Forgotten Botany

The Politics of Knowledge within the Royal Botanical Garden of New Spain

Bibliographic Data

ID11306222
AuthorsAnna Toledano (0000-0001-5695-2500, History of Science Stanford University Department of History 450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 200 Stanford CA 94305-2024 USA, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume44
Issue2
Pages228-244
Publication date2021-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBerichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0170-6233 • E-ISSN: 1522-2365
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1002/bewi.202100001
PMID33956364
OpenAlexW3159334204
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited16

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

Archaeology · Biology · Botanical garden · Botany · City-state · Colonialism · Creole language · Empire · Ethnology · Ideology · Institution · Political science · Politics · Servant · State (computer science · Archaeology and Natural History · Botany, Ecology, and Taxonomy Studies · Ethnobotanical and Medicinal Plants Studies · History · Law · Philosophy

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