Sir William Jones's Indian botany: Visual archive, natural history collections, and worldmaking in the British empire

In 1784, Sir William Jones arrived in India to serve on the Supreme Court in Calcutta, where he developed his long-standing interest in botany. This resulted in a plan for a treatise on Indian plants which remained unfulfilled due to his untimely death in 1794. Examining Jones's botanical endeavours, much less known compared to his literary, linguistic, and judicial overtures, helps us explore his colonial worldmaking. My article addresses this gap in scholarship with a focus on Jones's visual archive, specifically a collection of botanical illustrations by Indian artists whom he never acknowledged in his work. Presently at the Royal Asiatic society in London, these illustrations demonstrate how visuality was central to natural historical investigation and facilitated the extraction of India's vegetal world for the British Empire. Situating Jones as a ‘centre of calculation’, this article highlights the complexities of the relationship between science and society, as entangled with questions of race, power, and political authority. Jones's colonial worldmaking was paralleled by a process of ‘worldlessness’ in the marginalisation of local expertise. This double-movement, in turn, brings into sharper relief the differential premises of colonial knowledge formation, with implications for life and politics in late eighteenth-century India. • Focuses on the largely neglected botanical visual archive of Sir William Jones as part of colonial knowledge-making. • Foregrounds and analyses works of Indian artists whom Jones did not acknowledge. • Situates Jones as a ‘Centre of Calculation’ in the British Empire. • Examines relationship between science and colonial society through entanglements of race, power and political authority.