For my project, I will draw on the work of Alfred W. Crosby in Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (2004). In this seminal book, he defines his key concept of “ecological imperialism” as being based on the exploitation of “ecosystems, mineral resources, and human assets of whole continents outside the lands of the society making the jump” (xviii), and which emerged thanks to “European brutality, superior military technology, and capitalist encroachments” (xvi). Then, I would like to draw on the recent scholarship which focused on the notion of extractivism which has been a key element to understand the current environmental crisis. It is in the 16^th century that extractive endeavours on a global scale started to gain momentum with the development of capitalism and European colonial expansion.

On this topic, I am deeply influenced by the seminal work of Macarena Gómez-Barris in The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (2017) in which she argues that the main goal of her book is to “document geographies where coordinated forms of capitalist power advance, while also analysing the complexity of social ecologies and material alternatives proposed and proliferated by artists, activists, movements, submerged theorists, and cultural producers” (xv). Examining contemporary Latin American Indigenous knowledge and resistance, she connects racial capitalism and exploitative resource extraction to reveal the continuing impact of colonialism nowadays. I would like to use Gómez-Barris’s theoretical framework as a critical tool to analyse the beginning of such extractivism involving both Indigenous lands and population, and European colonial powers in early modernity.

Colonialism has been presented as closely connected to the history of botany, for instance by Banu Subramaniam in Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and The Scientific Legacies of Colonialism (2024). In this volume, Subramaniam intends to “tell the story of plant life on earth” (9) and to present it as “fractured” (10), “broken” (10) and “mutilated” while acknowledging it also implies “stories of winners and losers, competition and conquest, and also cooperation and care, symbioses and mutualisms, love and intimacy, solidarity and community?” (10). The natural environment and humankind cannot be separated, for their history have always been intertwined. Human politics and ecology thus deeply influence each other – as with the emergence of colonialism and the related reconfiguration of Indigeneity.

In their edited collection Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (2007), Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan emphasize the key concept of “colonial botany” that they define as follows: “[…] the study, naming, cultivation, and marketing of plants in colonial contexts—was born of and supported European voyages, conquests, global trade, and scientific exploration” (2). Moreover, they argue that “early modern botany both facilitated and profited from colonialism and long-distance trade, and that the development of botany and Europe’s commercial and territorial expansion are closely associated developments” (3).