‘Botany of Empire’: A conversation on the study of plant life

Looking critically at the history and culture of botany reveals how botanists remade, recategorized, renamed, and in some cases, removed and reinstated plants based on the needs of consumption and profit. Banu Subramaniam’s new book, Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism, asks many questions, but most important: What if botany is not an objective or neutral study of plants, but a tool for extraction and colonial conquest? 

“Colonialism isn’t an event or a historical blip of actions but an enduring installation,” the author writes, it is an ongoing project that has wielded botany as a tool. Subramaniam illustrates how botany perpetrates harm by reinforcing the colonial agenda of sorting nature into binaries. The plant world, naturally fluid and ever-changing, became grouped into categories of male versus female, native versus invasive, good versus bad, which ultimately lead to designating what “belongs” and what does not. 

Embranglements—that is, the state of being embroiled or mired in something—becomes an important part of the necessary vocabulary to talk critically about botany. “While terms like entangled, intertwined, and implicated imply the interconnections of worlds,” Subramaniam writes, “embranglements also implies tension within—shaking, wavering, confusing. Interdisciplinary embranglements are always fraught, capturing the difficulties of interdisciplinarity. We need to work through our embrangled histories.” 

Subramaniam is an Indian-born professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her early education was taught in the British style, choosing the specialization of science early on, with English as the preferred language. But growing up in the urban city of Chennai put her at odds with the representations in her British textbooks, including depictions of the four seasons and flora of daffodils. Coming to the United States for her PhD was the first time she saw the plants she had studied, and where she began to question botany’s past. 

Botany is an excellent site to work through the embrangled histories of, as many Indigenous peoples say, plant nations and our own human nation. This is in line with Indigenous ontologies that see no hierarchy or difference between the scientific, the personal, and the political in a holistic and circular logic; we are all intrinsically embrangled together.

Subramaniam applies novelist Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememory”—the active process of remembering the past, which lingers around and inside of us—to the plant world. “What is powerful about the concept of rememory is that it opens up the past, especially the lessons we have forgotten, unlearned, or never been taught,” Subramaniam explains. As an Anishinaabe Algonquin person, rememory resonates with so much of my generation’s work—my work—in the rememory of our culture; reintroducing myself to our plant relations and remembering the ceremonies and traditions that went with that relationship.

“Rememory can help us recognize the profound botanical amnesia that produced xenophobic concepts such as invasive species, ‘discovery’ of plants long known to natives, and translating the exuberance of plant reproduction into the decidedly human registers of ‘sex,’” Subramaniam writes. As a First Nations person working in the field of food sovereignty and art, looking at familiar concepts through the lens of plants has opened up a new frontier to discuss issues around racism, inequity, nationalism, and power. 

By analyzing botany’s embranglements from Subramaniam’s context as an Indian immigrant with my lens as a First Nations woman, it provides a compelling platform to starkly see the desire of colonialism and its instinct to create hierarchies. Perhaps the answers to how we can create more equitable futures for all living beings on earth are found in reacquainting ourselves with plants; literally re-rooting ourselves to the soil. I spoke to the author to explore these concepts deeper:

Cass Gardiner: In your book, Botany of Empire, you write, “While the Linnean system might seem simple in its binomial formulation, it was anything but. Its imagination and structures were fueled by powerful ideas about colonialism, race, gender, sexuality, and nation. The lasting legacy of his history is that all modern scientists are de facto Linneans,” citing his Species Planatum from 1753. “Linnaeus’s thread that showed the way out of the labyrinth of colonial botany continues to tether modern botany to colonial ideologies and science,” Why was it important for you to draw our attention to the fact that the study of plants is still bound to colonialism?

Banu Subramaniam: I feel that to understand where we are, we have to understand the history of how we got here. And it’s not that you can ever undo or go back into history, but certainly you can understand its harms better, and in the places where it is harming, [and] figure out how else we might do it. Because part of what botany did was become a universal knowledge that supplanted and erased knowledges from across the world and in places it also appropriated. Which is why you can’t just completely do away with it, because within its practices are appropriations from indigenous places also. 

