This unit we discussed the role plants have, and how they affected certain societies (i.e. the European society). There were 3 arguments made in the Commodities and Networks lecture. The first being that commodities were vital in the construction and maintenance of the European empire. In other words, plants matter. The second being that global networks have local consequences (i.e. massive trade networks in sugar). In other words, scale matters. The third being that Europeans tended to systemize and reformulate names according to the European belief. This led to the categorization of new names to these plants, while erasing indigenous practices as well as their knowledge. This led to the importance of names. This occurred during the Enlightenment period, which can be referred to as the long eighteenth century. The individuals during the Enlightenment period were self-aware and participated in a social, intellectual, political, and cultural movement for two reasons. They had a new focus of reason and wanted to make better lives for themselves (rejected the way of ancient times) as well as the expansion in social and political engagement. The latter mentioned could open the floor to both men and women of different socioeconomic backgrounds. This caused science to change because men, and more specifically women, could communicate their results more easily and sort, name and rank the natural world (i.e. botanical gardens). For example, plants were sorted into three categories: materia medica (i.e medicinal uses), materia alimentaria (i.e the things we eat), and materia luxuria (i.e. silk). This lecture was meant for the class to realize that plants, scale, and names all matter.
This introduction allowed me to have a better understanding on the next lecture day where we discussed the power of names. The overview of this lecture was that naming things, like plants, is more complex than I had originally thought. Linnaeus proposed a system to name plants and animals because of the overwhelming amount of plants coming into the European culture. Also, more people were doing this kind of work, which led to more versions and names of plants/animals making it harder to consolidate all of the names. Linnaeus had three rules for his naming system. The first was that the names had to be in Latin. The theory behind this was that Linnaeus was only fluent in Latin so he considered it to be a universal language (even though it wasn’t). However, this excluded a large population of people who wanted to participate, but couldn’t (i.e women, middle class, indigenous individuals). Therefore, botanical Latin evolved making the names sound Latin even though they weren’t. The second and third being that it couldn’t refer to the use of plant, and it had to be named after a botanist. The problem with the second and third rule was that it took away from indigenous naming of plants, which gave helpful information about the plant.
In addition, the cochineal story about how Nicolas-Joseph Thiery de Menonville, the French botanist, was the most interesting story I learned in this unit. He disguised himself as a rich physician in order to enter Spanish borders, and bring back these beetles. It was interesting to me because this botanist could have faced serious consequences if caught stealing these beetles for their vibrant scarlet dye. However, the benefits outweighed the disadvantages because of several botanists’ three main goals. Their goals were to identify new plants in different territories, find substitutes for imports that governments may have gotten elsewhere, and transport and acclimate these in plants in different soils. I think it was interesting to see the lengths these botanists would go through to bring a plant back to its native land for cultivation. For example, M. de Cliex risked his own health by sharing the small portion of water he had with the coffee plant he was trying to bring back to the French Carribbean2.
Furthermore, I would like to discuss one of the case studies I read in this unit. It was a chapter taken from the book titled, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World written by Gregory Cushman. The chapter my group read was called “The Guano Age.” My group and I had difficulties in locating the author’s central argument at first. We decided that his central argument in this chapter was that Cushman deemed the Guano Age to be “the age of shit” because it wasn’t a miracle fertilizer like everyone thought it was1. He continued towards the end of the chapter to reveal to his readers that this fertilizer caused inequalities and division between classes as well as wars. Therefore, I think this case study relates to our class so well because of the one important recurring theme: political science. My interpretation of this argument was that Cushman wanted to point out that this resource is an underlying change of manure, and thought it was important to revive guano as an important key player in history. All three case studies had a lot of similarities that helped connect them together. The case study I was assigned to read along with the two chapters in Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution had an obvious connection. The cacao plants mentioned obviously needed fertilizer to grow and survive in a certain environment. The last case study called “Standard Cocoa: Transnational Networks and Technoscientific Regimes in West African Plantations” had political science as a theme, which was a theme also seen in my case study.
Overall, I thought this unit was interesting because of the information covered. I enjoyed reading the case study about the Guano Age the most because I never thought of researching the history of fertilizer, and how it was considered a miracle.