Linnaean botany’s founding collections depended on slave-based world trade

Evidence

That glasshouse proved indispensable to Linnaeus when “Adam-like [he] invented modern plant nomenclature.” Kincaid observes how[t]he plants in [Clifford’s] glasshouse could only have come to him through—and I quote from Oxford Companion to Gardens—“the influence of the world trade being developed by maritime powers such as the Netherlands and Great Britain.” This being a way of expressing an extraordinary historical event—“trade being developed,” leaving out the nature of the trade being developed: trade in people and the things that they possessed, plants, animals, and so on—never ceases to amaze me. I do not mind the glasshouse; I do not mind the botanical garden. This is not so grand a gesture on my part. It is mostly an admission of defeat—to mind would be completely futile; I cannot do anything about it anyway. I only mind the absence of this acknowledgment: that perhaps every good thing that stands before us comes at a great cost to someone else. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 766

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘every good thing comes at a great cost to someone else’ claim is the chapter’s central synthesis — connects to slow violence’s dispersed accountability theme. — connects to: Molasses and rum were integral to the international slave trade as exchange commodities. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 287; English slave-trade dominance by 1700 grew from sugar-driven demand — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 590; Sugar cultivation’s labor hunger drove the English slave trade to Africa — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 589 (+14 more)
• SHARE: The phrase ‘trade being developed’ as euphemism for people-trafficking is exactly the rhetorical-unmasking device Nixon theorized in ch1 — worth sending to anyone working on euphemism and globalization.

Broader Connections

• Columbus’s 1493 sugar introduction triggered an Atlantic slave-sugar industry reordering the world #expands (0.84) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 270
• Sugar wealth and the slave trade financed the British North American colonies #expands (0.83) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 263
• Slavery powered European merchant capitalism and American expansion #expands (0.82) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 19
• English slave-trade dominance by 1700 grew from sugar-driven demand #expands (0.80) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 590
• Sugar cultivation’s labor hunger drove the English slave trade to Africa #expands (0.80) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 589
• New England’s liquor industry depended on the slave trade #expands (0.80) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 178
• New World slavery was a commercial system driven by global empires and world markets #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3847
• Molasses and rum were integral to the international slave trade as exchange commodities. #expands (0.78) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 287
• English capital financed the Brazilian slave trade #expands (0.76)
• British abolitionism of the slave trade served commercial empire-building #contradicts (0.75)
• Nineteenth-century consumers of coffee and cotton were complicit in slavery #expands (0.75) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 570
• Enslaved cotton cultivation accelerated the factory system and wage labor #expands (0.75) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 581
• Anglo-Portuguese bourgeois alliance shaped how the Atlantic slave trade developed #expands (0.74) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 527
• Mercantile empires fused monarchs and merchants in armed trade monopolies #expands (0.74)
• Advocates for indigenous welfare directly enabled the African slave trade #corroborates (0.72)