224. Empire in Your Garden

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0:28Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Durrumpel. And we are once more joined by Satlam Sengher, author of Empire World, How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe. His paperback is out right now. If you want to, you know, go and get it. I mean, if you want to, you just have to. It's a great, great book. It's really interesting. And it's taught us a few things as well, just chatting to him in the last episode. Just before we sort of launch ourselves on something that is more miserable, which is something you touched on in the last part, Satlam, about the classification of plants.

1:03Linnaeus. I mean, I actually didn't realise also classified human beings. Just remind people who may not have listened to the last episode of what Linnaeus did. I think a little recap of that would be interesting. Yeah, Linnaeus was a prominent botanist of the 18th century. He created the modern system of classifying plants and organisms, crucially, because he classified plants in this very clever way. But he put humans into the classifications according to their geographic origin and skin colour, decided that Europeans were great, Africans were crafty and indolent. And this is the way in which botany helped to reinforce imperial racism.

1:40And it's a deeply controversial subject. This kind of classification is a real thing. I mean, when I did Patient Assassin, I was talking about Sir Michael O'Dwyer, who was the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab at the time. He loved classifying people like plants. And he went through the different sort of tribes, as he called them, of the Punjab and gave them all sorts of like sort of three line and none of them really very lovely. I mean, I think there were sort of two sets of people he quite endured and the rest, you know, they drink too much, they fall over, they're crafty, you know, all of those kind of words, but they were presented just like the biology classifications I studied at school.

2:18So it is a real mode of thinking that you put people in boxes like you put plants in boxes. And it continues now. It shapes because those people decided, for example, that certain people were martial races, including Sikhs. As you can tell from our physiques, we're not. Speak for yourself. I could have you. I could have you in a fight. But it's such a powerful idea that a lot of these people, like the Punjabi Sikhs, still see themselves as a martial race. And they're not. They're just people. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There was a book published in 1868 called The People of India.

2:52And it is an enormous, great sort of ethno-biological study. And it contains photographs of all the different castes and tribes of South Asia, ranging from Tibetans and Aboriginals, right through to the doms of Bihar. It is sort of, you know, to our ears, completely and astonishingly racist. The image with the label, the Mohammedan, it is illustrated by a picture of an oligarch labourer who's given the following caption. His features are peculiarly Mohammedan and exemplify in a strong manner the obstinacy, sensuality, ignorance and bigotry of his class. It is hardly possible perhaps to conceive features more essentially repulsive.

3:36Now that's a direct quote from this and it goes on every single ethnic and tribal group in the subcontinent over a number of volumes. Yeah, and it talks a lot about caste identity, It reinforces caste identity. You know, this is what these people are like. And again, you put somebody in a box, then it's very hard to get out of the box. That's exactly the reason Kew Gardens is full of all these samples. It's the same reason why the British Museum has so many human remains because the Victorians were obsessed with measuring skeletons and brains. And noses and foreheads. Yeah, totally. And classifying people.

4:11It's the same ideology. And even though we've got rid of a lot of this weird 19th century racial science. Lots of it persists and weirdly and depressingly, some of it's coming back. What do you mean it's coming back, Salim? Well, there's some very controversial academics, one of whom was at Oxford recently, who have been indulging in this racial science, who still believe there are differences between black people and white people and so on. And racial science is quite a big thing on x on twitter part of this new online racist anglosphere people saying oh we've got this brand new uh you know transatlantic anglosphere between musk and tommy robinson and so on but as i explain in empire world this existed in the 19th century it's just the people involved were rudyard kipling and roosevelt they were they were talking about weird racist ideas back in the 19th century.

5:05And Rhodes. Rhodes was a big guy for the Anglosphere, wasn't he? Yeah, and you've got poems like The White Man's Burden, you know, and this is not a new thing. Can we bring it to plants again? Because I want to know, I mean, I probably don't want to know, but I should know about some of the names of plants that included words that we deem completely unacceptable and racist now. Yeah, I mean, there's different systems of classifying plants. There's Linnaeus' system, but there's also the common plant system. And until the 1990s, it was quite frequently, some plants were referred to with the N-word.

5:40I could think of three in front of me, which I'm not going to say out loud, but there was also the dew bush, the kefir plums. And when you talk about decolonization, people are very allergic to that idea and that word. But actually, if it involves the eradication of those racist common plant names, I think it's an entirely good thing. Another thing that you talked about was the difficulties that some faced, these imperial explorers who wanted to bring back samples and see whether they could be refined and grown by empire in other territories. You talked about rubber and Singapore and Malay. I want to know about the difficulties in transportation because you were talking about a type of seed that needs to be kept moist to transport.

