Breadfruit itineraries

This chapter examines the ‘object itinerary’ of two leaves that are now preserved in the Herbarium of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. The leaves in question once belonged to breadfruit trees (Artocarpus altilis (Parkinson) Fosberg) which grew on the island of Mauritius in the early nineteenth century. The chapter will discuss the geographical route taken by the specimens to the collection in Scotland, and will examine some of the key sites in which specific knowledge cultures about the breadfruit developed: Tahiti, Mauritius and Scotland. Historians of science have now long accepted that knowledge is formed through movement. What we mean when we talk about movement, however, still needs to be conceptualised and contextualised more clearly. Taking seriously the points made by Alexander Bauer about the non-linearity of an object itinerary, this chapter considers the present resonances of the breadfruit as well as its past ones. The geographical and chronological itinerary followed by the physical specimens discussed here was very clearly defined by colonialism and slavery. But the knowledge cultures that developed about the breadfruit moved in very different directions: their cultural and intellectual impact transcends the spatial and temporal boundaries that historians conventionally place around their subjects.