Diplomatic Gifts and Counter-Gifts: Britain and the Muslim East, 16th to Early 20th Century

A one-day conference in person at the Centre for Diplomatic Archives, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, la Courneuve, Paris, 27 September 2022

As symbolic commodities circulating within and across cultures, gifts offer rich and multiple perspectives on the conduct of international diplomacy and its corollary cross-cultural transactions. Taking as our focus diplomatic relations between Britain and the three Muslim systems of the Ottomans, Persians, and Mughals over a period ranging from early contacts in the 16th century to the high age of the British empire, we wish to map out the shifts of paradigms and the redefinitions of circuits of allegiance and power through objects over the longue durée. Our comparative approach will cover the three Maussian stages of the giving, receiving, and reciprocating of gifts, as we aim at identifying cultural agreements and disagreements across different systems and contexts over diplomatic gifts and the bonds which they create or disrupt. Particular attention will be paid to the rhetoric and protocol of hierarchy and/or reciprocity in gifts, their metonymic value and its possible repurposing in a changing context, as well as the legal and political personalities of the actors in charge of the transactive process and their various relations to the polities involved.

Organising committee (LARCA, Université Paris Cité): Marine Bellégo, Daniel Foliard, Ladan Niayesh, Stéphanie Prévost

Cadeaux et échanges diplomatiques: Ententes et mésententes entre la
Grande-Bretagne et l’Orient musulman (XVIe-début XXe siècle)

Journée d’études en présentiel, au Centre des archives diplomatiques,
Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, la Courneuve, Paris
27 septembre 2022

En tant que biens symboliques circulant au sein et entre les cultures, les cadeaux offrent des perspectives riches et multiples sur la conduite de la diplomatie internationale et des transactions interculturelles qui en relèvent. En nous concentrant sur les relations diplomatiques entre la Grande-Bretagne et trois systèmes politiques de l’Orient musulman (Ottomans, Persans, Inde moghole) sur une période allant des premiers contacts au XVIe siècle jusqu’à l’âge d’or de l’empire britannique, nous souhaitons cartographier les changements de paradigmes et la manière dont les circuits d’allégeance et de pouvoir se redéfinissent à travers les objets sur la longue durée. Notre approche comparative entend couvrir les trois étapes maussiennes du don, de sa réception, et du contre-don, pour identifier les accords et désaccords culturels entre différents systèmes et contextes autour des cadeaux diplomatiques et des liens qu’ils tissent ou qu’ils défont. Une attention particulière sera portée à la rhétorique et au protocole de hiérarchie et/ou de réciprocité rendu possible par les cadeaux, leur valeur métonymique et sa possible redéfinition dans un contexte nouveau, ainsi que les personnalités juridiques et politiques des acteurs en charge du processus transactionnel et leurs liens divers aux États.

Comité d’organisation (LARCA, Université Paris Cite): Marine Bellégo, Daniel Foliard, Ladan Niayesh, Stéphanie Prévost

diplomatic_gifts_programme

An illuminated letter, written by the calligrapher Edward Norgate and dated 9 July 1621, from James I to the Ottoman sultan Osman II, announcing the appointment of Sir Thomas Roe as ambassador to the Porte and the recall of his predecessor Sir John Eyre. Source : https://www.soas.ac.uk/gallery/bridge/.

A Royal Warrant dated 10 March 1631 mentions Edward Norgate, one of the clerks of the Signet Extraordinary as having “for many years been employed in preparing for the Royal signature letters to the Emperor and Patriarch of Russia, the Grand Signor, the Great Mogul, the Emperor of Persia, and Kings of Bantam, Macassar, Barbary, Siam, Acheen, Fez, Sus, and other remote kings and princes”.[1] This rather long description makes it clear that diplomatic correspondence with “remote kings and princes” was a matter of specific artistic concern and care. From 1661 onwards, the garnishing of “letters to eastern princes” even became an official appointment.[2] Such discriminate treatment may be due to the fact that “England’s relations with Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Asia were established primarily to further the interests of its merchants. The exchange of royal letters was crucial to the maintenance of such relations; little wonder that establishments such as […] the East India Company, were asked to contribute to the cost of embellishing these missives”.[3]

