Plant, planter, planted: new perspectives on bioprospecting under the Dutch East India Company (1600–1700)

Among historians of science, the instrumentalisation of natural knowledge under colonial trading companies such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC) has recently come under increased scrutiny. In these studies, humans are usually taken to be the planters, and crops the things that are being planted. This presentation reconsiders this conventional narrative. It will be argued that the dichotomy between planter and planted appears to have been experienced with much more ambiguity by those who tra