Donal Thomas
Graduate Recipient, Department of History
Guiliano Fellow, Fall 2022
Knowledge Transfer from the Natural World of the Western Ghats and the Making of Imperial
Metropolitan Institutions, 1770-1905 (London and Kew, UK)
My research visit to the UK in the winter of 2023 was done with the support of the Edward Giuliano Global Fellowship from the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University. The Fellowship allowed me to visit British Library and British Museum in London and Kew Gardens, Richmond.
The visit to British Library helped me access the plethora of primary documents in the Asian and African Reading Room and Maps collections. I used a couple of the sources from these collections for my paper at the American Society for Environmental History Annual Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, from March 22-26, 2023. The collections at British Library I accessed includes revenue reports, letter, photographs, official correspondences, maps, etc. The access to Maps collections helped me to have a unique idea about various places in relation to tribal communities in South Asia and also to locate how various spaces and places developed over centuries with regard to trade and commerce. I was able to locate the early twentieth-century map of Munnar (British hill station during the colonial period) by combining various maps, which helped me to have a more nuanced understanding of the development of hill station in the Western Ghats and how the geography is marked according to the changing landscapes during the period. The revenue reports from various mountainous regions in South Asia during the British colonial period helped to understand how various resources were collected and how colonial administrative structures systematically codified the commodities for export to Britain and across the globe. The letters, including official correspondences from the collections, helped me to have more individual perspectives of various knowledge systems and resources and how the administrators valued them according to their needs and necessities.
The visit to Kew Gardens Archives and Library allowed me to get access to records in relation to floral knowledge of South Asia and also how systematically those resources are documented in relation to their usage. I was able to go through official correspondence between various Kew Gardens directors, including Joseph Dalton Hooker, and others with various officials in South Asia, including Robert Wight, Charles Dew, H. Cleghorn, and many others. These interactions helped to know how Kew Gardens was directly interested in South Asia's floral knowledge, especially in the Western Ghats. The official correspondence also helped locate certain floral varieties during the long nineteenth century. The travelogue that I accessed at Kew helped me to have a better understanding of the different ways in which the life of common people is intrigued by floral knowledge systems.
In short, the research trip to the UK opened the colonial depository of South Asian sources to my research, and the access to the documents helped to understand the imperial narratives of knowledge transfer. Thanks to Edward Giuliano Global Fellowship, without which the research trip would have never been possible.
The Guiliano Global Fellowship Program offers students the opportunity to carry out
research, creative expression and cultural activities for personal development through
traveling outside of their comfort zone.
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