Collecting photographs, constructing disciplines: the rhetoric and rationality of photographs at the Museum of Economic Botany (original) (raw)
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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...