In 1593, already, we know from the Khasseki Safiye that Elizabeth I had sent her a “special letter, full of marvels, whose paper was more fragrant than pure camphor and ambergris and its ink than finest musk, notifying indescribable and immeasurable consideration and love […].”[4] The Sultana’s lavish description of Elizabeth’s letter immediately and tellingly follows her account of the gifts she received. The fragrant and colourful missive served as a complement and addition of sorts to the gift-giving ceremony.[5] The multi-sensory impression made by the letter mattered as greatly as the words it bore, whose own impact depended upon the mediation of an interpreter.[6] Later beautifully illuminated letters, such as the ones sent by James I to Sultan Ahmed I on 17 January 1617[7], to Sultan Osman II on 9 July 1621[8] or to Emperor Abbas of Persia on 14 February 1622,[9] testify to the ongoing artistic value of diplomatic correspondence with the East. Although the one Elizabethan example I have given above is rather exceptional, thereby confirming the fact that “some letters were more like gifts than others”, such later “exquisitely limned letters were often works of art in their own right”.[10]

Rather significantly enough, the limners who ornamented the English monarch’s letters were sometimes also versed in the art of portrait miniatures, which circulated widely in diplomatic negotiations and are known to have played a significant part in Elizabeth’s own relation with Safiye and Thomas Roe’s negotiations with Jahangir, among others.[11] The flourished vellums[12] of diplomatic correspondence showcased techniques and materials near-identical to those used by limners of precious “pictures in small”, (including the use of liquid gold, precious pigments, watercolour and bodycolour). Edward Norgate’s Miniatura or the Art of Limning, even features a vast array of recipes which could have been used by limners of both letters and portraits in small volume.[13] Portrait miniaturists were then in fact still known as “limners” (the word “miniature” having entered the English language in this sense rather late in the 17^th century): not only did they share a name, techniques and materials with embellishers of “patents and commissions of embassadours”,[14] but also equally contributed to asserting the agency of limners in extra-European diplomatic negotiations.[15]

[1] “East Indies: March 1631.” Calendar of State Papers Colonial, East Indies and Persia, Volume 8, 1630-1634. Ed. W Noel Sainsbury. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1892. 125-141. British History Online. Web. 18 May 2022. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/colonial/east-indies-china-japan/vol8/pp125-141.

[2] “The writer, flourisher and embellisher of letters to eastern princes was appointed by lord chamberlain’s warrant to the gentlemen ushers, daily waiters. He received a fee of £10 a document until Anne’s reign, when a salary was established of £60 per annum at the treasurer of the chamber’s office.””Salaired tradesmen: Other.” Office-Holders in Modern Britain: Volume 11 (Revised), Court Officers, 1660-1837. Ed. R O Bucholz. London: University of London, 2006. 384-390. British History Online. Web. 18 May 2022. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/office-holders/vol11/pp384-390.

[3] Carlo M. Bajetta (ed.), Elizabeth I’s Italian Letters, 1533-1603. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, p. 252.

[4] Lines 15-19 of a letter in Turkish from the Khasseki Safiye to Queen Elizabeth, written in the first decade of Rabi I, 1002/25 November-4 December 1593, translated into English by S. A. Skilliter, “Three Letters from Şāfiye to Elizabeth I”, in S. M. Stern (ed.), Documents form Islamic Chanceries. Oxford, Bruno Cassirer, 1965, p. 119-158, p. 132. The letter is now property of the British Library, London, Cotton MS Nero B. viii, f. 41.

[5] “In relations with non-European powers, royal letters were most commonly delivered at an audience in which a gift was also presented. This gift had often been paraded through the city in which the court was based before being processed through the royal compound to (and even past) the ruler. In such contexts the gift was calculated to convey the wealth of the English monarch and as a sign of the prestige with which they viewed the ruler to whom it was sent. A relatively bare letter, even one with silk threads, would have seemed incongruous when juxtaposed with such gifts”.

