Tobias Delfs’ recently published habilitation offers a meticulous examination of botanical collections across South Asia and is based on extensive archival sources. It focuses on the multidirectional and dynamic networks of German botanists in the first half of the nineteenth century who actively engaged in pan-European colonial systems of knowledge production. The transimperial embeddedness of these actors is traced using a variety of materials—including correspondence, letters of recommendation, and journal articles—analyzed as relational webs of exchange and communication within an actor-network framework. As the author highlights, the analysis of colonial and imperial knowledge production requires new approaches. It is essential to also trace actors who—despite lacking colonial territories of their own—operated within existing empires and actively contributed to colonial knowledge regimes. Their situated participation, in particular, reveals how strongly colonial epistemologies were shaped by inter-imperial cooperation and asymmetric participation within these networks.
Across six chapters, the publication offers a detailed and precise view of scientific practices, including seed exchanges, plant shipments, and distribution, as well as the mediation of scientific training opportunities in colonies and academic reputation. Delfs identifies a differentiated spectrum of actors: among them missionaries of the Rhenish, Berlin, and Moravian missions, German doctors, military personnel, captains, so-called amateur botanists, European women such as the Prussian Pauline Helfer who authored reports, German pharmacists, including naturalists and poets such as Adelbert von Chamisso, who extracted human remains in South Africa and sent them to Berlin. Based on these diverse configurations, the study shows that German botanists did not operate outside colonial orders but actively shaped them through mobility, collection, classification, and exchange—whether in India, Great Britain, South Africa, or within the German states themselves. This entanglement of multiple scientific, social, and colonial-institutional spaces is conceptualized by Delfs as polycentrism (158), which reveals the overlap and simultaneous effectiveness of multiple networks in knowledge production and thus challenges the supposed dichotomous division between colonial periphery and European center.
The study demonstrates how European Natureculture relations in the handling of flora—and fauna—were understood as exchangeable and mobile “material.” Particularly noteworthy in this context is the analysis of the Calcutta Botanical Garden under the direction of Nathaniel Wallich, who emerges as a central figure within the examined correspondence. The botanical garden functions here as a hub of colonial circulation, where German-speaking botanists actively participated in the pan-European empire of botanical knowledge (209) while being embedded in multiple dependencies. Delfs convincingly shows that these processes were not free of interpersonal conflicts: for example, in questions of ownership of specimens extracted from colonial contexts or tensions between different epistemological positions. In the course of the analysis, it becomes clear that the assumed stable dividing line between nature-philosophical and speculative-deductive traditions did not pose a hindrance in the practice of global network formation by botanists (145). Further, the study highlights social, institutional, and logistical dependencies of the botanists: for instance, their patronage by nobility, scholarly societies and economically struggling associations such as the Esslinger Reiseverein, support from mission stations, institutional backing by entities such as the Zoological Museum in Berlin under the direction of Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein; or the practical dependencies during plant transport, such as on the goodwill and care of the captains responsible for the preservation and maintenance of shipped plants. At the same time there was dependency on local actors—carriers, illustrators, interpreters, informants (often) Brahmin guides, intellectuals such as Ram Camul Sen or unnamed actors within the sources—without whose knowledge and labor colonial expeditions and imperial knowledge production would not have been possible. The study traces these levels of relationships, logics of usefulness, and infrastructures and reveals their significance for the circulation of knowledge and plants.
In addition to the analysis of mission stations as important infrastructures in colonies, botanical gardens stand out in particular as “intermediate stations” and redistribution centers. Places like Cape Town or St. Helena provided not only logistics for people and ships but also served as sites for the “recovery and stabilization” of plants before they were transported to Europe. This perspective on plant mobility vividly illustrates how deeply colonial knowledge circulations were embedded in climatic conditions, botanical care work, and bio-imperial infrastructure—and how individual German settlers in South Africa acted within these structures. A particular contribution of the publication lies in the precise presentation of the role of Baron Carl Ferdinand Heinrich von Ludwig in the introduction of new plant species in South Africa. The Württemberg-born pharmacist deliberately assembled plants from different world regions—such as Mauritius, settler colonies like Australia, South America, and Europe—in order to establish a non-state botanical garden in Cape Town. Delfs describes how these introductions of plants into new ecologies, shaped by colonial profit-oriented logics of usefulness, did not take place in isolation but were mediated through dense transnational networks that connected Cape Town with botanical gardens in cities like Glasgow, Leiden, or Hamburg. Thus, the publication makes an important contribution to the analysis of colonial plant mobility and the establishment of new ecological orders in the nineteenth century.
Despite the dense and detailed analysis, the engagement with power relations and the perspective on colonial extraction in the context of botanical knowledge production remains mostly peripheral. While several passages (11, 19) point to the role of gendered translation work, infrastructure, and military presence, and while reference is made to the works of Claudia Swan and Londa Schiebinger (Plants and Empire, 2007, 11; Colonial Botany, 2005, 1–16) on botany and colonialism, central aspects of their analysis—such as the epistemic violence of taxonomic naming practices, in which indigenous plant names were consciously and deliberately replaced with European ones, the gendered categories of the Linnaean system, or their analyses of biopiracy and the appropriation of indigenous botanical knowledge—remain unaddressed. These perspectives on linguistic, epistemic, and legal forms of colonial dispossession and extraction could have productively expanded the analysis. The historical sources and the chosen network approach result in the relatively overrepresented European male German botanists speaking for themselves. In contrast, so-called local actors and European women appear mostly as marginal figures. However, their social positions—as white and middle- or upper-class—remain unexamined, as in the case of the sisters of the Scottish botanist John Claudius Loudon, whose first names are not given (134). Although Delfs reflects this archive-based asymmetry (27), if colonial knowledge production is at the center of analysis, it would be necessary to more strongly include the epistemic conditions, colonial power relations, and gendered as well as racialized divisions of labor in the analysis. Especially in response to Delfs's own question of who collects in which way, with what mandate, and within which institutions, further reflections on epistemic extraction, gendered-hierarchical labor relations, issues of ownership and property (206), ecological exploitation, and gender orders would have been insightful. Furthermore, Delfs also analyses how practices of “collecting” and exchanging plant specimens created a European scientific culture of mutual recognition and appreciation among botanists, materialized in labels, dedications, and correspondence. Building on Schiebinger's approaches, Banu Subramaniam (Botany of Empire, 2024, 77–102) argued that particularly these botanical taxonomic practices were based on colonial extraction, epistemic hierarchization, and the erasure of indigenous knowledge—and continue to have lasting effects today. A connection of both perspectives could show how colonial networks reinforced or even enabled recognition practices in scientific exchange within unequal, often colonially structured knowledge regimes. This tension deserves to be examined more closely.
The strength of the publication lies in the dense reconstruction of biological networks; its challenge lies in not only documenting the colonial violence of these networks and their infrastructures but also identifying them as forms of violence and decentering them epistemically. The work thus invites a critical further development of histories of knowledge and botany in colonial contexts.
