Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen: Making L’Empereur’s Jardin in Early Modern South Asia

Abstract

In recent years there has been increasing interest in the strategies employed by Europeans for gathering natural-historical, ethnographic, and geographical knowledge beyond the confines of the metropolis in the context of European expansion. Academic attention has focused in two main directions. One examines the specificity of these modes of ‘field’ inquiry in contrast to the more common focus in science studies on knowledge making in the controlled setting of the laboratory.1 The other looks at the genre of ‘instructions to travellers’—often written by sedentary men of science in Europe—aimed at teaching travellers what to observe in foreign lands, how to regulate and standardize their gestures and techniques when collecting the requisite objects, and, finally, how to report on them.2

Full text

CHAPTER 1
Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants,
and Craftsmen: Making
L’Empereur’s Jardin in Early
Modern South Asia
Introduction
n recent years there has been increasing interest in the strategies
employed by Europeans for gathering natural-historical, ethno-
graphic, and geographical knowledge beyond the confines of the
metropolis in the context of European expansion. Academic attention
has focused in two main directions. One examines the specificity of
these modes of ‘field’ inquiry in contrast to the more common focus
in science studies on knowledge making in the controlled setting of the
laboratory.1 The other looks at the genre of ‘instructions to travel-
lers’—often written by sedentary men of science in Europe—aimed at
teaching travellers what to observe in foreign lands, how to regulate
and standardize their gestures and techniques when collecting the re-
quisite objects, and, finally, how to report on them.2
1See Henrika Kuklick and Robert E. Kohler, ‘Introduction’, in idem, eds,
Science in the Field, Osiris (2nd series), vol. 11 (Chicago & London: University
of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 1–14.
2See Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘Instructions for Travellers: Teaching the Eye to See’,
History and Anthropology, vol. 9 (1996), pp. 139–90; Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, ‘La
collecte du monde: voyage et histoire naturelle (fin XVIIème siècle—début
XIXème siècle)’, in Claude Blanckaert, Claudine Cohen, Pietro Corsi and Jean-
Louis Fischer, eds, Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire (Paris: Muséum
National d’Histoire Naturelle, 1997), pp. 163–96; and John Law, ‘On the Meth-
ods of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation and the Portuguese Route to
India’, in idem, ed., Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge?
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 234–63.
I

28 Relocating Modern Science
Although both approaches have opened a number of new and im-
portant questions for the history of science, each is riddled with serious
difficulties. Thus, by opposing the heterogeneous space of the field
sciences with the more uniform civilities of the laboratory sciences,
the former approach fails to examine the relationship between the
two spaces of knowledge making, between those ‘out there’ and their
sedentary colleagues who often played a crucial role in validating
knowledge claims made in the field. And, by focusing exclusively on
the corporeal and labelling techniques that metropolitan savants re-
commended to workaday travellers (usually seamen, ships’ surgeons or
merchants, and, sometimes, missionaries), the latter set of studies sug-
gest that it is enough to scrupulously follow instructions in order to
gain knowledge of the outside world. They thereby imply that the
sought-after natural-historical objects and knowledge were directly
accessible to the travellers, and that the whole project of collecting na-
ture was akin to present-day space engineers programming planetary
probes in order to retrieve relevant information from hostile environ-
ments. But the crucial difference between space probes and early-
modern travellers is that the latter mainly visited populated lands
and had to negotiate with indigenous peoples to find out about, and
obtain, objects that were often accessible only through their medi-
ation.
Many European men of science were well aware of this aspect, as
even a cursory reading of their instructions makes clear. Robert Boyle’s
(1627–91) General Heads for the Natural History of a Country (1692),
which he advertised as ‘the only sure Foundation of Natural Philoso-
phy’, is a classic of the genre. His instructions range from hydrographical
and topographical measurement, the reckoning of latitude and longi-
tude, ‘Specifick Gravity of the Air’, ‘Weights of the several Waters’, re-
cording astronomical phenomena, climate, and ‘Soyls ...Minerals,
Vegetables or Animals’ of the places visited, to the arts, mining and
metal extraction techniques, laws, agriculture, economy, and medi-
cine of their respective inhabitants—
both Natives and Strangers, that have settled there; particularly their
Stature, Shape, Features, Strength, Ingenuity, Dyet, Inclination, that seem
not due to Education. As to their Women, their Fruitfulness or Barrenness,
their easie or hard Labour, with their exercises and Dyet; the Diseases both

Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen 29
Men and Women are subject to, peculiar to themselves, compared with
their Dyet, Air &c. that do influence them.
They also included specific ‘Enquiries about Traditions, concern-
ing all particular things relating to [each] Country, as either peculiar
to it, or at least uncommon elsewhere.’ These countries included
‘Turky’, Poland, Hungary and ‘Transilvania’, Egypt, ‘Guiny’, Persia,
‘Suratte, &c.’ (which included the Indian subcontinent, Southeast
Asia, China, Japan and the Philippines), Virginia, Bermudas, ‘Guaiana’,
‘Brasil’ and the ‘Antisles (or Caribe Islands)’. In particular, Boyle
directs travellers to ‘enquire’ into the ‘Plants, Trees, Fruits, &c. with the
Peculiarities observable in them . . . and what Soyls they thrive best in.
What Animals, Terrestrial or Volatile, or Insects of all sorts they [the
inhabitants] produce, and to what Use applyed by [them], as to Meat,
Physick, Surgery, or Dying, &c.’3
As this passage implies, the role of the traveller was precisely to
report on the social—and economic—significance of natural-histori-
cal objects, especially of flora and fauna, bringing to light their anchor-
age in the human cultures that surrounded them. The acquisition of
this knowledge—hardly possible without the active participation of
indigenous collaborators—was seen as an inevitable first step towards
the commoditization of these objects within the regional and global
economies that the Europeans sought to enter and reconfigure. Be-
cause of its strategic importance, it must be mentioned that this type
of information was itself highly prized merchandise.4
3Robert Boyle, General Heads for the Natural History of a Country, Great or
Small, Drawn out for the Use of Travellers and Navigators (London: J. Taylor,
1692), quotes from pp. 1, 8, 9, 13. That knowledge is to be gained through ‘en-
quiry’ is explicitly stated in the same section, pp. 11–12. See also Francis Bacon,
‘Of Travel (1597)’, in idem, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed., James Spedding,
Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 volumes (London: Longman
& Co., 1861), pp. vi, 417–18; John Woodward, Brief Instructions for the Making
of Observations and Collections, in order for the Promotion of Natural History in all
Parts of the World (London, 1696).
4Benjamin Schmidt, ‘Inventing Exoticism: The Project of Dutch Geography
and the Marketing of the World’, in Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds,
Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe
(New York & London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 347–69.

30 Relocating Modern Science
To be sure, the interactive nature of knowledge gathering outside
the metropolis has not escaped the notice of at least some historians,
as attested to by recent research on the role of intermediaries in the
construction of natural knowledge, although mainly in the context of
the New World.5 Little attention has, however, been focused on the
other major contact zone—the Indian Ocean.
For the latter area, specific approaches and methods need to be
developed. Despite many similarities, European encounters with the
West and the East present significant differences, especially in the case
of knowledge formation. Attracted to the East initially by the lucrative
spice and luxury-commodity trade, Europeans discovered a world that
was, all said and done, familiar to them, one already dominated by
trade and the presence of Muslims, their perennial, yet well-known,
rivals. However, it was also a world in which they formed but one very
small commercial group among many long-established trading com-
munities of different racial, religious, and regional origins, who consti-
tuted an intricate and dynamic world of commerce—based largely on
botanical products—extending across the Indian Ocean.6 European
survival in the region thus depended on the development of an on-
going and durable relationship between their merchants, missionaries,
and travellers, and various regional agents—rulers, merchants, bank-
ers and interpreters, but also skilled workmen and savants. For in the
Indian Ocean world, specialized knowledge, particularly relating to
botany, medicine, and alchemy, was already formalized and circulated
from the Arabian peninsula to China within constituted specialized
communities, each with its own civility. And early-modern European
5 See Jesús Bustamente García, ‘Francisco Hernández, Plinio del Nuevo
Mundo: Tradición clásica, teoría nominal y sistema terminológico indígena en
una obra renacentista’, in Berta Ares Queija and Serge Gruzinski, eds, Entre dos
mundos: Fronteras culturales y agentes mediadores (Seville: Escuela de Estudios
Hispano-Americanos, 1997), pp. 243–68; James H. Merrell, Into the American
Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999);
Antonio Barrera, ‘Local Herbs, Global Medicines: Commerce, Knowledge, and
Commodities in Spanish America’, in Smith and Findlen, eds, op. cit., pp. 163–
81.6See Denys Lombard and Jean Aubin, eds, Asian Merchants and Businessmen
in the Indian Ocean and the China Sea (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000);
and Ashin Das Gupta, The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant 1500–1800
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen 31
physicians, surgeons, and, later, naturalists in the region readily ack-
nowledged this fact.
This has led at least one scholar to assert that early-modern Europ-
ean botanizing in South Asia consisted essentially of compiling Mid-
dle Eastern and South Asian ethno-botanical knowledge, ‘organized
on essentially non-European precepts’.7 However enticing—and re-
freshing vis-à-vis the received notion of botany being a European
preserve—this interpretation begs many important questions.8 What,
for a start, were ‘European’ and ‘non-European’ precepts of knowledge
in the early-modern world? How did Europeans and South Asians
develop working relationships in knowledge-making enterprises? What
was the nature of the wider material, economic, and symbolic trans-
actions between indigenes and Europeans within which these know-
ledge-making encounters took place? How did these relate to the
manufacturing and trading economies of the region? In what langu-
age(s) did they communicate? Was the knowledge that emerged a mere
compilation of local knowledges? What was the relationship between
this knowledge, its producers on the one hand, and metropolitan
European savants and academies on the other? Finally, were there sig-
nificant differences between the various European nations present in
the region in their relationship towards foreign knowledge practices?
Curiously, an unknown manuscript herbal held at the Muséum
National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and related documents scat-
tered among various French archives help shed new and valuable light
on these questions.
From a Forgotten Codex in a Paris Archive . . .
Under the title Ellemans botanique des plante du Jardin de Lorixa leur
vertu et quallite, tans conus que celle qui ne le sont pas avec leur fleur fruis
et grainne traduit de louria an frances (Botanical Elements of the Plants
7 Richard Grove, ‘Indigenous Knowledge and the Significance of South-
West India for Portuguese and Dutch Constructions of Tropical Nature’, Mod-
ern Asian Studies, vol. 30, no. 1 (1996), pp. 121–43.
8For the traditional perspective, see Isaac Henry Burkill, Chapters on the Hist-
ory of Botany in India (Calcutta: Botanical Survey of India, 1965); and Ray Des-
mond, The European Discovery of the Indian Flora (Oxford: Oxford University
Press for the Royal Botanic Gardens, 1992).

