“‘In order to dominate it’: Empire, Race, and Power in the Botanical Garden of Havana in the Nineteenth Century”

Conditions of imperial control, racialized slavery, and ecological crisis defined the expansion of Havana’s botanical garden over the first half of the nineteenth century. Because of these conditions, the garden served at various points in time as a site of spiritual contemplation and of medical utility, of increased sugar production and of direct opposition to big sugar. The contradictions in the ways in which various people understood Havana’s botanical garden to function played out on the earth itself. Plans for the garden’s layout over the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as descriptions of the space, reveal it as a palimpsest of the highest order.

The very future of Cuban slave society was spatialized on the grounds of the botanical garden. This was especially true in the 1830s when agricultural experimentation that looked towards the end of the system of racialized slavery were being carried out by enslaved workers who shared a bedroom wall with the garden’s head botanist. In this paper, I examine two key moments in the history of Havana’s botanical garden. These are the reforms made by Ramon de la Sagra in 1824 and the movement of the botanical garden to a new site in 1838. As I address, these were moments when related debates about the purpose of the garden, as well as of the future of Cuba itself, came to a head. At stake, I argue, was the very role of nature in empire.