Laborious Transformations. Plants and politics at the Bogor Botanical Gardens

Abstract

Contributors to this theme issue examine the history of the life sciences at the Botanical Gardens in Bogor (Kebun Raya Bogor) in Indonesia. Each of the essays in this theme issue focusses on a major transformation that the garden, its networks, and staff underwent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Before summarizing individual contributions, this introductory essay familiarizes readers with more recent scholarship in the field. Taken together, the essays in our theme issue suggest that the practice of the life sciences at the Gardens can be best analyzed as the outcome of historical processes of coordination and competition in which different disciplines, communities, and networks not only in insular Southeast Asia but also other parts of the world played a formative role.