For example, so many pharmaceuticals we use today are because of Indigenous knowledge. The active ingredient, now patented but that [original] knowledge came from centuries of people using a particular leaf, root, or bark to help with certain ailments. So returning to the Linnaean system, the fundamental issue is that we still use that binomial nomenclature that every plant has two words, one a genius and one a species. This very fundamental way in which all life is organized into these units of species, even though if you look biologically, there are, I don’t know, many dozens of definitions of what a species is. So it itself is an unstable category, but we act like it isn’t. 

So when we learn where these names come from—[you learn that] in part these names came because colonists wanted a universal naming system, so they could know that this plant here is the same as this plant there. Then they could figure out where they could get that plant the cheapest or where it would grow, or how to move it. There was a larger colonial agenda to why a universal language was so very important. But for most people living in their neighborhoods or their forests, it’s not clear to me that having a universal naming system matters.

Why can’t we be polylingual? Why can’t all these names coexist? It’s this [idea of] universalizing, that this is the only way to look at the world. That seems to be the power of botany, that it is the one place of truth that has erased all local knowledges and knowing. And so going through that thread, you come to understand how it became this central power, and then also understand why it was applied to certain projects, like colonialism. And if we are not into re-enacting colonialism anymore, it’s not clear that we need to follow in naming and classifying plants that way, we can classify in other ways.

As we spoke I was struck by this idea that the creation of a universal language was also a way for settlers to escape building relationships and fostering reciprocity between themselves and Indigenous nations. Proper protocol when visiting Indigenous communities would be to make your presence known in someone else’s homeland, to visit with the nation’s leaders, to exchange gifts, to feast together, which led to respect for the stewards of the land and their culture in order to learn about the plants and the land. Subramaniam ties this impulse to a need to exploit the natural resources easily, and it also highlights a desire to evade accountability to Indigenous nations and to the plants themselves.

While there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to indigenizing the field of botany, a starting point would be to seek out cultural custodians of traditional plant knowledge and language within each respective nation. Language and culture often lay the foundation to see with a holistic worldview, and applying this to botany and ecology by working with Native nations to co-steward or give full stewardship back to the nation. The early architects of botany didn’t see the value in this level of diplomacy with the numerous sovereign nations living in Turtle Island they only wanted to order and control them. Ecological intervention was the target, not a symptom of colonialism within botanical practices. Applying the idea of terraforming to the “new worlds’” that Europeans discovered, these settlers sought to turn what they saw as useless wilderness into productive (or said bluntly profitable) landscapes. 

Erasing the native knowledge systems and languages severs any autonomy plants have, and their own need for relationality and reciprocity. Indigenous knowledge of plants is shared through stories, which are grounded in the hyperlocality of the environment the plants are within. The stories and the plants are connected to the physical place that the listener would also have a relationship with through a lived experience. Can that be felt through a herbarium sheet? 

For example, the Anishinaabe word for “dandelion” is doodooshaboojiibik, which, when broken down, the first part of the word “doodooshaaboo” translates to a consumable liquid, milk—and this word is also used for breast milk specifically. The second part, “jiibik” means the entire root system. Combined together, the word tells the story of both parts of the plant, the liquid and the roots will be nourishing and can be consumed by humans. Is all of that understood and transmuted when the plant is called “dandelion,” or the latin taraxacum officinale instead? Renaming plants cuts off their lineages and their ties to their specific relations.

For settlers practicing botany, local knowledge was seen as inconvenient, confusing, and actively working against civilizing efforts. There was a need for a universal science, and thus a universal language and categorization system, one that would use Indigenous knowledge systems but not acknowledge, credit, or create links to it either.

It’s important to reclaim Indigenous knowledge systems–this is their rememory–we also need a new framework to hold all of this in, and new politics to contextualize it. A new container in every sense. 

CG: It seems that by looking at botany only through the lens of how it’s taught in formal education, in textbooks and in school, we have such a narrow view of botany when there’s this whole periphery that exists outside of this dominant way of thinking.

BS: That’s the other thing of naming, which has also become very important in the botanical language, is that so much of—not all but a lot of—the naming practices was about [assigning names after] the queen, the empress, this military dictator—[naming was a way to honor] people who were part of empire. Every now and then colonial scientists did take local names, but then those [local names] were latinized.

