Medicine and Botany in the Making of Madras, 1680–1720

Abstract

Over the last fifty years, historians of science and medicine have demonstrated that natural knowledge was central to the process of early modern European expansion. Networks of botanical gardens, plant collectors and plantations eventually aided European powers in increasing their control over colonial territories by using exotic plants as food, medicine and valuable articles of trade.1 However, with some exceptions, such studies have emphasized the importance of European capitals and the scientists working within them as what Bruno Latour calls ‘centres of calculation’.2 While the role of colonial collectors, naturalists, doctors and surgeons working on the ground is recognised by Latour and others, their immediate contexts have often been neglected and their interests in collecting subordinated to those of the metropolitan collector.3 However, the activities that made up the ‘scientific revolution’: the assiduous collection and detailed study of natural objects, the amassing of libraries and ‘repositories’ of curiosities and books of dried plants, the exchange of information through networks of scholarly correspondence and the formulation of theories about the natural world also took place in colonial settlements and outposts. Furthermore, each settlement was embedded within webs of local and international connections and the collection and deployment of natural knowledge had immediate political consequences on the ground as well as distant ones in Europe.