Cultivating Power: Botany and Empire in the Dutch East Indies, 1745–1942

Why did Buitenzorg, a small colonial town in Java, become one of the world's leading centres of tropical botany, and what does its rise reveal about the making of Dutch colonial rule?

Cultivating Power tells the story of how Buitenzorg emerged as the scientific centre of the Dutch East Indies. From the Botanic Garden and its surrounding institutions, botanical research expanded into mountain stations, laboratories, plantations, forest reserves, and agricultural experiment fields. The book traces how plants, scientific knowledge, and people moved through these networks, reshaping landscapes and linking Java to wider imperial and scientific worlds.

The title reflects the book's central argument. Cultivating power meant cultivating plants for scientific inquiry and commercial agriculture, but it also meant cultivating colonial authority through science. Botanical knowledge shaped decisions about crops, forests, labour, and land, becoming closely intertwined with the administration of the colony. At the same time, science remained deeply dependent on local expertise and on environments that colonial officials could never fully master.

To explain these relationships, the book introduces the concept of colonial verticality. Colonial science was organised through a spatial system that assembled and circulated people, plants, knowledge, and institutions along a vertical axis connecting coastal settlements, lowland administrative centres, mountain laboratories, plantation frontiers, and forest stations. Rather than treating mountains as the backdrop to colonial history, the book shows how differences in altitude, climate, and ecology became fundamental to the production of scientific knowledge and colonial governance.

Throughout this history, the environment and local labour remain central actors. Sundanese and Javanese guides, gardeners, collectors, herbarium workers, and cultivators sustained botanical research, while volcanic landscapes, tropical forests, plant diseases, and mountain climates shaped what colonial scientists could know and what they could never fully control. Colonial botany emerged through these encounters rather than through European expertise alone.

Drawing on archival research in Indonesia and the Netherlands, Cultivating Power offers a new interpretation of Dutch colonialism through the intertwined histories of science, environment, and empire.

Published by Cornell University Press on February 15, 2027.