“Local Animosity and Elite Support: The Decline and Fall of the St. Vincent Botanic Garden”

J'Nese Williams (New York Botanical Garden, Vanderbilt University)

In 1800, Britain had a few botanic gardens in its colonies, though that number swelled to over a hundred by the century’s end. The colonial botanic gardens cultivated economically and medicinally valuable plants and managed the transfer of these plants throughout the empire. As a result, they were part of an imperial system directed toward profit and “improvement,” with Kew Gardens its head. As scientific institutions, the colonial gardens were also concerned with the creation and dissemination of plant knowledge. Though the proliferation of botanic gardens throughout the British Empire suggests that they were largely successful institutions, continued support of any particular garden was not a foregone conclusion. This paper looks at a particular botanic garden in St. Vincent, from its glory days in the late eighteenth century to the withdrawal of government support in the 1820s to explore questions of government support of science and the relationships between scientific institutions and their local communities. The literature on the British colonial gardens focuses on the overall expansion and success of an imperial system. The St. Vincent Garden was one of these success stories until ongoing skirmishes with the local community over land and authority led to its demise. By looking closely at a specific example of failure, this paper demonstrates that despite the appearance of strong central oversight, government support of colonial science was always contingent on local factors.

“Sugar Beets and the Rise of Mathematical Statistics in Agriculture”

Theodora Dryer (UCSD)

Between 1918 and 1940, an international community of statisticians and logicians reimagined agrarian work as a modernist project that relied on algorithmic thinking in its procedures. This paper examines the international mathematical statistics community of the interwar era as they worked to strengthen and build national agrarian economies amidst the uncertainties of economic depression. At the heart of this story is the sugar beet. Sugar beet breeding was symbolic of good agriculture and statisticians in western countries like England and the United States became interested in the mathematical planning logics of Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union by virtue of their strong sugar beet production. At the level of discourse, sugar beet breeding was often used to promote mathematical statistics in agrarian planning to the international community and at the level of practice the sugar beet field became an ideal laboratory for new methods in mathematical statistics. Early twentieth century sugar beet breeding became a statistical project at the center of land reform, agrarian science, and statecraft. In the history of mathematical statistics, study of sugar beet planning breaks from the focus on Anglophone developments and emphasizes the importance of transnational exchange during this time. The shared interest in mathematical statistics across Europe, the United States, and beyond, allowed new mathematical methods in agrarian planning to be exchanged throughout the world. Into the late 1930s, support from the international mathematics community allowed Eastern European and Jewish mathematicians to emigrate as tensions in Europe mounted.

“The German Sugar Beet Industry and Appraisals of Health: A Case Study in Agricultural Practices and Food Quality”

Carolyn Taratko (Max Planck Institue for the History of Science/ Vanderbilt University)

This paper examines the production of the sugar beet in nineteenth-century Germany. Large-scale beet cultivation involved intensive and mechanized practices for an export-oriented industry and grew in scale over the course of the nineteenth century in Germany the result of concerted efforts to refine cultivation practices. Because it was unprofitable at a small scale, and the operation of sugar refineries was untenable without access to large capital, beet cultivation ushered in an age of industrial agriculture. This paper explores this development and charts the concern of government officials, nutritionists, and social reformers who were ambivalent, and at times hostile to the labor practices on sugar beet farms. The depressed wages of laborers on these large estates, and their recruitment of foreign, primarily Polish workers, was said to degrade the overall quality of the product. Disapproval for the labor practices was thus tied to a negative appraisal of the quality of the sugar produced, along with general anxieties about overconsumption of sugar. This episode provides a case study that opens up an exploration of 3 how the circumstances of food production became reflected in assessments of health in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

“High and Low Modernisms in Colombia: Sugarcane Breeding and State Management in the 1930s”

Timothy Lorek (Yale University, New York Botanical Gardens)

Colombia’s subtropical Cauca Valley is today the country’s primary sugarcane growing zone. Seen from the air, the valley’s rectangular fields of the monocrop grass grow between perfectly straight access roads, offering a geometric visual of the “high modernist” landscape as described in James Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998). Long before the ascendency of this geometry, however, contradictory and often competing visions of the valley’s agricultural and scientific future became intertwined in state management practices. This paper juxtaposes programs for sugarcane breeding and genetics research to those for agricultural extension and education during the global depression of the 1930s. As state investment and subsidization of the corporate sugarcane industry increased through breeding programs and international partnerships with the USDA, a high modernist landscape emerged in tandem with large-scale irrigation projects designed for the benefit of this growing sector. At the same time, the Colombian state and regional government continued to channel funding into agricultural education and extension services in line with the agrarian populism of the global 1930s, described as “low modernism” in Jess Gilbert’s Planning Democracy (2016). This paper presents the tensions between these contradictory visions of agrarian modernity and traces the scientific details of sugarcane breeding programs and their consequences for state management of a changing landscape.