[6] Tellingly enough, most accounts tend to confirm that the original letter was presented before its translation. This is the case in Thomas Roe’s description of his presentation of James’s letter to Jahangir, for instance: “After many Complements, I vsed some words to him, deliuering his Majesties letter and showing my Commission, the Coppy wherof (I meane the letter) I then also deliuered in Persian […]” (Letter to the East India Company dated 25 January 1615), in Frederick Charles Danvers (ed.), Letters Received by the East India Company from its Servants in the East. London, S. Low, Marston & co., 1896, p. 10.

[7] Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. hist. b. 172, fol. 57.

[8] The letter can be seen here: https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-1837964.

[9] London, British Library, India Office Records and Private Papers. IOR/A/1/7B.

[10] Tracey A. Sowerby, “Negotiating with the Material Text”, in Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood (eds.), Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World. Oxford, Oxford University press, 2019, p. 203-219, p. 218.

[11] About portraiture ‘(including portrait miniatures) and diplomacy, see Tracey A. Sowerby, “‘A Memorial and a Pledge of Faith’: Portraiture and Early Modern Diplomatic Culture.” The English Historical Review, vol. 129, no. 537, 2014, p. 296–331. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24473825. Accessed 19 May 2022. About Elizabeth’s gift of a portrait miniature to the sultana, see Richard Wrag’s account, “A Description of a Voiage to Constantinople and Syria, begun the 21. of March 1593. and ended the 9. of August, 1595,” in Richard Hakluyt’s  Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 12 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehouse and Sons, 1904), 6:94-118, 94. About Jahangir and Roe, see Anne-Valérie Dulac, “Miniatures between East and West: The Art(s) of Diplomacy in Thomas Roe’s Embassy”, Études Épistémè [Online], 26 | 2014, DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme.343. William Segar and Edward Norgate are perhaps the most prominent examples of limners who excelled in both the limning of letters and portrait miniatures.

[12] The use of vellum rather than paper was yet another distinguishing feature of letters to “remote kings”. It was also best suited to travelling and changing weather conditions.

[13] The history of this treatise (which survives in two version, one in manuscript form and a later one which was intended for printing) can be read in Jeffrey Muller and Jim Murrell’s introduction to their edition of Norgate’s Miniatura or the Art of Limning (c. 1627–8, then 1648), ed. by Jeffrey Muller and Jim Murrell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). About Norgate’s contribution to “limning” and the dissemination of terminology and techniques, see Anne-Valérie Dulac, “Miniatures in Translation: Words for a Gentle Art”, in Laetitia Sansonetti and Rémi Vuillemin (eds.), Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England. Translation, Transmission, Transfer. Turnhout (Belgium), Brepols, forthcoming, p. 273-292.

[14] I am here quoting from John Fuller’s concise biography of Edward Norgate in The History of the Worthies of England: “[Norgate] became the best Illuminer or Limner of our age, employed generally to make the Initial letters in the Patents of Peers, and Commissions of Embassadours, having left few heirs to the kind, none to the degree of his art therein.” (London: Printed by J.G.W.L. and W.G. for Thomas Williams1662, p. 161)

[15] See Maija Jansson, Art and Diplomacy: Seventeenth-Century English Decorated Royal Letters to Russia and the Far East. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, Leiden, Brill, 2015. About limners/miniaturists see chapter 4 “Limners, Printers and Embellishers”, p. 55-67.

In the first instalment of this blog, Ladan Niayesh identifies two key terms derived from Persian and Arabic that were first used by Europeans in the early modern period to refer to types of gift given and received during their encounters with Eastern courts. First, peshkash, a present made to a ruler in recognition or anticipation of a privilege to be granted, for example a new appointment. Second, khilat, a gift presented by a ruler or another ‘acknowledged superior’ to someone of a lower rank, closely associated with the public display of authority and munificence.

