The Illusion of Botanical Precision: Substitution and the Taxonomy of Performance in the Dyewood and Bow-Making Timber Trade (18th–21st Centuries)

From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the European trade in red dyewoods and in bow-making timber classified its materials not by botanical species but by commercial performance — dyeing yield, density, colour, and behaviour at the workbench. This study reconstructs that system, here called a taxonomy of performance, and argues that to read it through the lens of modern binomial nomenclature is an anachronism: it retrojects onto past actors an order their records were never designed to support. Following the bow-making timber chain as its principal case — from the brazilin-bearing dyewoods of Pomet to the pernambuco of the Tourte workshop, and from the Mexican Coulteria platyloba to the present market in "Caribbean" and "Mexican pernambuco" — it shows how commission merchants and bow-makers sorted a porous supply pool without ever durably fixing botanical identity. Its central claim is not that substitutions occurred — that much is familiar — but that species-level identity was never the operative unit of commercial knowledge: the trade could function precisely because it did not need to know. Proceeding by structural inference where the archive is silent, it closes on the 2025 CITES decisions, arguing that botanical traceability is not a property markets possess but a system that must be built.