Kew’s Colonial Archive : A Plant Humanities Approach to the Caribbean Miscellaneous Reports, 1850-1928

University of Roehampton London 2024

This thesis examines the history of colonial botany in Jamaica as represented in the Miscellaneous Reports, an archival collection held at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which documents economic botany across the British Empire. This is the first sustained study of this collection, offering an analysis of the origins and function of these records which facilitated Kew’s colonial activity during its peak in the Caribbean in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Approaching the Miscellaneous Reports from a literary ecocritical and Plant Humanities perspective, this research centres on the cultural role of the plants represented in the collection. The first chapter examines the history and materiality of the Miscellaneous Reports collection itself and its transition from working documents to archival records within the administrative structures of Kew and the Caribbean botanical gardens. The chapters which follow address the different spaces of plant cultivation in Jamaica: gardens, forests, and plantations. The research identifies debates which appear across the collection about labour, race, and land use, Empire Forestry and deforestation, and the cultivation of food plants such as ackee in plantations and provision grounds. A central aim is to translate methods of literary ecocritical attention to plants into new methods to approach plants in botanical archival materials. Analysing the language used to describe plants in the collection can elicit and reveal the presence of marginalised people in colonial archives. This research uncovers the attitudes, narratives, and absences arising from the colonial origins of these records, incorporating materials beyond the archive, including literature and visual representations to contextualise these absences. It engages with methods of archival decolonisation to both acknowledge and expand upon the original contents of the Miscellaneous Reports. This thesis contributes to the developing field of Plant Humanities

Botanic gardens; Plant Humanities; colonial archives; ecocriticism; Caribbean; plants; Doctoral Thesis

Open access content. Open access content

English

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https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/studentTheses/02f5f12e-7d9e-4456-979d-90bc93698b5d
1472585432

ROEHAMPTON UNIV
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