            Both types of gift were important to the English East India Company’s exchanges with Mughal authorities in India from the outset, as Thomas Roe’s visit to the court of Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605-27) shows. Arriving in December 1615 in the north Indian city of Ajmer, where Jahangir’s court was then based, Roe’s aim was to secure permission to trade for the Company, which had been founded in 1600. Though not the first Englishman at Jahangir’s court – several representatives of the Company had already been received by the emperor – Roe’s visit signalled the intensification of English diplomatic efforts towards the Mughals; serving as ambassador to King James I, his arrival at Jahangir’s court marked the beginning of direct diplomatic relations between the English and Mughal thrones.[i]

            A few days after his arrival at Ajmer, while still recovering from the arduous journey across land from Surat, Roe was summoned before Jahangir. Gifts of an English horse-drawn coach, a scarf and a sword were presented to the emperor, before Persian translations of King James’ letters to him were read. At a second audience a few weeks later, Roe then presented Jahangir with an English-made clock. For reasons which we will explore below, closely related to the role of gifts in diplomatic relations, the English request for trading rights in Mughal territories was not immediately granted. Roe was forced to spend the next three years at Jahangir’s court, during which time he also presented the emperor with a miniature by the celebrated miniature portrait artist Isaac Oliver, before an imperial edict (firman) confirming English trading rights was finally secured.[ii] By this point, the gift-giving had been reciprocated, Jahangir presenting Roe with a gold cup inset with rubies and emeralds. During his stay at the Mughal court, Roe was also gifted one or two of the emperor’s horses and presented with copies of Oliver’s miniature that Jahangir had requested his court artists to produce.

            Important in these exchanges were not just, of course, the items gifted but the processes of their giving and reception, which were rich in symbolism and ceremony. Roe presented his gifts to Jahangir in the emperor’s audience chamber (durbar), where visitors were usually received, Jahangir looking down on his guests from a throne on an elevated platform, surrounded by members of his court. The later performance of khilat, when Roe was presented with the gold cup, involved the conferring on the Englishman of a golden cloak lifted from Jahangir’s shoulders, a ceremony denoting the acceptance and integration of Roe into the Mughal polity on the part of its highest authority.

What emerges most clearly from the English sources relating to Roe’s stay at the Mughal court, however, is an understanding of gift-giving and receiving as transactional; gifts were considered not as disinterested offerings made through largesse but as contributions towards specific ends, sometimes even as a form of payment. What was gifted was ultimately more important than the processes of giving and reception and what they signified. At Ajmer, Roe worried that the gifts that the English crown had asked him to present to Jahangir – notably the horse-drawn coach – were insufficient to impress the emperor and decided to add the scarf, the sword and later the miniature from his personal possessions, hoping that the latter would pique Jahangir’s curiosity and be appreciated for its rarity.[iii] In parallel, he lamented that he had nothing to offer other influential members of Jahangir’s court, including the empress, Nur Jahan. Roe was right to be concerned. Jahangir, we are told, accepted the presents courteously, and later made use of the coach, but decided that Roe’s presents were insufficient, asking the Portuguese Jesuits at his court why, if the King of England was a great monarch, he had ‘sent presents of so small value’ and letting it be known that what he really expected was some jewels.[iv] By requesting his court artists to make copies of the miniature, the emperor indicated to Roe that the artwork was not so rare or interesting after all, and demonstrated that his artists were equal or superior in talent to their European counterparts.[v] 

