Collecting photographs, constructing disciplines: the rhetoric and rationality of photographs at the Museum of Economic Botany (original) (raw)
The first Museum of Economic Botany opened in the grounds of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in 1847. Its purpose was to inform ‘not only the scientific botanist, but...the merchant, the manufacturer, the physician, the chemist, the druggist, the dyer, the carpenter and cabinet-maker, and artisans of every description’ of the variety of plant raw materials available in British territories and to suggest possible new applications for them. By 1910 it had grown to encompass four separate museum buildings. The Museum developed composite display modes consisting, not only of botanical specimens, but also ethnographic artefacts to demonstrate indigenous usages, and manufactures in various stages of preparation, known as ‘illustrative series’. It appropriated interpretative devices from the domestic, academic, and exhibitionary spheres, and these included models, illustrations, and photographs, which it began collecting in 1858. One of the Museum’s aims was to form economic botany as a discipline, long before the universities had shown interest in applied sciences. So while taxonomic botanists disdained the use of the new medium of photography, the Museum claimed it as its own and in doing so presented economic botany as the most modern of sciences. And nothing spoke more of modernity than the photo-micrographs it began acquiring in 1872 which were a source of wonder to Victorian audiences and must have positioned the Museum at the cutting edge of scientific discovery. At one level, photographs were evidently used to illustrate the living plant in its biogeographical context – to give an idea of its scale, its natural habitat, and its living appearance. This was important information for commercial growers interested in transplanting particular species into plantations within British colonial territories. Photographs were also used to demonstrate cultivation or production processes, often with several images in sequence. This again was practical knowledge, but it also worked at the meta-level. By representing the transformation of plant raw materials into finished goods via the application of British investment and colonial labour, the Museum was highlighting what Halford McKinder referred to as the ‘super-added characteristics due to British rule’. It was offering a narrative of process and progress. Photography thus played a key role in Kew’s imperial rhetoric of ‘improvement’, the same rhetoric which had been used to justify colonisation since the eighteenth century.
Nineteenth-century museums have long been recognized as sites for the formation of a range of disciplines from archaeology to art history. This formation process occurred, more often than not, in advance of attempts by universities to establish disciplinary boundaries and conventions. Taking the example of the Museum of Economic Botany at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, this article examines the process by which the field of knowledge known as economic botany was rendered as a discipline at Kew from the midnineteenth century. But as well as demonstrating the potential of museums to undertake such epistemological acts, by following the life of a particular object — the Tasmanian Timber Trophy — what also become clear are the limits of museums’ disciplinary authority. Keywords: economic botany, museum, discipline, international exhibitions, Kew Gardens, Tasmanian Timber Trophy
Curating Global Knowledge: The Museum of Economic Botany at Kew Gardens
The Museum of Economic Botany opened in the grounds of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in 1847. In 1840 the Kew estate had passed from the ownership of the royal family to the British government, and William Jackson Hooker became the first director of the new, publicly-funded Kew in 1841. The Museum was in many ways emblematic of this new order. Through the construction of networks, the collection grew such that by 1910 there were four separate museums, displaying ‘all kinds of useful and curious Vegetable Products’ and catering for not only the scientific botanist and a very general public, but also ‘the merchant, the manufacturer, the physician...and artisans of every description’. This paper examines the ways in which the Museum produced ‘global’ scientific knowledge in its spaces, through its practices, and across its networks. It looks at the model established to do this by William Hooker, a model which involved the juxtaposition of a number of elements not previously seen in the displays of natural history museums, and a model which relied in large part on a shared vision of science, industry and empire. Then, by reconstructing the ‘biography’ of a particular object – a model of an Indian indigo factory – from its origins in Krishnanagar, West Bengal to the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in South Kensington and thence to the Kew Museum of Economic Botany, it considers how the reality of knowledge production – its mechanisms – operated across the nineteenth-century ‘exhibitionary complex’. Beyond this, however, it considers the temporal, social and spatial contingency of meaning; how the intentions of museum directors and curators can fall victim to the particularities of an object’s locus and moment of display. Thirdly, it serves to emphasize the truly global nature of knowledge production at and by the Museum of Economic Botany. Global in terms of the impacts it was to have on British colonial territories and their economies, but global too as regards the reach of the networks across which the Kew Museum produced and exchanged knowledge. In doing so it puts paid to the notion of London as imperial metropolis, with knowledge travelling unilaterally from peripheries to centre, and demonstrates the multi-directional flow of objects, people, and ideas which served to produce global economic-botanical knowledge at Kew’s Museum.
