Colonial Botany: Gender, Politics, and Commerce between Europe and the West Indies in the Eighteenth Century

殖民植物学：18世纪欧洲和西印度群岛之间的性别、政治和商业londa Schiebinger，宾夕法尼亚州立大学最近几年，人们对植物学这门早期现代欧洲的“大科学”重新产生了兴趣。这本书的长度项目探讨了运动，胜利，压制和灭绝不同的植物学知识在18世纪的遭遇之间的欧洲人和加勒比地区的居民。这个项目有几个目的。首先，它要求学术读者考虑植物的文化政治。植物很少出现在本科或研究生的欧洲、美国、世界历史或科学史课程中，也很少出现在我们关于战争、和平甚至日常生活的宏大叙述中。但它们是重要的文化文物，往往处于政治和经济斗争的中心。在18世纪，植物在围绕奴隶制的政治斗争中发挥了作用（例如，奴隶妇女雇用堕胎者来抵制为种植园主生产更多的田地工人）。在贸易公司、国家和当地生物海盗之间争夺有利可图的殖民地商品垄断权的斗争中，植物也扮演了重要角色。第二，本项目旨在研究殖民地植物学与两性关系之间的联系。虽然性别在18世纪人类学、旅行文学和奴隶制的历史中受到了一些关注，但在殖民植物学的历史中却很少受到关注。在这个项目中，PI探讨了欧洲的性别关系如何引导博物学家探索其他土地、民族和知识。第三，该项目有助于重新思考植物学的历史。一个长期存在的叙述将现代植物学描述为分类学、命名法和“纯粹”分类系统的兴起。这种方法并没有捕捉到植物学在18世纪作为一个国家的现实。在争夺土地和资源的新兴民族国家看来，植物学家为研究和全球交流收集稀有美丽的植物，对欧洲人在热带气候下的殖民努力至关重要。第四，这个项目寻求进一步发展和应用一种新的方法论工具，罗伯特·普罗克特称之为“agnatology”——研究文化导致的无知。基因学将“我们如何知道”的问题重新聚焦到我们不知道什么以及为什么不知道的问题上。虽然大部分关于殖民科学的文献都集中在知识是如何在大陆之间产生和转移的，但PI探索了重要的知识体系从新大陆到欧洲的非转移。PI将在欧洲和加勒比地区的档案馆和图书馆开展工作，为包括STS工作人员以及植物学家和自然学家在内的广泛学术读者编写一本书。

Project AbstractProposal 0217605Colonial Botany: Gender, Politics, and Commerce between Europe and the West Indies in the Eighteenth CenturyLonda Schiebinger, Penn StateThe last several years have witnessed renewed interest in the history of botany, the "big science" of early modern Europe. This book-length project explores the movement, triumph, suppression, and extinction of different botanical knowledges in 18th century encounters between Europeans and the inhabitants of the Caribbean. The project has several purposes. First, it asks scholarly audiences to consider the cultural politics of plants. Plants rarely appear in undergraduate or graduate courses on European, American, World History or History of Science, and are rarely part of our grand narratives of war, peace, or even everyday life. But they are important cultural artifacts, often at the center of political and economic struggles. In the eighteenth-century, plants played a role in political struggles surrounding slavery (slave women, for example, employed abortifacients to resist producing more field hands for plantation owners). Plants also figured in battles between trading companies, states, and local bio-pirates for monopolies on profitable colonial commodities.Second, this project seeks to examine the linkage between colonial botany and gender relations. While gender has received some attention in the history of eighteenth-century anthropology and travel literature and in the history of slavery, it has received relatively little in the history of colonial botany. In this project, the PI explores how European gender relations guided naturalists as they explored other lands, peoples, and their knowledges. Third, this project contributes to rethinking the history of botany. A long-standing narrative has presented modern botany as the rise of taxonomy, nomenclature, and "pure" systems of classification. This approach does not capture the realities of botany in the eighteenth century as a matter of state. Emerging nation-states that vied for land and resources saw botanists who collected rare and beautiful plants for study and global exchange as crucial for European colonizing efforts in tropical climates. Fourth, this project seeks to develop further and apply a new methodological tool that Robert Proctor has called "agnatology"--the study of culturally-induced ignorances. Agnatology refocuses questions about "how we know" to include questions about what we do not know and why not. While much of the literature on colonial science has focused on how knowledge is made and transferred between continents, the PI explores the non-transfer of important bodies of knowledge from the New World to Europe.The PI will work in archives and libraries in Europe and the Caribbean to prepare a book, for a broad scholarly audience including those working in STS as well as botanists and naturalists.