Cultivating Power: Botany and Empire in the Dutch East Indies, 1745–1942

In Cultivating Power, Luthfi Adam delves into the history of the Buitenzorg Botanic Garden in Java, the center of world tropical research over the long nineteenth century. Buitenzorg took shape through the entanglement of forest and mountain ecologies, plant collection, laboratory practices, and skilled labor, as global scientific inquiry and colonial economic ambitions developed through one another. As Adam demonstrates, botany was never a neutral subject of study in the Dutch East Indies. Botanical theories, field excursions, and experiment stations helped colonial officials push cultivation into new terrains. Plant geography identified local altitude and microclimates as providing suitable conditions for introducing highland crops such as tea and cinchona. Darwinian experimental botany shaped efforts to understand disease and protect plantation economies. Cultivating Power shows empire as a spatial project that moved along a vertical axis, from coastal lowlands into upland forests, where land, labor, science, crops, and capital could be organized for extraction. At Buitenzorg, colonial botany cultivated power by extending the empire’s capacity to grow crops and extend scientific and administrative authority across lowland and highland terrains.