Baptists, Bengalis, and the Construction of Agricultural and Horticultural Science in India, 1793-1840

Join NACBS to celebrate the publication of Laura Tavolacci’s recent work Baptists, Bengalis, and the Construction of Agricultural and Horticultural Science in India, 1793-1840.

April 23 at 12pm ET/ 11am CST / 10am MST / 9am PST/ 5pm GMT

"The Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India was founded in 1820 by an English Baptist missionary, William Carey. He was part of a network of missionaries centred at Srirampur (Serampore), the Danish settlement close to Calcutta. This book explores the ways that missionaries included plants in their projects of proselytization to better understand the origins of this scientific society. It includes an investigation of the farms and gardens at each mission station, the missionaries’ work with indigo plantations, and different scientific projects leading up to the creation of the agricultural society. Amidst all of this, plants became an important target and sign of moral improvement, marking a sort of ‘moral frontier’ which reiterated racial hierarchies. Nevertheless, various entanglements with Bengali converts, gardeners (malis), and the elite bhadralok class also impacted the missionary vision. In the initial years of the scientific organisation, missionaries and their interlocutors upheld a romantic and hierarchical vision of agrarian society that mixed gardening with large-scale agriculture – but, an economic depression in 1833, followed shortly by William Carey’s death in 1834, ended this composite vision. The Society began to focus instead on the production of more remunerative agricultural cash crops, like sugar and cotton, over horticultural crops like vegetables and fruit trees."

Laura Tavolacci is an Assistant Professor of history at the University of Chile, and received her PhD from University of California, Davis. She teaches global history, comparative empires, and the history of science. Her first book, titled Baptists, Bengalis and the Construction of Agricultural and Horticultural Science in India, 1793-1840, was published with Palgrave Macmillan’s “Cambridge Imperial and Postcolonial Studies” series. Her work has also been published in History Workshop Journal, the Journal of Historical Geography, Irish Studies Review, and Endeavour. Her current project, “Plants and their Social Lives across the British Empire, 1850-1950” looks at colonial Calcutta as a center for plant breeding and the exchange of seeds, plants and knowledge about them across the empire.