Anti-famine tropics: Botanical gardens as micro-climatic infrastructure

The resettlement of plants during the famine period significantly shaped the conditions of early colonialism in India. These botanical efforts were grounded in the perception of the tropics and its agriculture as poor, leading to projects of colonial “improvement.” This paper examines how colonial famine interventions led to a project of transforming the tropics through Botanical Gardens. The study uses imperial and local archives to analyze the early material and cultural spaces produced and circulated by the British Botanical Gardens to argue that the Botanical Gardens emerged as two types of infrastructures. As physical infrastructures, the Botanical Gardens transformed the environment through plant resettlements, violently forcing new relationships into the environment at the micro-climatic level. As micro-climatic knowledge infrastructures, the gardens revealed gaps in micro-climatic knowledge and later filled the early knowledge gap through failed plantation trials. The spatial mobilities of plants these gardens set in motion constructed “micro-climatic” infrastructure for altering the landscape of subsistence with cash crops exacerbating famines in the long term.