6:22Now, these difficulties that face a botanist who wants to bring back samples will inevitably lead to innovation. And they did, didn't they? I mean, the one thing I'm thinking about is the thing that you write about, the Wardian case. I'm fascinated by this. Tell us a bit more about the Wardian case. Yeah, so it's a great book by Luke Keogh on the Wardian case. We nowadays just assume it's easy to transport plants, right? But back in the day, in the 19th century, plants on a boat, they'd get killed by the salt in the seawater the heat the darkness being manhandled being eaten by goats you know it's very hard to transport any plants but a guy called nathaniel bagshaw ward solved the problem accidentally in 1829 in an experiment in his own home in london he placed a moth cocoon in a sealed glass bottle with some fern fronds and some moist soil and discovered that the plant sprouted and thrived without being watered for three years.

7:18And this led to the creation of the Wardian case, which is a portable... Named after him. Named after him. A portable glass-sided wooden or metal container that contains a kind of controlled environment for plants to thrive in. So the case creates a regulated atmosphere like a modern terranium, keeping the plants hydrated and healthy. The glass allows them to receive sunlight. There's ventilation to keep out the rodents. And you've got batons to kind of hold the plant into place. And this object appeared in the Great Exhibition in 1851. And the historian Lim Barber described it as probably one of the best investments the British government has ever made.

8:01I mean, it totally transformed plant transfers. And the Wardian case was how tea was moved from China to India to establish the Assam and Darjeeling Tea District. something we're going to be dealing with in our opium war episode, because of course, it was the deficit in British finances that the popularity of tea drinking created, which needed a solution. And the solution was selling opium to the Chinese in order to be able to pay for the tea. The Wardian case involved in that. The rubber industry, the plants were transferred from Brazil to Asia with the Wardian case, moving bananas to the Pacific Islands and Central America and the Caribbean.

8:39That was the Wardian case. And also smuggling the Sanchona plant from South America to India was also the Wardian case. So this, I don't know if you've ever seen one. I saw one in Kew Gardens. I've seen it only because I looked it up after reading about it through you, but describe it. I mean, just... It's kind of like a crate. Yeah. I saw one at Kew Gardens. It's like a crate, a bit like a Fortnum and Mason hamper. I'm saying that Changed. You've changed, Sanghera. We remembered when you were a Wolverhampton boy. When you ate out and tiffing on the beach like the rest of us. Yes, go on, like a Fortnum and Mason hamper.

9:18Yeah, like it's wooden or metal and it's got glass, it's got holes in. It's, yeah, it's a box, but incredibly simple, but changed the shape of the planet. Incredible. Would you have had ships just filled with Wardian cases or it was part of a voyage? So try to imagine how this all worked. Yeah, they'd obviously be on the deck because they need sunlight, right? But yes, and it'd be a constant battle to make sure that they weren't disturbed or the glass wasn't broken and so on. But it was still easier than actually trying to transport plants in the old way. I mean, we thought about tea and we are going to talk about tea and opium a lot more in this series.

9:56But I want to know about some of the other plants that are lesser known. Now, gutta percha. Am I saying it right? Gutta percha. I've got some here. Oh, what is it? So it looks like a squash ball. It looks like a squash ball. It's black and round. Is it squidgy? You're not far off, actually. It's a 19th century golf ball. Oh, right. Yeah, gutta percha, very important, is a natural thermoplastic. And it was found in a tree found in Malaysia and Indonesia. And the gum was extracted by killing the tree and extracting it. And you might have some in your teeth because it's still used in dentistry today.

10:30For fillings. Yeah, but crucially, it made golf balls. But also more importantly, it became a vital component in waterproofing telegraph cables. So Kato Percha made telegraph communication, Morse code, speedy news reporting, international communication possible. So this one plant changed the way in which empires were managed, the way wars were waged. Incredible. about and also the the places where these wires cables were laid are also where the cables are still laid because they chose the shortest route so you could say this plant is the foundation of the modern internet and when you say i mean we sort of gobbled up the explanation as it were but you know you said it's in your mouth because this stuff is used for fillings because it is waterproof it's a sealant and even now even now they use it though it's not used that much now for things mainly because people went crazy about it and they over-harvested it.