To make matters worse, embassies from the Portuguese at Goa and the Safavid dynasty of Persia arrived at Ajmer in early 1616, bearing much more impressive gifts than those that Roe had been able to produce. The Portuguese embassy was a particular problem, given that its object was to dissuade Jahangir from permitting English trade in the Mughal Empire. Before long, Roe was admitting defeat, reporting to the Company’s directors in London that, faced with Portuguese competition, ‘articles of treaty on equal terms I cannot effect; want of presents disgraced me.’[vi] Only with the arrival of a new English fleet at Surat in the final months of 1616, carrying more gifts for Jahangir, did the situation change, renewing hopes of a formal contract with the emperor. When the English delegation transporting these gifts arrived at Ajmer, however, Jahangir reportedly broke with protocol by taking possession of them without first summoning Roe to an audience. The emperor then insisted on keeping all the new objects from England for himself, including presents destined for other members of court, velvet and silk intended for sale, and a hat meant for Roe himself! It was in the diplomatic fall-out from this incident that permission for trade was finally secured, leading Roe, who had at first been angered by Jahangir’s breach of protocol, to conclude that, if the emperor kept his promises, he was ‘happily robbed’.[vii]  

For his part, Roe was not immune to diplomatic faux pas either, suggesting a degree of incomprehensibility on both sides. During his stay at Ajmer the English ambassador had little patience for the intricacies of Mughal court ceremony, seeing for example in the exaggerated servility of the Persian envoy towards Jahangir something undignified. When Jahangir offered him the golden cup, his first reaction was to refuse it, responding that ‘all he desired was that his countrymen, the English, might have a free, safe, and peaceable trade in his dominions.’[viii] Such a response reveals Roe’s lack of understanding of khilat: the ambassador did not realise that by offering a gift to Roe, accompanied by the symbolic conferral of the cloak from his own back, Jahangir was confirming his acceptance of the Englishman – and by extension of all Englishmen – in the Mughal polity. Preoccupied by his conception of the gift-as-transaction (or payment), usually from an inferior towards a superior, Roe failed to comprehend the meaning of the present that Jahangir offered. Only once the misunderstanding was cleared up, and assurances offered that a firman granting trading privileges would follow, were the cup and symbolic conferral of the cloak accepted.

Throughout his time at Ajmer, peshkash remained a more consistent preoccupation to Roe than khilat. Informed by his experiences at the Mughal court, Roe concluded that jewels, swords, knives, works of art, furniture and wine were all presents likely to win favour with Indian rulers. Quality of workmanship was important, he suggested, along with the novelty of the objects gifted. Above all, however, it was the perceived material value of gifts that mattered. To ensure the future of the English company in India, presents would have to be given generously and regularly, not just to the emperor but to his governors in each region of the empire where trade was conducted. ‘It is the custom to change the governors here every year,’ Roe cautioned. ‘New humours must be daily fed; and presents are here expected as due as the king’s customs.’[ix]  

As historians have established, repeated demands for gifts and payments to preserve trading privileges were, by the late seventeenth century, one of the key sources of antagonism between European and Mughal parties in India, provoking war between the English East India Company and the Mughals in the 1680s and contributing to the English decision to establish de facto control over parts of the Mughal Empire, most notably the province of Bengal, in the following century.[x] In this sense, the significance of peshkash to changing European-Mughal relationships of power is understood. In contrast, instances of khilat, in which gifts were offered by ruling authorities to their inferiors, merit further research – not least as, after 1750, Mughal structures of authority were undermined, and relationships of power between Mughal authorities and Europeans turned on their head.

[i] English archival material relating to Roe’s embassy, including the ambassador’s journal and letters, was collected together and published as W. Foster (ed.), The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615-1619 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1899). The spelling and capitalisation of extracts quoted below has been modernised for ease of understanding.

[ii] On the miniature and its significance, see A. V. Dulac, ‘Miniatures between East and West: The Art(s) of Diplomacy in Thomas Roe’s Embassy’, Études Épistémè, 26, 2014 (https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme.343). Accessed 3 June 2022.

[iii] Dulac, ‘Miniatures between East and West’

[iv] Foster (ed.), Embassy, vol. 1, p. 119. Unfortunately, the Jahangirnama, the key Persian chronicle of Jahangir’s reign, makes no reference to Roe’s embassy. For Jahangir’s actions and views, we are therefore forced to rely on the English sources.  

[v] Dulac, ‘Miniatures between East and West’

[vi] Foster (ed.), Embassy, vol. 2, p. 346.

[vii] Foster (ed.), Embassy, vol. 2, p. 384.

