The Floracrats is a welcome and felicitously titled addition to the growing literature on colonial science and its post-colonial legacies. Andrew Goss traces in meticulous detail the inextricable entanglement of science, and botany in particular, with the Dutch administration of its East Indian possessions from 1840 until Indonesia gained its independence after World War II. A final chapter rounds out the history of the last half-century, underscoring the failure of modern Indonesia to create an independent scientific community. Goss frames this failure in terms of an Enlightenment ideal—Enlightenment with a capital E—a somewhat problematic approach given the time period in question. Enlightenment does not seem to have been a concept used by the individuals he tracks, and it is not always clear whether it refers to an ideal of “useful knowledge,” a disinterested goal of understanding the natural world, a science detached from state dictation, or a combination of all of these.
What is most valuable in Goss's study is his chronicle of the vicissitudes of the Buitenzorg Botanical Gardens. Like so many of its counterparts, the Gardens began life as an embellishment of the governor's summer palace and struggled to establish themselves as a serious scientific institution. Much depended on the character and drive of the Gardens' chief officials and their ability to not only gain funding from a parsimonious administration but also set their own objectives, free from the meddling of their colonial superiors. Over all, the record has been disappointing, Goss argues: if Indonesia has been and continues to be an important research site for tropical biologists, Indonesia's own contributions from the colonial period onward have been little more than a “footnote in the history of science.” For most of the past two hundred years, the study of natural history in the archipelago has been tightly linked to the agricultural economy on the one hand and limited to state-sponsored institutions on the other, marginalizing privately funded research as well as native expertise.
Goss offers some comparative perspective in his introduction and conclusion. He notes the imperial impetus given to classifying, understanding, and appropriating the natural world. Indonesia was part of a global enterprise in which Buitenzorg played an intermittently distinguished role. A chapter devoted to the twists and turns of the effort to acclimatize cinchona provides a case study of one of Buitenzorg's most important contributions to the plantation economy. Indeed, it would have been enlightening to compare these efforts with similar experiments in India and Ceylon, just as more comparative data on other tropical crops such as coffee, cassia, tea, and rubber would have enriched this work. For example, Perideniya, the chief botanical garden in Ceylon, is in many respects a counterpart to Buitenzorg. Both oscillated in their agendas between pure and applied science and both depended a great deal on the personalities of their directors at any given moment. Whether Perideniya's close ties to the state also crippled the independent growth of science in Ceylon/Sri Lanka would be an interesting avenue for a researcher as skilled as Andrew Goss to explore.