Between Metropole and Province: circulating botany in British museums, 1870–1940
Archives of Natural History
Exchange of duplicate specimens was an important element of the relationship between metropolitan and regional museums in the period 1870–1940. Evidence of transfers of botanical museum objects such as economic botany specimens is explored for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and six museums outside the capital: Cambridge University Botanical Museum, National Museum Wales, Glasgow Museums, Liverpool World Museum, Manchester Museum and Warrington Museum. Botany became an important element in these museums soon after their foundation, sometimes relying heavily on Kew material as in the case of Glasgow and Warrington, and usually with a strong element of economic botany (except in the case of Cambridge). Patterns of exchange depended on personal connections and rarely took the form of symmetrical relationships. Botanical displays declined in importance at various points between the 1920s and 1960s, and today only Warrington Museum has a botanical gallery open to the public. However, bot...
Between Metropole and Province: circulating botany in British museums
Archives of Natural History, 2020
Exchange of duplicate specimens was an important element of the relationship between metropolitan and regional museums in the period 1870-1940. Evidence of transfers of botanical museum objects such as economic botany specimens is explored for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and six museums outside the capital in Cambridge, Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Warrington. Botany became an important element in these museums soon after their foundation, sometimes relying heavily on Kew material as in the case of Glasgow and Warrington, and usually with a strong element of economic botany (except in the case of Cambridge). Patterns of exchange depended on personal connections and rarely took the form of symmetrical relationships. Botanical displays declined in importance at various points between the 1920s and 1960s and today only Warrington Museum has a botanical gallery open to the public. However botanical objects are finding
2017
This is the second of a series of Working Papers produced as part of the Mobile Museum Project (www.royalholloway.ac.uk/mobilemuseum). It represents work in progress and is subject to further revision in the course of the project. We are happy to acknowledge the support of the AHRC (The mobile museum: economic botany in circulation-AH/N00941X/1), our partner museums-the British Museum and Pitt Rivers Museum-as well as other museums who have provided data and answered our queries, in particular Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow, and our fellow project team members. We would also to thank the Kew archivists and librarians, and Traude Gavin for sharing her knowledge on Iban textiles.
Kew Gardens and the Emergence of the School Museum in Britain, 1880–1930
The Historical Journal, 2019
The idea of the school museum as an active resource for object-based learning played an important but now neglected part in programmes of educational reform during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth. In this article we focus on the role of the Kew Museum of Economic Botany in supplying schools with botanical specimens and artefacts for their own museums during this period, to support a broad variety of curricular agendas, from nature study to geography and beyond. The evidence suggests that this scheme was remarkably popular, with demand among teachers for museum objects outstripping supply, and increasingly being met in other ways. Seen from the perspective of Kew, the distribution of specimens, artefacts, and visual materials to schools was a way of extending the ethos of economic botany into the classroom. For the teachers who requested specimens in large numbers, and the pupils who studied and handled them, however, such object...
Botanical Collections in Museums
2017
This dissertation aims to illuminate the role of botanical collections around the United Kingdom, seeking to understand their display and usage, as well as their presence and value within museums, society and science. From this study, it is hoped that botanical collections can be better understood and therefore displayed. It is also felt that this dissertation can be used to help current museum professionals know how their collections can be used and try to uncover what their future will be. A final aim of this paper is to provide information on the potential display of objects and specimens, which can be used to assist curators in the absence of dedicated natural history staff. As there is currently no comprehensive study on the display of botanical collections as a whole, this dissertation will close a gap in the literature that currently exists. The belief is that it is time to evaluate collections as a whole in an attempt to discern their future, especially at a time when their scientific importance is so valuable for research into global climate change and species loss. Research has been conducted by analysing literature, visiting collections and speaking with curators. From this research it was discovered that these objects and specimens could be well represented and displayed in museum exhibitions. But only 3 of the 20 museums investigated had substantial botanic exhibits. It was also found that there is a very strong scientific usage for these collections. Unfortunately, with the current dwindling interest in natural science, the future for these collections does not look good. It is the hope that this paper will be able to show the value of these collections and rekindle enough interest to save them for the future.
The centrality of the politics of display in botany and natural history are perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, London. Artists have played a key role in botanising, and in the transfer of botanical knowledge, not only as illustrators of the physical characteristics of botanical subjects, but also in advancing the ways that scientists (in this case study, those that study plant sciences at Kew) have understood, named, represented, categorised and related to plants.Highly sensitive, plants produce chemicals in response to touch, and to those in their immediate environment. For instance, orchids store their scents in pouches until they have need of them. Their colours entice the males into the ‘pleasures of pseudocopulation’ (Natasha Myers). This article is part of a series of investigations, see also my Botanical Drift book and recent lecture at HKW 'Orchidisms'.
