"Written by a leading scholar in the field of anticolonial feminist STS, Botany of Empire offers a beautiful guide that teaches the layers of anticolonial feminist approaches to science through the specificities of plants and botany. Combining a breadth of ambition with accessible, gorgeous writing, this book invites us to imagine a more just science in thought and feeling."
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Michelle Murphy, author of The Economization of Life
"Banu Subramaniam leads the reader on a lively trek across a historical landscape of colonial botany, narrating the ‘great men of science’ as not only relentlessly curious but conditioned by violent expansionism and misogyny. Botany of Empire is a compelling read for this Indigenous science studies scholar who stands on Linnaeus’s grave every time I am in Uppsala. My aim, like Subramaniam’s, is not to ‘cancel’ a revered European scientist who regretfully broke relations into taxa, but to stand against colonial ideas of universal knowledge and progressivism co-constituted with the elimination of diverse peoples, knowledges, and moral orders."
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Kim TallBear, Professor, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta
"Dwelling on the expansive field of botany, Banu Subramaniam imagines ecologies, biodiversity, and extra-human taxonomies as tethered to empire and open to decolonial revision. Botany of Empire is an exciting text that draws on and entwines feminist studies, science studies, queer studies, disability studies, and studies of colonialism in order to imagine both plant life and our collective livingness anew."
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Katherine McKittrick, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies, Queen's University
"Botany of Empire is an absorbing account of the many ways in which race, class, gender, and colonialism have shaped, and continue to influence, the plant sciences. This book will change the way you think about plants."
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Amitav Ghosh, author of The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis
