Abstract
The Scottish-born East India Company surgeon and botanist Robert Wight, who spent his working life in southern India, is used as an example to show some of the botanical networks operating between India and Europe (and to a lesser extent within India) in the period 1820 to 1850. The information in this chapter1 is taken from a recent series of monographs on Wight’s life and work,2 to which readers are directed for further detail and background.
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Notes
H. J. Noltie (2005), The Botany of Robert Wight. Ruggell: A.R.G. Gantner Verlag. A catalogue of the names of flowering plants published by Wight (with details of their types). Introductory chapters include a bibliography of Wight’s works, a chronology of his life, a gazetteer of his collecting localities and biographical details of his collaborators.
H. J. Noltie (2007), Robert Wight and the Botanical Drawings of Rungiah & Govindoo. 3 vols. Edinburgh: Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Vol. 1 is a biography of Wight, with emphasis on his taxonomic work, and the experiments to introduce American long-staple cotton to India. Vol. 2 is about the drawings Wight commissioned from Rungiah and Govindoo, with 137 of them reproduced in colour. Vol. 3 is a travelogue, describing the author’s search of Robert Wight in India and Britain.
K. Raj (2006), Relocating Modern Science. Delhi: Permanent Black. Of particular relevance is the discussion of the work commissioned by the French surgeon Nicolas l’Empereur from an Orissan painter at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also discussed is the Indian contribution to subjects such as map making.
In this context it is interesting to note that Hendrik van Rheede (a soldier and Dutch East India company (VOC) administrator for a notably mercantile nation) was apparently in the first instance inspired to compile his great Hortus Malabaricus, not for commercial reasons, but by his aesthetic response to the fecundity of tropical nature (as expressed in Rheede’s own preface to Hortus Malabaricus Vol. 3), see R. Grove, ‘Indigenous Knowledge and the Significance of South-West India for Portuguese and Dutch Constructions of Tropical Nature’, in R. Grove et al. (eds.) (1998) Nature and the Orient. Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 199.
M. J. Franklin (1995), Sir William Jones. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, p. 84.
T. M. Kelley (2012), Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 162–209.
In a book review of the author’s ‘Robert Wight and the Botanical Drawings of Rungiah and Govindoo’, K. Raj (2009), British Journal for the History of Science, 42: 606–8.
This first nomenclatural ‘Code’ was written by Alphonse De Candolle (Paris: V. Masson et fils, 1867), partly as a result of discussions at the Third International Botanical Congress held in London in 1866 — the Congress at which Wight made his final botanical appearance reading an unpublished paper on ‘On the Phenomenon of Vegetation in the Indian Spring’. The ‘Code’ currently in operation is: J. McNeill et. al. (eds.) (2012), International Code of Nomenclature for Algae, Fungi, and Plants (Melbourne Code), adopted by the Eighteenth International Botanical Congress Melbourne, Australia, July 2011 (Regnum Vegetabile 154). Königstein: Koeltz Scientific Books.
T. Robinson (2008), William Roxburgh: The Founding Father of Indian Botany. Chichester: Phillimore.
R. H. Grove (1995), Green Imperialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
W. Griffith (1848), Posthumous Papers. Calcutta: J. F. Bellamy. Letters to Wight, pp. xxiii, xxvii.
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Noltie, H.J. (2015). Robert Wight and his European Botanical Collaborators. In: Damodaran, V., Winterbottom, A., Lester, A. (eds) The East India Company and the Natural World. Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137427274_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137427274_4
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