So I grew up with words and I was like, Oh, this word sounds like the word in my local language. And then it turns out that it was [used by settler scientists] but I didn’t recognize the word because it was latinized. Now there are movements calling attention to look critically at the names of plants. In the “Rhodes Must Fall” protests they took down a lot of statues of Cecil Rhodes, yet, Smith & Figueiredo wrote a paper [calling attention to the fact] that there are still 126 species named after him. So if you can take names out of countries, if you can take names out of buildings, you can take names out of statues, why do plants still have to be named after these men?

CG: I wonder if that’s because people don’t see plants as part of their everyday life, unless you study it or seek that knowledge out specifically. I looked at my own neighborhood differently once I learned that the tree at the end of my driveway was a walnut tree, and that rose bushes are where rose hips come from.

BS: I think so. It’s like if you have to learn another language to re-describe the world around you and the [natural] world around you isn’t part of your work … then there’s a place of alienation where you don't recognize things around you. And it’s not clear to me why it needs to be a fight. Why there has to be only one way in which we describe the world, and why these different knowledge systems that all have their own cosmologies can’t also be learned. Different Indigenous groups have different ways in which they classify based on what is important to everyday life, and each of these are valuable in their own way because it helped people live for thousands of years.

CG: What I think is great about your book is that it can act as a primer for people to understand how colonialism and botany are linked, and why it matters, and how it affects us in our daily lives. How can the average person think about these concepts of plants, Indigenous knowledge, and power structures, and use it to expand their viewpoint of colonialism? How can they fit this into their world and experiences? 

BS: For me, it’s just that plants are far more interesting than the ways in which botany teaches. They do so many more interesting things than I think most people observe, but that we don't record because we try to fit these observations within whatever boxes we studied in school or college. I think that the frameworks within botany become the site where contemporary politics comes into it.

For example, for me, the whole language of native, and foreign, and invasive species are categories that feed into what is happening within the national discourse. And historians have shown that during periods of xenophobia, [people] are xenophobic against bacteria and viruses and other infecting agents; you fear anything that is not the same. And so it’s important to recognize that science is not immune from larger politics and that we should think of everything critically.

So many foreign plants, these so-called “invasive plants,” have traveled everywhere because of these colonial networks. And this is not about whether this is good or bad, but it’s just about understanding why and how the world is what it is, and also not because individual things, plants for instance, are bad and good. We are all caught up in these larger frameworks, and then sometimes you have people who mobilize these frameworks into hatred of certain kinds of groups.

As the United States acknowledges the 250th anniversary of its founding, it feels more poignant than ever to call out the politics and biases in power structures that seek to divide in order to dictate who and what ‘belongs.’ Even the way that plants are re-named and embraced illustrates these contradictions. Things that are desirable are incorporated into the culture and things that are not desirable remain “othered.” Species such as Japanese knotweed or Chinese privet are bad or harmful, yet “Georgia” peaches, also from China, are claimed as ‘American.’ “The majority of U.S. crops are plants of foreign origin, while most insects that cause damage are considered native,” Subramaniam writes. “We need to historicize botany and our accounts of plant life in their complex global ecologies of relationality if we are to have any hope of scientific explorations that do not merely reinscribe histories of colonial investments.”

Ultimately, Botany of Empire makes the case that we are all collectively suffering from a botanical amnesia, forgetting how the formal Western science of botany has obfuscated local, traditional knowledges held by Indigenous people, forcing false human-made binaries on the natural world while robbing plants of their agency. In the process, by embracing colonial practiced botany, we recreate it and ultimately miss out on so much of the plant world by staying in the narrow purview of Linnaean and company. Confronting the field of botany, and its narrow view of plants, is not merely a metaphor but a mirror to confronting our role as active participants in the environment. 

“What if we worked from the biologies of plants to reimagine plants, and from there to rethink the human?” asks Subramaniam. Doing the work of rememory of our embrangled lives with our plant relatives from the colonial framework of botany means embracing differences, rejecting binaries, and working daily to cultivate community and cooperation. The first step is being brave enough to believe there is another way, and as I walk around my yard I see affirmations in the plant world all around me.