Vegetable Gardens versus Cash Crops: Science and Political Economy in the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India, 1820–40

Abstract

Abstract The goal of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India (founded in 1820) was to create a science for the cultivation of plants in India and use this science to increase agricultural production. This article tracks the ideas of this society in its early decades as it created a highly contested and changing discourse regarding agriculture in India. As the society was based in Calcutta, it had Bengali members who appropriated and modified these ideas according to their own social circumstances. In the first decade of its life, many members envisioned the project of ‘agricultural improvement’ as increasing the production of food and medicine for local consumption as well as agricultural commodities for export. Yet beginning in 1829, this mixed agri-horticultural vision began to change. British members complained that local gardening activities were not remunerative and so the society should focus more on agriculture for export. As a result, agriculture began to be more clearly defined as the large-scale production of commodities for export, separate from the science of horticulture, which concerned growing fruits and vegetables for local consumption. Horticulture increasingly became the lesser science and the society’s focus went towards agriculture for export. Many Bengali members remained more interested in the activities associated with horticulture, proceeding to develop an agri-horticultural knowledge which appropriated new ideas about gardening promoted by the society and combined them in new ways with gardening knowledge from other North Indian networks. This episode reveals the complex world of knowledge about plant cultivation even as the British created an English-language discourse of global capitalist agriculture.

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