Global Biopiracy in the Age of Empire: Indigeneity, Decolonisation, and the Politics of Botanical Knowledge in the British World, c.1600-1800

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Examining the politics, inequalities, and power negotiations in the production of botanical knowledge in the British Empire from 1600 to 1800, this project presents a unique interdisciplinary, global approach to the early modern history of imperial and material knowledge about plants. It will be the first monograph-length study of early modern biopiracy and its entanglement with colonialism and the 'scientific revolution', including its consequences forIndigenous communities and museum collections. Bringing global history and material culture studies into a pathbreaking conversation with environmental humanities, the history of science, and decolonial and Indigenous studies, this project recovers the shifting nature of botanical collections as engendered by British colonialism around the early modern world. This period has been characterised as an era of scientific knowledge production and global exploitation of environmental resources(Richards; Sivasundaram). Advancing such studies, this project's main research questions are:-To what extent did a new culture of science and British global colonialism reshape the production of botanical knowledge?-What were the long-lasting consequences of British biopiracy for Indigenous source communities? This project's global approach to early modern biopiracy, as negotiated from the outset of Britain's global expansion, fills a pressing chronological and methodological gap in research that has mainly focused on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has not taken the methodological innovations of material culture studies, Indigenous studies, and decolonial studies into account (Batsaki; Bleichmar).