11:30And it's all but forgotten, Daycutta Perch. I mean, we don't even know how to pronounce it. But in the Victorian era, it was a household word, you know. But the scale of the demand was such that millions of trees were destroyed and it was one of the first great industrial ecological disasters. And where is it now? Is it in the wild at all? Yeah, it exists, but it's not really… Hardly anything. yeah house plants now looking around i think this will be really fun for people who are listening to this while they're doing the vacuuming or you know thinking about folding up laundry or all the things all the wonderful things that you share with us that you do while you're listening to us if people were to look around their house i'm just thinking of like household favorites so a lot of people have ferns cheese plants what are their their origin stories sanam yeah and that's the thing we see a lot of these plants is intrinsically british but almost all of them came from the empire.

12:21So fern mania convulsed 19th century Britain became very fashionable to display ferns actually in Wardian cases. But there was a massive downside to this. So people were taking ferns from around, from Australia, from America and so on, bringing them back and causing huge damage just so they could have them in their drawing rooms. And the other great imperial plant in the household was the palm. Queen Victoria famously introduced the palm into her residences and it became a symbol of empire. Rudyard Kipling uses the palm as a symbol of the empire in one of his famous poems. Was that part of her trip to Kew Gardens you mentioned in the last episode when she spent three trips to go and see the palm house?

13:03Yeah, it's possibly related. But yeah, I mean, palm was not only beautiful, it's an industrial super product. So that became a symbol of empire. But then the biggest thing changed was in gardens. And obviously, you know, most of our plants in our gardens come from elsewhere. The Romans gave the British great vine. The rosemary came in the 14th century. But in the 18th century, everything changed because of two men, a man called John Bartram and a man called Peter Collinson. John Bartram was in America, was in Philadelphia. Peter Collinson was in London. And they came up with a scheme called Bartram's Boxes.

13:38And so you would order a crate for five guineas, and it would contain around 100 varieties of seeds and dried plant specimens. And through this scheme, we had introduced to Britain plants including the magnolia, rhododendrons, mountain laurels, azaleas, sugar maples, and sumac. So these plants, which are now seen as very British, actually came from empire. I mean, azaleas and rhododendrons, I've been through many a posh house garden, and they have little walkways filled with these enormous azaleas and rhododendrons in full bloom. All brought in from the Himalayas. Yeah, and actually one of the people who bought in rhododendrons was Joseph Hooker, who was one of the directors of Kew Gardens.

14:18And he set up some very famous rhododendron gardens in Scotland, which are still thriving today. I mean, do they get enormously eye-wateringly wealthy on the back of this? I mean, you talk about fern mania and this desire to have, you see them in wealthy houses, as I say, as aides and rhododendrons. Does it make them a lot of money? It's more that rich people spent the equivalent of millions of pounds of going these plants. I don't know what the equivalent would be. I don't know, having a robot, if you're very rich, or having a Rolls Royce. They were such status symbols in stately homes. And did people go and collect them themselves?

14:57I mean, if you were a landowner on the west coast of Scotland, would you make a trip to Bhutan or to Sikkim and get your rhododendrons and azaleas? or did you just get a Bartram box? You get a Bartram Collinson box to do it for you. If you're relatively ordinary, you had the boxes, but if you're rich, you probably employed botanists. If you were the East India Company, you hired Joseph Banks or William Hooker to do it for you. Another plant or rather tree, which I'm not that familiar with, but everybody was mad for it at one time in Victorian England, is the Jamaican lace bark tree. Now, first of all, what does it look like?

15:30What is it? I've seen a sample in Kew Gardens, actually. It's basically a tree. The only way I can say it, it's a tree. When you cut through the bark, it's got lace inside. It's incredible. It's like got a doily inside it, and it grows to around 13 or 30 feet. It was only found in the rocky crevices of Jamaica's mountains. But the Victorians who loved anything lacy went crazy for it. I'm just looking it up now. It's extraordinary stuff, isn't it? And so people used it to make hard-wearing clothing. People made whips out of it for enslavement, doilies and fans. Anti-macassas? Charles II was said to have been sent a suit made entirely of lace bark.