The British Journal for the History of Science, 2017
Contributions come from several (mainly European) countries, and many different disciplines, including photography, physics, botany, chemistry, meteorology and oceanography. Just as diverse as the chapters' contents are the different kinds of home they deal with: the town house and the country house, whether aristocratic pile or suburban maisonette, but also inbetween spaces (bespoke laboratories in the home, as well as institutional laboratories meant to reflect the home, such as in Donald L. Opitz's chapter), and incorporating gardens as important parts of the extended domestic environment (as does Julie Davies). I particularly enjoyed many of the authors' evocative descriptions of the ways in which scientific practice took place at home, often using everyday objects such as bits of card and string. As Claire G. Jones shows in her chapter, it is clear that reorienting the term 'home-made' away from connotations of second-rate shabbiness and amateurism would be one important consequence of renewed attention to domestic environments. Considering the emotional as well as the practical work which took place in homes of different kinds, including by the famous inhabitants of Down House discussed by Paul White, similarly enables the writing of more historically nuanced and rounded accounts. Indeed, many essays demonstrate that a key component of domesticity is (and was) not just location but relationships, a significant complex of home-family-kinship-children-colleagues. These could be scholarly Enlightenment networks such as those described by Isabelle Lémonon; intergenerational relationships, such as the father-son focus of Staffan Bergwik's chapter; the uneasy coming together of family life and social policy depicted in Sven Widmalm's chapter; or the 'fictive kinship' forged in the academic workshop in Helena Pettersson's phrase and work. Such relationships, many of the chapters in this work show, were related to local and gendered identities, whether the 'global Indianness' of Aalok Khandekar's analysis, or the opportunity for the negotiation of gender identities through pulp fiction about newly domesticated wireless technologies, as Katy Price argues. These more dynamic constructions help present domesticity not just as a backdrop for certain kinds of enterprise, but also as an active means by which historical experimenters, authors, correspondents, students, 'citizen scientists' and more could reflect on and participate in creating many different kinds of scientific activity. Domesticity in the Making of Modern Science is, therefore, an important contribution to the historical geographies of scientific practice, to the history of professionalization, and to the history of family life. Given its range, some scholars might be interested in just one or two chapters which pertain most directly to their areas of interest, but read in its entirety it is a manifesto for reorienting scientific study, past and present. It urges scholars to reclaim the importance of the domestic space, knowledge and residents; and homemade objects, equipment and ideologies. As Alix Cooper advocates in a stirring afterword, the impulses behind this collection can be expanded both chronologically and geographically, to 'discern even broader patterns' (p. 284) and changing relationships between domesticity and the sciences across time and space. In historians' haste to emphasize the role of the laboratory, observatory, hospital or field site, this collection is an important reminder that, for many people, modern science began at home, and is itself a beginning of a new definition for what counts as domestic science.
Premises for exhibition and for use: King’s College London Museum, mid to late nineteenth century
2011
In 1841, Queen Victoria donated orphaned collections of her grandfather, King George III, to King's College London, England, as well as the College of Surgeons, the Armagh Observatory, and the British Museum. 1 Kew Observatory (Old Deer Park at Richmond, London) had housed these collections of insects, ancient agricultural implements, models of bridges, fossils, and other curiosities at public expense. 2 After the government discontinued maintenance of Kew, the collections needed a new home. Focusing on the royal gift, this article discusses changing attitudes towards the display of science as well as the role of science collections at King's College. In summer 1843, the college established the new King George III Museum. Object-based displays relected new exhibition techniques, but unpublished documents question the role of the museum in science education. his interpretation of the King George III Museum combines cultural and anthropological perspectives in the history of science and historic museology. King's College London Signiicance of the King George III Museum as science museum needs further elaboration. 3 Ludmilla Jordanova notes that the active role that museums of science and
Museum History Journal 'My dear Hooker': the botanical landscape in colonial New Zealand
Museum History Journal, 2020
From the 1860s, there was a flurry of activity around the natural sciences in colonial New Zealand, as the native flora of this place was collected, analysed, identified and classified. While males dominated the professional world of knowledge production in the recently established field of ‘serious’ scientific botany, the amateur field was populated by highly talented females, including Georgina Hetley and Sarah Featon. James Hector, first Director of Wellington’s Colonial Museum, was a keen botanist, and regularly communicated with ’My dear Hooker’, Joseph Dalton Hooker of Kew Gardens. Hector supported several scientific publications by males in the 1870s and 80s, yet his lack of support for locally produced works by females is notable. This paper investigates the networks that both supported and restricted female activity in this field. It will consider the contributions of female practitioners, highlighting that the life of a ‘flower painter’ occupied a liminal realm – never fully at home either in the world of science, or of art. It will imagine how different these women’s lives and careers may have been if they had been privileged to communicate with ’My dear Hooker’ and to receive letters addressed in turn to, for example, ’My dear Hetley’.