Plants

Abstract

Plants moved between locales, and connected points across, the Atlantic world from Antiquity to the Early Modern period. While the role of plants as the portmanteau biota of colonial settlements in the Americas underscored their instrumentalization by Europeans, historians now see the interplay of African, Indigenous, and even Asian plants in the Atlantic world. Plant humanities scholarship in history, geography, anthropology, archaeology, and other disciplines provides a sense of diverse human-plant relationships, and this article collects research that focuses on plants as food, medicine, cultural emblems, scientific specimens, and aesthetic objects. These varied kinds of socio-floral engagements are reflected in equally disparate scholarship from researchers investigating North and South America; the Caribbean; West, West Central, southern, and eastern Africa; and western Europe. Numerous studies of Mesoamerican cultures conducted by anthropologists and archaeologists point toward the rich botanical traditions of Maya, Mexica, and other Central American societies in “pre-Hispanic” periods. However, the contact between Europeans and Mesoamericans largely still serves to divide studies on plants, particularly since many sources reflect the hybridization of plant knowledge. A number of monographs and articles are included here; however, more research is necessary on earlier cultures and periods, such as the Olmecs. Likewise, for Atlantic African and African diaspora studies, much of the scholarship remains regionally divided between West Africanists and scholars of West Central and southern Africa. Exceptions to this trend are evident in Caribbean-focused research that emphasizes the relative dynamism of plant-derived medicine as knowledge crisscrossed among Africans, Indigenous Amerindians, and Europeans. An epistemic challenge remains for historians of science and medicine and economic or cultural historians regarding whether to write about plants as culturally embedded actants or as emergent commodities moving along chains of production, supply, and consumption. One example of this involves the history of High John the Conqueror root, both a material plant and a spiritual being who appears in African American literature as a trickster. John’s commodification over time in the United States, as Carolyn Morrow Long has shown, into an accepted pharmaceutical, involves his transformation from a black spirit into a white kingly figure. This further touches on the complex racialization of plants, an issue likewise related to the de-Africanization or de-Indigenization of plants by settler colonialism. Linguistic challenges pose problems for researchers as well, as a number of plant collections remain untranslated and understudied, such as plants collected at slave castles where captives spoke a multitude of languages and dialects. Vagueness and anonymity within primary sources that mention “an Indian” or a “Negro Dr.” further frustrate efforts to identify and build up narratives of Amerindian and Atlantic African intellectual traditions due to the historical construction of the archive itself.