[viii] Foster (ed.), Embassy, vol. 1, pp. 256-7.

[ix] Foster (ed.), Embassy, vol. 1, p. 94.

[x] See R. Ivermee, Hooghly: The Global History of a River (London: Hurst, 2020), pp. 70-88.   

Botanical things are commonly used as gifts: ornamental plants can easily be turned into presents, terrariums in glass bottles have become fashionable objects to bring to a birthday party, and offering cut flowers remains a codified way of expressing various feelings ranging from compassion to love. In a much more mundane way, the colonial officers who ran imperial botanic gardens in the 19^th century commonly used plants and plant-derived products as gifts in their daily professional activity. The small-scale gift economy on which the naturalist community relied, however, contrasted sharply with the large-scale production of plant commodities (tea, opium, cinchona, etc.) meant to be sold at a good price on the global market, an entreprise to which botanical gardens were expected to contribute. By examining the circulation of botanical objects produced by colonial gardens, one can explore the ambiguous status of the plants and plant-derived products that were offered, exchanged and sold within colonial networks of trade and science in the late 19^th century.

Imperial authorities funded botanical institutions, such as the Calcutta garden which was one of the most important gardens of the British Empire, investing them with a mission to improve the imperial economy by encouraging profitable trade¹ . During the last three decades of the 19^th century, for example, the Department of Agriculture of the Government of Bengal strongly encouraged the officers in charge of the Calcutta garden to focus as much as possible on ‘economic botany’ through experiments in acclimatizing, growing and processing profitable species such as tea, opium, rubber or cinchona. Opium, cultivated in the plains of Bihar by peasants who were forced to give up their existing cultures, and then sold mainly to China, became one of the most lucrative commodities for British capitalists in the 19^th century.²) Several studies have explored the links between exploitative economic systems, which relied on underpaid human labour, and the plant transfers organized by imperial powers³ . It is therefore interesting to focus on the ways in which scientific practices that took place in such gardens were purposedly kept out of financial transactions.

Gifts and exhanges were central to the practical and symbolic economy that enabled the scientific functioning of cross-imperial networks, of which botanic gardens were important elements⁴ . Colonial gardens hosted herbaria, namely collections of dried plant specimens that were used for the description and identification of species. The ‘discovery’ of new species was at the heart of what colonial botanists considered to be their scientific mission. In order to find and obtain specimens, the gardens’ directors often relied on the unpaid labour of amateur naturalists stationed in various regions and with whom they corresponded⁵ . The work of these amateurs was motivated by friendship and collegiality as well as by a search for  prestige and recognition. George King, the director of the Calcutta garden, congratulated himself on his friendship with a colonel named Collett who sent him many interesting specimens from Burma and Assam. ‘It’s a pity that there are no more soldiers than Collett’, he wrote in 1890 to the director of Kew Gardens, near London.⁶

In order for a herbarium to function and for collections to be used and compared, plant specimens had to be made both accessible and mobile. Once a particular species was discovered or when plant collections were arranged, duplicates were sent to other botanical institutions and no money was ever expected in return. The same was true of living specimens of plants sent from one garden to another, which were meant to contribute to the ornamental or pedagogical dimension of other gardens. Even the nautical transportation of living plants in Wardian cases (boxes made of wood and glass) was kept outside the monetary sphere. The large-scale transport of plants depended on a system of favours between botanists and ship captains, who were often allowed to pay themselves in nature (literally) by eventually appropriating some of the plants they took in charge.

