Vitrines of a Western ordering of nature in the service of colonial exploitation, the botanical gardens were mainly reduced models of empire, of which they also bring back the flaws and the discontinuities.
The banal character of a walk in a garden of plants quickly fades when reading Hélène Blais’s latest work. The wandering in these approval places constitutes one of the many entry points mobilized by the author, professor of contemporary history at the École normale supérieure-PSLto reveal the different functions of the gardens of Asian, African, and Caribbean colonial possessions of the European powers. They constitute places of knowledge which participate in the phenomenon of globalization of science in the XIXe century, as well as colonial domination in all its forms. The gardens feed an economic domination by the experimental role they occupy in the farm, while physically marking the colony of the colonizer’s imprint. Conceived as windows of the empires by their promoters, they are an ideal political and economic observation point. Hélène Blais provides readers with an impressive English -speaking bibliography on the colonial gardens which mainly treated British and Dutch empires, and more unequally the Portuguese, French and German possessions. Based on this effort of synthesis enriched by first-hand work on the French Empire and several British possessions, the gardens emerge as scholarly places whose material fragility reflects the discontinuous and non-hegemonic character of colonial domination.
Gardens, reduced models of colonial empires
By reconstructing a chronology of the creations of botanical gardens in the Empires, Hélène Blais first shows that they serve more and more political objectives. While certain creations in territories where the European presence is older at first testify to their scientific dimension as in Cayenne (Guyana, 1790) or Colombo (Sri Lanka, 1810), an increasing number of gardens is created immediately after the conquest of the territory, as in Algiers (1830), Saigon (Cochinchine 1856), or Porto-Novo (Dahomey, 1895). The geography and chronology of these gardens are a reflection of European imperial expansion, in particular in the second half of XIXe century, during which some older but abandoned gardens are sometimes taken over to serve as windows of colonization. This dynamic obeys a logic of classification, exhibition of an exotic environment and the know-how necessary to understand this colonial nature. Historian attentive to the notion of space, designed not as a simple framework in which societies evolve, but as the construction of the latter by means of cartographic knowledge in particular, Hélène Blais demonstrates that the gardens actively participate in the marking of a colonial territory by a European power.
The study of colonial gardens in this political perspective shows that they constitute a true reduced colonial society. Gardens thus import European botanical devices, such as Calcutta or Bangalore greenhouses, which sometimes prove to be unsuitable for the high temperatures of colonial spaces. The attention paid to the hands of works and to the audiences of the gardens makes it possible to illustrate their deeply unequal dimension, traveled by forms of racial and spatial segregation. Designed as exhibition spaces for the success of the colonial enterprise, but also for pleasure for colonial urban elites, the gardens are thus frequented by primary European audiences. As for the hands-of-the-way, they are sometimes servile, and the abolition of slavery in 1848 caused a shortage of labor which led to a degradation of the garden of plants from Saint-Pierre in Martinique (p. 315), accentuated structurally by budgets still deemed insufficient. At the scale of an empire, the gardens more widely reveal the spatial and political structure of the latter. If the budgets of a few gardens are substantial, almost all seem to suffer from a lack of endowments typical of the model of the “ cheap empire »(Denis Cogneau) European at XIXe And XXe centuries.
Colonial empires and global learned circulation
Beyond these common characteristics, the gardens show their great diversity. As such, the choice of a thematic structure to study places whose area varies from one hectare for the garden of Bingerville in Côte d’Ivoire at 240 hectares for the Kistenborsch botanical garden in CAP in South Africa is essential. It translates a comparative approach proven in imperial history. The British are distinguished with the establishment of a dense network of colonial botanical gardens. From the end of XVIIIe century, the royal gardens of Kew, south of London, received the plants taken by James Cook in the Pacific. In the middle of the following century, the institution coordinates the circulation of plants, botanical information, and staff between the new gardens established in colonial possessions. As for the Buitenzorg garden established on the island of Java in 1816, it constitutes, in the absence of a metropolitan royal garden, the real botanical center of the Dutch empire, remarkably funded by the metropolis.
These examples are permanent references for administrators and botanists in the French Empire. If the colonial gardens are sometimes as ancient as those of the British Empire, attempts to organize a network across the Empire date from the colonial expansion of the Third Republic. Created in 1899 with the support of the Ministry of the Colonies, the Botanical Garden of Nogent, near Paris, is designed as a central institution at the head of the colonial gardens, in the quest for better agricultural yields overseas. On the scale of European empires, this creation at the turn of XXe century also illustrates a moment of reconfiguring the functions of gardens which cease to be first of all scientific institutions. The economic function sometimes takes precedence over research, while other gardens like that of Cape Town (South Africa) are transformed into parks for the benefit of their approval function. During this period of readjustment, the Nogent garden certainly becomes a place of exhibition of the Empire in mainland France, but does not really manage to place itself at the head of a colonial botanical network. Unable to systematically acquire the laboratories, museums, libraries or greenhouses maintained over time, the French gardens bare at the same time a mass of institutional archives less substantial for the work of the historian.
This geographic, material and institutional diversity, allows at the same time a complementarity of experiments and cultures which constitutes the very support of learned botanist circulation. The transcentive scale shows “ Network gardens (P. 39) between which the exchanges of seeds and plants are structuring for the learned prestige of gardens, and more widely participate in the globalization of scientific circulation since and towards spaces located outside of European empires – which is also characteristic of a form of Western modernity. Created from the first years of the conquest in 1832, the Hamma botanical garden in Algiers quickly enters these networks, and exchange of plants with Chile in the middle of the XIXe century.
However, these circulation outside the European Empires do not dilute the colonial specificity of the studied gardens. The latter is certainly based on material criteria such as the methods of transport and conservation in particularly humid environments or the use of a servile colonized workforce, but it is above all supported by a political dimension. The gardens have imperial political ideologies, and aim, by the acclimatization of metropolitan plants in the colonies, to create the evocation of a distant Europe erected as a moral guide invested with a civilizing mission.
Put the global in its place ?
If some gardens are thus real “ nodal point Empires (p. 51), their unequal global insertion underlined in the book would perhaps more translate an interface role between local and global. For Hélène Blais, who claims an approach “ global social history (P. 6), the local distribution of seeds to cultivators from a utilitarian perspective to improve yields shows at the same time the circulation of the directors of the gardens behind these practices. About the Calcutta garden mobilized in the work, other works underline that this global dimension is partly staged by the gardens, in favor of a local orientation of the nurseries. The multiple functions of the gardens, however, make it possible to exceed this tension between global and local. Hélène Blais highlights the limits about the invisibility by European scientists of Aboriginal actors and knowledge in the development of scientific knowledge within universal scope (p. 206).
Consequently, the impossibility of gardens to produce a European science guiding colonized and colonists towards a moral, material, civilizational elevation, must be more widely related to the many failures of these colonial institutions. It is not a question of ignoring the attempts at successful acclimatization, some of which have also served directly the colonial conquest, starting with the culture of quinquin from which the quinine necessary for colonial armies is extracted. But there are very numerous renunciations from the last third of the XIXe century, which then decides with the economic ambition and the universality of speeches, and the directors of the colonial gardens must, for example, recognize the impossibility of cultivating cocoa, coffee or mango in Algeria.
The utilitarian dimension of gardens does not produce a “ Putting the tropics Who would be flawless. In terms of a now abundant literature on colonial empires, The Empire of Nature So makes it possible to think of the failures of colonial domination to better emphasize the intrinsic limits.