Indonesia is and was famous for its beautiful “wild” nature, its many endemic plants and animals, the biodiversity of its forests, but also for its “tamed” nature, such as landscapes consisting entirely of irrigated rice fields, following geomorphologic contours. Descriptions of some of its plants and animals reached Europe soon after the Portuguese and the Spaniards established themselves in the region in the early sixteenth century. However, a more thorough inventory had to wait until the Dutch and their East India Company, the VOC, established their trading posts in the Archipelago in the seventeenth century. People, often with medical training, employed by the VOC, interested in what then was called natural history, not only researched plant life – and occasionally also animals – in southern India and Sri Lanka, but also in and around the main Company establishments in the Indonesian Archipelago – Batavia and Ambon. Here, famous naturalists like Bontius and Rumphius investigated the natural environment, and published their findings. Bontius was a physician who had to carry out his natural history research in his spare time, did not leave Batavia and its environs, and died young, leaving behind a rather small oeuvre. Rumphius, on the other hand, lived long (but required help, as he became blind), started his career as a merchant-cum-magistrate in the service of the VOC, but was then allowed to dedicate the remainder of his career entirely to his botanical work, leaving behind copious data, published posthumously.

Between the 1770s and the 1820s a large number of non-Dutch botanists (and a few zoologists) came to Java, partly inspired, no doubt, by Bontius and Rumphius, and were allowed to go plant hunting, even in Java's interior, usually zealously guarded by the VOC officials. Some of these people – Solander, Thunberg, Hornstedt – were pupils of arguably the most famous botanist ever, Carl von Linné (Linnaeus). This group of scholars, and the rather sudden peak in botanical interest in Indonesia (mainly Java) represented the tail-end of the Enlightenment.

The book written by Andrew Goss deals with scholars of a later date. The term “Floracrats,” coined by the author, makes it clear that he is mainly interested in botanists, although he defines floracrats as “naturalists working as colonial officials on state projects” (p. 9), and his analysis starts basically in the 1840s. Goss presents as his first example of a floracrat the German military physician Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, whom he also calls an “apostle of enlightenment”. I don't think Goss defines this term anywhere in his book, but he is clearly referring to people who wanted to create enlightened inhabitants in the Netherlands Indies, partly by publicly showing the fruits of Enlightenment knowledge (p. 9). Be that as it may, Junghuhn is evidently presented by the author both as a prime example of a floracrat and as a typical apostle of enlightenment.

Junghuhn is, and rightly so, a major figure in this book. Like so many physicians in his day, Junghuhn was also a gifted botanist (and not much of a soldier), and fairly soon after arriving in Indonesia the colonial government gave him the opportunity to concentrate entirely on his botanical research. Scholars specializing in the history of science in Indonesia, or the environmental or economic history of Indonesia, are mainly, if not exclusively, interested in Junghuhn as the author of Java, deszelfs Gedaante, Bekleeding, en Inwendige Structuur (“Java, Its Form, Covering, and Inner Structure”), published in four volumes, containing 1,400 pages, between 1850 and 1853. The book, which was composed along the lines of Alexander von Humboldt's earlier work on South America, presents a thorough biogeography of Java, divided in a number of plant-geographical zones. This work was based on Junghuhn's travels all over the island during more than a decade, which included climbing all of Java's thirty-three volcanoes. Goss, however, although of course mentioning the book and the fact that it gave him stellar scholarly status, is much more interested in Junghuhn's role as head of the government project to grow Cinchona trees, the source of the well-known quinine, at that time the most effective drug against malaria. Of this tree, endemic to Peru, young plants had been collected there and sent to Java, where the saplings arrived in 1854. In 1856, Governor-General Pahud made Junghuhn head of the Cinchona-growing project, with the title of inspector of scientific research in the Netherland Indies. Thus, Junghuhn became a Floracrat, but, as successful as he was as a scholar publishing on Java's biogeography, he failed dismally as the leader of the Cinchona-cultivating project, because he was unable to develop Cinchona subspecies with a high quinine content. After the death of Junghuhn, in 1864, his successor, K. W. van Gorkom, who had been trained in chemistry, succeeded in isolating highly productive subspecies, mainly by avoiding the mistakes Junghuhn had made. The latter was a brilliant botanist, but not good at systematically selecting, growing, and testing various breeds of Cinchona – and all that over a great many years, during which time he was secretive about what he was doing, and refused to call in outside experts where necessary. It was not until 1872 that Van Gorkom's methods proved to be effective. By 1900, Java was producing 80 per cent of the world's quinine.