One particular file of the Calcutta garden’s archives bears witness to the fact that gifts and exchanges contributed to define the scientific identity of colonial botanists. Since the 1890s, the Calcutta garden published a prestigious scientific periodical, the Annals. In 1909, the Bengal administration started to object to the cost of these bi-annual volumes, which they deemed excessive. The director of the garden explained that such financial matters could hardly be an obstacle: ‘When the governement sanctioned the establishment of these Annals […] it was decided that, although a few extra copies might be printed so as to be obtained by purchase, it was contrary to the object of Government to treat the issue of volumes of the series as a commercial speculation.’ He added that the cost of these publications was in fact minimal, considering all the periodicals that the garden was sent in exchange for those volumes, and concluded that the government should regard the Annals as a ‘remunerative investment’.⁷ The financial argument was of course strategic when dealing with the colonial administration, but the director’s main point was the centrality of gifts and exchanges in scientific botanical practice. Sending seeds, plants, specimens and books to similar institutions, without any monetary counterpart, was primarily a matter of prestige and scientific reputation.

Within colonial botanic gardens and around them, the tension between the realm of economic profit and the sphere of collaborative scientific exchange manifested itself through the vexed question of the free distribution of seeds and plants. Colonial botanic gardens were public institutions and one of their initial roles was to spread the culture of useful plants in environments where they did not grow spontaneously. This enterprise was integral to the imperial rhetoric of improvement and civilization. The tabular annexes to the Calcutta garden annual reports show that the distribution of plants and seeds was one of its main missions: in the 1860s, hundreds of thousands of young plants were sent each year to prisons, hospitals, offices, train stations, municipal parks and gardens, official buildings and monuments, and even individuals. As local nurseries began to develop, however, this free distribution began to be seen as unfair competition by Indian nurserymen. The free distribution of plants therefore became limited, in theory, to ‘public purposes’. Files from the archives show that this principle was difficult to apply, because the Calcutta garden’s officers in charge of sending plants had a rather accomodating conception of what a ‘public purpose’ meant. Any British person who lived or had lived in India could be seen as serving or having served the colonial mission and therefore receive plants as a matter of ‘public interest’. In 1911, when a retired Bengal chaplain wrote from to Calcutta from Loughton, in Essex, to receive ‘very small quantities’ of local varieties of roses for his garden, he was sent the seeds freely and was even exempted from paying the post charges.⁸

Regulating the giving and sending of plants was a complicated matter, not only because rules were open to various interpretations but also because the behaviour of individual botanists and gardeners was often unpredictable. A close reading of the archives show for example that many young gardeners who stayed in the Calcutta garden as ‘probationer gardeners’ often fell victims to psychological illnesses. Alcoholism was widespread among them. In 1883, a probationer gardener named James Craig, in one particular ethylic bout, offered numerous and precious orchids from the garden to a London collector who worked for a private nursery. He was later dismissed for ‘drunken behavior’.⁹

One of the functions of the gift economy that prevailed among naturalists was to distinguish the scientific sphere from the merely economic one. However, the case of the Calcutta botanic garden shows that the two realms were far from being hermetically separated. Whatever the efforts of naturalists to define scientific credit through a collective gift system independent from trade, colonial botanic gardens remained institutions designed to serve the economic interests of imperial capitalists.

Marine Bellego

1. Lucile H. Brockway, 1979, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens, New York, Londres,Toronto : Academic Press [↩]
2. See for example the novel Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh (2008 [↩]
3. Richard Drayton, 2000, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World, New Haven, Londres : Yale University Press ; John Tully, 2011, The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber, New York : Monthly Review Press. [↩]
4. Thérèse Bru, 2017, Circulations scientifiques : les naturalistes et leurs données entre les mondes britannique et français, 1700-1836, Thèse de doctorat, Université Paris 8. [↩]
5. Dominique Juhé-Beaulaton et Vincent Leblan (dir.), 2018, Le spécimen et le collecteur : savoirs naturalistes, pouvoirs et altérités (XVIII^e – XX^e siècle), Paris : Museum d’Histoire Naturelle. [↩]
6. Kew Gardens, DC/156/848, 6^th October 1890. [↩]
7. Acharya Jagadich Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden, Uncatalogued archives, ‘Annals of the Royal Botanic Gardens’. [↩]
8. Acharya Jagadich Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden, Uncatalogued archives, ‘Seeds sent to retired Bengal chaplain’. [↩]
9. Kew Gardens, DC/156/614, 8^th May 1883 [↩]