16:13And it was presented as a wonder material, again, at the Great Exhibition of 1851. It was a bit like graphene. I mean, you've got this bark where you've got a cloth inside, so it saves you a lot of the hassle of having to create a cloth. What, did you just cut it? You cut it very thinly, or is that how it works? So you take away the outer bark of the tree very carefully and it reveals inner layers. And it's like a net-like in structure. And then you soak that in water to soften it, to make it pliable. And then you stretch it and you can make amazing things or you can layer it. It's very lightweight, very breathable, very unique.

16:48And people went absolutely crazy, a bit like Gutter Percher. And guess what happened? They over-harvested it. Killed it off. although I've just had a look at one of these posh websites that sends pot plants to your home a little bit like you know the bartram boxes and you can buy lace bark trees for your home we can all get mail-order lace bark you can get mail-order lace bark trees for 35 pounds you can get a young lace bark tree also I just wanted to explain one thing that William said because this is something that if you're posh you you know all about it and I only found out about it quite late in life but an anti-macassar in that this is a sort of a doily that goes on the back of a sofa so that if you've got heavily brill creamed oiled hair you don't stain the material or in a train famously all british rail trains used to have antimicassars on the back of the seats so that people traveling with oiled hair would not wreck the furniture no it's quite an advanced age when i learned about this because you know in india nobody cares and every seat is stained quite barely if not with that with palm all over the wall yeah nobody cares uh okay so that's the Jamaican lace bark tree and it also appeared at the Great Exhibition.

17:58And the Great Exhibition, again, of 1851 is such an interesting place because it's a shop front. It would be anything to be able to take a TARDIS back there, wouldn't you? An amazing thing. It was not only a flex, an imperial flex of look how powerful we are, look at what our reach is, but it's a shop window to say, look, this is something, you know, like the latest robot vacuum cleaner, this is what you really need in your life. And people would come, I think it was one third of the population of Britain goes through the doors of the Great Exhibition. And they would see things and suddenly covet them.

18:28Because if they were in there, in the greatest shop window on earth, also entirely made of glass, like the palm house of the last episode at Kew Gardens, and you would want it. So these crazes, you can find their roots stretching into the soil of the Great Exhibition. The kind of world I grew up in, in Scotland, still had these plantings of trees, azaleas, rhododendrons, but also things like giant hogweeds, which we sort of take for granted and are now kind of virtually native. Giant hogweed is what? Giant hogweed comes from New Zealand originally. What does it look like for those who haven't seen a hogweed?

19:03It's like a sort of giant cauliflower, but it's something that is one of those Victorian plantings and you see all over Victorian houses, particularly the west coast of Scotland. And the same with rhododendrons plantations. It's extraordinary to imagine that it's a foreign plant. No, I know. It's a state-ly home. It's so at home in the state-ly home. Absolutely right. Let's take a break here and when we come back, let's tackle the prickly problem of the prickly pear. Der Insolvenzantrag ist gestellt. Und plötzlich läuft alles im Eiltempo. Für unsere Protagonistin beginnt jetzt die härteste Phase.

19:42In Folge 4 unserer Serie Endstation Insolvenz zeigen wir, warum Offenheit zur wichtigsten Währung wird, weshalb ein Insolvenzverwalter kein Gegner ist und wie sich ein Betrieb stabilisiert oder geordnet abgewickelt wird. Im Podcast-Kanal Gute Geschäfte von Kreditreform. Überall, wo es Podcasts gibt.

20:09Welcome back. Now, it won't have escaped your notice. that whenever you're traveling through an airport, and some countries are far more militant about this, you can't even bring a sandwich in or a piece of fruit without getting jumped on and having to throw it all in the bin or declare it. But you bring a non-Indigenous plant into a country, you have every prospect of spreading mites, disease, destruction, or indeed overwhelming a native population of plants and animals. You get all of these warnings not to do it. this must have happened Satnam when you have these clever cases and clever means of transporting there is no way you can ensure that you don't have and probably you didn't even have the science to know what diseases and mites you're bringing along with them precisely I mean we've talked about all these plant transfers and it's very innovative and exciting but at the same time as you're you're transporting live plants you're also sending pests around the world and as the biologist Richard Mack said that the results of the 19th century nursery trade were both beautiful and disastrous.

21:16And it's the same now. So, you know, a large, a third of the invasive arthropods in Europe were introduced by the live plant trade. And in Britain, nearly 90 % of the invertebrate pests first arrived on live plants. And this was part of the story right from the beginning. So when we started transporting plants, we started transporting problems. So one of the most damaging was coffee rust, which devastated the coffee plantations of Ceylon in the late 19th century, causing losses of up to two million pounds a year. And live coffee plants from British Guyana and so on were thought to introduce the fungus.

