Mellon Fellow of Scholars in the Humanities, Stanford Humanities Center, Lecturer, Department of History, Stanford University.
Ber Wiss. 2021 Jun;44(2):137-158. doi: 10.1002/bewi.202100011. Epub 2021 Apr 23.
This essay examines the aims, labor regime, and workers of the St. Vincent botanic garden to highlight differences in the infrastructure of government-funded botany across the British empire. It argues that slavery was a foundational element of society and natural history in the Anglo-Caribbean, and the St. Vincent botanic garden was both put into the service of slavery and transformed by it. When viewed from the Caribbean context and the perspective of enslaved workers, the St. Vincent garden's affiliation with imperial improvement becomes less salient than its support of the status quo of slavery as a system and labor regime. The garden was dependent on enslaved laborers, yet the conditions of work and contemporary prejudices led superintendents to see them as undifferentiated labor. The politics of the archive make it impossible for historians to reconstruct the experiences of the garden's enslaved workers as individuals, including the specific labor that they performed or skills that they possessed. Plantation slavery's appropriation of and influence on the infrastructure of colonial botany through the St. Vincent botanic garden suggests that historians should center the local logics of the societies where scientific knowledge making took place to reveal the many meanings of science.
本文考察了圣文森特植物园的目标、劳动制度和工人，以突出英帝国政府资助的植物学基础设施的差异。本文认为，奴隶制是英属加勒比地区社会和自然历史的基础要素，圣文森特植物园既是奴隶制的服务对象，也是其变革的工具。从加勒比地区的背景和被奴役工人的角度来看，圣文森特植物园与帝国改良的联系不如其对奴隶制作为一种制度和劳动制度的现状的支持那么显著。该植物园依赖于被奴役的劳动者，但工作条件和当时的偏见使主管们认为他们是没有区别的劳动力。档案的政治性使得历史学家不可能重建该植物园被奴役工人的个人经历，包括他们所从事的具体劳动或拥有的技能。通过圣文森特植物园，种植园奴隶制对殖民植物学基础设施的挪用和影响表明，历史学家应该关注科学知识产生的社会的地方逻辑，以揭示科学的多种含义。