The next Floracrat to hold centre stage in the book is Melchior Treub, director of the Botanical Gardens (then called 's Land Plantentuin, now Kebun Raya) in Buitenzorg (now Bogor), to the south of Batavia (now Jakarta), where he took up his position in 1880; later on he founded the Department of Agriculture, of which he became the first director (1905). Treub is, just like Junghuhn, a well-known name to those specializing in the history of science of Indonesia, but much less to other historians or Indonesia specialists, as he was more a bureaucrat than a scholar, and never wrote the book that could have made his name. In his day, however, he was famous in and outside Indonesia, particularly among botanists with an interest in the tropics, because he had made it possible, and attractive, to many a foreign researcher to come to the botanical gardens of Buitenzorg. However, although a great organizer who could always convince the bureaucracy to finance his projects, he was a failure in one important respect – research done in Buitenzorg was of little value to the Javanese smallholder, of whose “economic abilities” he held “disparaging views” (p. 92), which in the end got him into trouble in these days of the so-called “Ethical Policy”. Treub had been concentrating so much on technical-scientific work that he had neglected the socio-economic problems of the millions of agriculturists. Under Treub, “pure” (biological) science was more important among the scientific establishment in the colony than applied science, while the latter received more attention in the Netherlands. This rather unexpected and counterintuitive role reversal – didn't the reader, as I did, expect pure science in the metropolis and applied science in the colony? – is emphasized in a recent Dutch dissertation,Footnote ¹ and might have been emphasized more in Goss's book.

Under H. J. Lovink, Treub's successor (1909), practical-minded agronomists, often trained in the Agricultural School of Wageningen, the Netherlands, gradually took the place of the botanists, establishing an agricultural extension service for the education of Java's peasantry. Younger native elites, for whom agricultural schools had been established in the colony, were increasingly trained and co-opted in order to work alongside the European professionals. However, around the same time Indonesian elites-cum-intellectuals became interested in nationalism and independence, while colonial politics became more conservative from around 1930, a development that led to the alienation of many Indonesian intellectuals, thus postponing the emergence of a sizeable group of Indonesian Floracrats until after 1949.

In fact, it could be argued that after Treub the age of the Floracrats was over (although the author doesn't do so), and important scholars or bureaucrats mentioned for this period (Boeke, Hart, van Mook, Wellenstein) were either not botanists, or, if they were (as was the case with Bernard, Dammerman, Docters van Leeuwen, Koningsberger, Lam, and Went) totally obscure or relatively unknown.

After World War II, only two names will probably be recognized by historians of science in Indonesia – those of the Dutchman C. G. G. J. (Kees) van Steenis, the father of the Flora Malesiana, who was important in the 1940s and '50s, and of the Indonesian scholar Otto Soemarwoto, active during the Sukarno period and the Suharto years. One could call them the last of the Floracrats. From the 1960s, science and the state grew closer, and Goss calls the type of science that developed during these years in Indonesia “desk science”, also stating that the discipline lost much of its independence (pp. 163–64). Thus, the author could write in his introduction “Since the 1950s, Indonesian science and scientists have drawn scant attention from scholars, scientists or otherwise, outside of Indonesia” (p. 4). In his preface he argues that “the failure of the Enlightenment (…) is the key to understanding the history of science and the politics of knowledge in modern Indonesia” (p. ix).

Summing up, it can be said that the book gives an interesting overview of the links between applied and “pure” science – mainly biology, and within that discipline predominantly botany – on the one hand, and the bureaucracy – or perhaps one should say various types and levels of bureaucracy – and ideological-political development in Indonesia, between, say, 1850 and 2000 on the other. I am less happy with terms –even those which ended up in lower case – such as “apostles of enlightenment” or “the failure of the Enlightenment”, partly because it is a bit odd to apply such terms to developments in the twentieth century, and partly because the author fails to make a distinction between enlightenment and Enlightenment, although Kant, rightly, already did so two centuries ago.