The floracrats: Civil science, bureaucracy, and institutional authority in the Netherlands East Indies and Indonesia, 1840--1970.

This dissertation examines the construction of scientific expertise in a society without universities or learned academies, where funding was for over a century at the mercy of the colonial government. It focuses on professional botanists---the floracrats---and their management of a discipline that combined the seemingly incompatible aspects of pure and applied scientific knowledge. Unlike other intellectual histories of colonial science, this dissertation situates the development of colonial scientific practices within government offices. In so doing, it fundamentally reconceptualizes the role of colonial science in Indonesia, and seeks to make an original contribution to the study of transnational science. The narrative follows European botanists who starting in the 1840s moved to the Dutch colony drawn by the prospect of romantic exploration. By the end of the nineteenth century they learned it was only possible to be a government scientist by administering nature from behind a desk. Although this desk science curtailed their research opportunities, it also gave them the power to direct how colonial society tamed tropical nature, in matters ranging from agriculture to pedagogy. This dissertation argues that the floracrats maintained their scientific authority and careers by establishing botany as a civil science---knowledge capable of developing colonial society through universal principles. They reconciled their official duties to the state with their identity as members of the global scientific community, by casting scientific knowledge as foundational to the spreading of Western civilization in the East Indies. This study also explores the legacy of colonial plant biology for Indonesia, and the challenge that Indonesian botanists faced in the 1950s and 1960s establishing plant science as part of Indonesia's civic culture. The thesis is divided into three main parts that deal with the tension between public and state science in the nineteenth century; the rise and fall of bureaucratic science at the Botanical Gardens in Buitenzorg; and the emergence of a post-colonial biology as part of international science.Ph.D.Asian historyScience historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124412/2/3138159.pd