconnected tendrils, while also blooming with personal anecdotes and even fictional stories."

"Subramaniam's work arrives as a welcome tonic. . . . Botany of Empire is both a clarion call and an inspiration."

"Provocative. . . The book challenges plant science to better see the ways in which it has been profoundly shaped by European colonialism and how imperial attitudes, theories and practices endure."

"Dwelling on the expansive field of botany, Banu Subramaniam imagines ecologies, biodiversity, and extra-human taxonomies as tethered to empire and open to decolonial revision. Botany of Empire is an exciting text that draws on and entwines feminist studies, science studies, queer studies, disability studies, and studies of colonialism in order to imagine both plant life and our collective livingness anew."—Katherine McKittrick, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies, Queen's University

"Banu Subramaniam leads the reader on a lively trek across a historical landscape of colonial botany, narrating the 'great men of science' as not only relentlessly curious but conditioned by violent expansionism and misogyny. Botany of Empire is a compelling read for this Indigenous science studies scholar who stands on Linnaeus’s grave every time I am in Uppsala. My aim, like Subramaniam's, is not to 'cancel' a revered European scientist who regretfully broke relations into taxa, but to stand against colonial ideas of universal knowledge and progressivism co-constituted with the elimination of diverse peoples, knowledges, and moral orders."—Kim TallBear, Professor, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta

"Botany of Empire is an absorbing account of the many ways in which race, class, gender, and colonialism have shaped, and continue to influence, the plant sciences. This book will change the way you think about plants."—Amitav Ghosh, author of The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

"Written by a leading scholar in the field of anticolonial feminist STS, Botany of Empire offers a beautiful guide that teaches the layers of anticolonial feminist approaches to science through the specificities of plants and botany. Combining a breadth of ambition with accessible, gorgeous writing, this book invites us to imagine a more just science in thought and feeling."—Michelle Murphy, author of The Economization of Life