Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World

Natural History, April, 2005 by Laurence A. Marschall

Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World

by Londa Schiebinger Harvard University Press, 2004; $39.95

It is a measure of the richness of tropical biodiversity that even today, 500 years after Columbus's first voyage, much of the botanical resources of the Caribbean and its shorelines remain undocumented. Londa Schiebinger's scholarly study covers botanical exploration during what the author calls "the long eighteenth century": from the 1670s until about 1802. This was a period of dawning European recognition that the real treasures of the New World lay not in fabled cities of gold but in the vines, bushes, and flowers that crowded village gardens and grew in the jungles beyond.

There were fortunes to be made, clearly, in cultivating such indigenous species as chocolate, cotton, and vanilla for export, and in establishing imported rootstocks such as sugarcane and tea. But many of the most sought-after plants were the sources for what we today would call "herbal remedies."

The cinchona tree was, in effect, the key to all the other riches of the New World, because without it Europeans could not survive the debilitating fevers that seemed to strike everyone who ventured into the Americas. European powers regarded their sources of quinine and other drugs as virtual military secrets, and, since secrecy breeds countersecrecy, a subculture of "biospies" grew up in the colonies--shadowy souls who collected information on the herbal discoveries of competing nations.

Biopiracy, though it makes for exciting reading, is only a small part of Schiebinger's narrative. Most of the bio-prospectors she profiles were legitimate naturalists, driven by the collector's impulse to catalog and describe the exhilarating profusion they encountered. Schiebinger pays special heed to the work of Maria Sibylla Merian, who spent twenty-one months collecting in Surinam in 1699. Merian published a monumental volume of scientific drawings of the tropical insects of that country in 1705, but her accompanying text also recorded the medicinal uses of indigenous plants. For her information on medicines she relied heavily, it seems, on local informants, often noting that "they told me this themselves."

Among the useful plants her informants told her about was the red "peacock flower" (Poinciana pulcherrima), common throughout the Caribbean and South America. Slave women, according to Merian, used the flower to induce abortion. Then, as now, the practice was laden with emotion, but in those days it also resonated with issues of race and class, as well as religion and gender. To refuse to bear children, who were viewed only as a form of free labor to the slaveholder, was a particularly bitter form of social protest against the system that held the women in bondage.

P. pulcherrima, as can be imagined, found its way into European culture along a route rather different from that of other botanical remedies. The virtues of most new herbal drugs were widely transferred into the European pharmacopoeia. Not so the peacock flower. Numerous specimens crossed the ocean to the botanical gardens of Europe, and several authors, in addition to Merian, mentioned the medicinal use of the flower. Yet knowledge of the peacock flower and its use as an abortifacient remained confined, by and large, to the slave camps and backwoods villages of the New World colonies. Schiebinger's thoughtful study, then, sheds light not only on how new knowledge comes to be, but also on how some new knowledge comes to be ignored.