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Forgotten Botany: The Politics of Knowledge within the Royal Botanical Garden of New Spain **
Author(s) -
Toledano Anna
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
berichte zur wissenschaftsgeschichte
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1522-2365
pISSN - 0170-6233
DOI - 10.1002/bewi.202100001
Subject(s) - colonialism , empire , botanical garden , creole language , institution , politics , ideology , state (computer science) , servant , city state , history , ethnology , archaeology , political science , botany , biology , law , philosophy , linguistics , algorithm , computer science , programming language
Spanish naturalists established the Viceregal Botanical Garden of New Spain in Mexico City in 1788 to advance agriculture, manufacturing, and medicine. This colonial institution also served the ideological role of cultivating agents of empire. Rather than establish the garden in the already robust tradition of American botany, the Spanish appropriated this space, employing Creole students and servant workers to Europeanize local botanical knowledge through taxonomic colonialism. The different agendas at work in the botanical garden, which straddled the colonial and revolutionary periods in Mexico, destabilized not only this institution, but also the empire itself from the ground up. That the contributions of the agents of the garden have been forgotten is evidence of the fragility and failure of a European institution in the American colonial state.