A Place for Plants: The Politics of Botanical Geography in East Central Europe, 1850–1930

This project studies the emerging science of botanical geography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor states, bringing together approaches from cultural history, political history, and the history of science. In the second half of the nineteenth century, botany gained legitimacy as a distinct branch of natural science. It was institutionalized through the creation of new botanical gardens and the establishment of university chairs. Naturalists in East Central Europe adapted, enriched, and advanced research developed in western European (colonial) centers of botanical knowledge to their regional contexts. These naturalists thus exchanged information and collaborated on larger projects with other Europeans. Yet they also worked locally, studying and collecting specimens from their regions (at times implicitly delimited by political boundaries). Mountainous spaces in particular—cultural, scientific, and political hinterlands—received increasing scientific attention. Mountains not only offered unique biodiversity to botanical collectors but were also spaces of increasing nationalist, cultural, and artistic agitation. How did naturalists come to define the geographical spaces where they collected, worked, and studied? (How) did knowledge about plants participate in the articulation or legitimation of competing visions of space in East Central Europe? How did shifting political borders after the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy shape the development of botanical research, scientific collecting, and mental mapping?