21:55And so the planters had to turn to other crops like tea, rubber, and cinchona. And there was another cautionary tale in the prickly pear, which is this cactus found in Mexico and southern states of America. And it was introduced to Australia in 1788 by British colonialists. And it's a prickly pear. I don't know if you've seen it. It's edible. I mean, it's sort of the red thing. You know, when you've got the fork-shaped cactus, you've got the red fruit, which is also quite spiked growing on. That's the prickly pear, isn't it? Yeah, and really good for cattle feed. Problem is, it spread incredibly quickly and it swamped farmland.

22:32And so by 1925, it covered more than 60 million acres. Where did it cover so much territory? Australia. And Australia? Gosh, it took over Australia. Yeah, so farmers just had to abandon the land. But it's also a rare example, and they almost completely solved the problem. They found that if you introduce the cactoblastus moth, this moth will lay eggs in the prickly pear and destroy it. So they actually managed to, it's a very rare situation where they managed to solve the problem. Yes, I know. Famously in Australia, they imported rabbits to feed people. The rabbits took over. Myxomatosis becomes a thing.

23:12They introduced the dingo, which then very happily starts taking over and eating livestock and stuff. You know, there are unintended consequences. And here I'm talking from Delhi, but next week I'm going to be in Jaipur. And when you go to Rajasthan, the single most common plant in this grub around Rajasthan is mesquite, which comes from Mexico. And this was specifically brought in by the Maharaj of Jodhpur, who scattered seeds from his tiger moth plain. The botanical name is Prosopis juliflora. And it's become this sort of, it's eaten up Rajasthan. Wow. Suits Rajasthan so well. Have you been, William, to St.

23:53Helena? Never have. I'd love to go to St. Helena. Because, you know, it's interesting. It's also where Napoleon ended up. But it's the ultimate example of what could go wrong because there were three phases of destruction by the different colonists. So first of all, the Portuguese introduced goats. I know you're a big fan of goats, William. I love goats. But they thin the vegetation to the point of leaving the soil on the slopes very vulnerable. But they also fertilize it. Yes. Always a defender of the goat. He is. I mean, there's no talking to him, Salman. Goats and pigeons, you're going to lose.

24:27Just give it up. Okay, so they deplete the soil. Next, you had the East India Company, who set about chopping down all the trees for cooking and heating and making booze. And finally, you had the alien plant introduction by the British imperialists, many of which became highly invasive. So St. Helena is a microcosm of what can go wrong. I'd love to go there to see. Is there any estimate of how many species were lost during that time of imperial planting and supplanting? I think it's impossible to really measure this stuff. But St. Helena is a good place to study it because it's an island, isn't it?

25:05So it's a discrete entity where you can monitor it. The thing is that when you introduce plantations in particular, these one crop economies, you make the nature very vulnerable because you need diversity for a healthy environment. And so whenever you introduce sugar plantations or cinchona plantations, you create huge environmental problems. And there were so many other things that the British did. They stopped the 18th century tradition in Australia of controlled burning in southern Australia. They oversaw the cutting down of oak forests in the Himalayan regions of India and replaced them with pine plantations for resin.

25:47And obviously, dry pine needles become a cause of wildfires. Barbados was used to the point of utter erosion, the deforestation of Guyana, the West Indies, 60 % of New Zealand's forests destroyed. Another example, not in the British Empire, but in the Stalinist USSR, is Great Swathes of Uzbekistan, where they had monoculture of cotton. And the entire cotton for all the Soviet armies was grown in Uzbekistan. So Stalin was very clear that it should be taken as a kind of national priority to keep this cotton coming in and growing more and more. And when you go to the area around Kiva and northern Uzbekistan, you pass miles and miles and miles of dead earth.

26:31And it's not desert, it's earth which has been killed by monocultures. And it is biologically dead, there's nothing you can do with it. And there's miles and miles of it. It's very, very striking. Mahogany is a very interesting one because we all go to these stately homes and marvel at the mahogany furniture. But a lot of it was harvested from the Caribbean. And these mahogany forests were pulled down to the point of near extinction. And we don't make that connection between the beauty of these 19th century drawing rooms and the environmental destruction that we caused. So, I mean, you can sort of credit this monoculture with the awakening of Gandhi.