Colonial ambitions generated imperial attitudes, theories and practices that remain embedded in botany and all the life sciences. Banu Subramaniam draws on fields as disparate as queer studies, indigenous studies and the biological sciences to explore the labyrinthine history of how colonialism transformed rich and complex plant worlds into biological knowledge. Botany of Empire demonstrates how fundamental theories and practices of botany were shaped and reinforced in favour of colonial rule and its extractive ambitions. We see how the colonisers erased the deep history of plants to create a reductionist system that imposed a Latin-based naming system, drew on the imagined sex lives of European elites to explain plant sexuality, and discussed foreign plants as foreign human beings. Subramanian thus focuses on imagining a more inclusive and capacious field of botany, untethered and decentralised from its origins in histories of racism, slavery and colonialism. This vision harnesses the power of scientific and feminist thought to chart a course towards more socially just experimental biology practices.

Banu Subramaniam is Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, she writes about social and cultural aspects of science in relation to experimental biology. She is the author of Ghost Stories for Darwin. The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (University of Illinois Press, 2014), Holy Science. The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (University of Washington Press, 2019), Botany of Empire. Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism (University of Washington Press, 2024), his current work focuses on the decolonisation of botany, nativism in plant biology and the relationship between science and religious nationalism in India.