This project funded by the Science, Technology & Society Program explores how foresters and botanists in British colonies around the Indian Ocean rim attempted to coordinate scientific forestry policies, introduce and grow similar trees, and, ultimately, create a new ecosystem spanning the entire Ocean rim. During this period, foresters and botanists planted millions of teak, rubber, pine, eucalyptus, palm, sisal, cinchona, and gutta percha trees in cities, plantations, and the countryside of colonies along the Indian Ocean rim. This period corresponds to the creation and then fragmentation of an Indian Ocean network of foresters, beginning with the founding of the Indian Forest Service in 1864 and ending with the decolonization of British East Africa in the early 1960s. Using state forestry records, private papers, environmental science, and maps in the United Kingdom and Australia, this dissertation critiques the assumptions of Alfred Crosby and Jared Diamond that the success of Old World plants in Australasia was ecologically predetermined. This dissertation attempts to find how scientists throughout the Indian Ocean socially constructed much of the landscape that we consider today as "natural."
A comparative historical assessment of long-term tree flows and forestry policies helps academics, environmental policy makers, and scientists to more comprehensively think about the existing forests -- especially those in the Indian Ocean -- in terms of being a constantly changing and constructed ecosystem. It also offers possibilities for constructing models of the changing ecosystems in the Indian Ocean, leading to more effective protection and conservation schemes.