32 Relocating Modern Science
of the Flora of Orixa, Their Virtues and Qualities, Both Known and
Unknown, with Their Flowers, Fruits, and Seeds, Translated from the
Oriya into French) the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle’s
library in Paris holds a fourteen-volume folio herbal, twelve of which
contain 725 double-folio paintings of 722 plants species. The first two
volumes contain a description, in French, of each of these plants with
an index of their vernacular names transcribed in the Roman script and
a classification according to their medical and, sometimes, economic,
uses.9 In addition, the first volume of the manuscript contains a
‘Preface’, an ‘Avis au lecteur’ (Note to the Reader), and an intriguing
frontispiece depicting five human figures, a potted tree in the fore-
ground, and a Greco-Roman ruin in the background. The human fig-
ures are divided into two groups—three on the left, comprising an
artist painting the tree, a man sitting next to him and a woman carrying
plants in a basket on her head, and two on the right: an ascetic holding
a manuscript, and a European standing behind him. The style of the
frontispiece and the human figures it depicts, as well as that of the plant
paintings, leave no doubt as to the South Asian origins of the herbal.
But the library’s manuscript catalogue gives only two meagre bits of
information: its author is a certain L’Empereur—in all probability the
European in the frontispiece—and it dates from the eighteenth cen-
tury. If the catalogue is laconic, the manuscript is more forthcoming.
The title refers to a specific location in the Indian subcontinent: Jardin
de Lorixa means ‘Flora of Orixa’ (the common eighteenth-century
spelling for present-day Orissa). It also claims that the work is a trans-
la-tion from the Oriya into French. The volumes yield further clues.
Their similarity to accounting ledgers, the paintings, the French-
watermarked paper, and Indian parchment binding lead one to sur-
mise that the work was executed in a European trading settlement with
the requisite infrastructure, indigenous craftsmen, and other special-
ized communities.
From the ‘Preface’ and the ‘Note to the Reader’, we learn that their
author, although not a savant, was probably trained in medicine.
9Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (hereafter MNHN), Central Lib-
rary, Manuscripts collection, Mss. 1915, 1916, 1916bis, 1916ter, and 1917 to
1926: referred to hereafter as Jardin de Lorixa.

Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen 33
L’Empereur modestly states that ‘it was not with the ambition of rend-
ering it perfect’ that he commissioned the work: ‘I only thought of
making a start and leaving the glory of finishing it to whoever would
like to take it up.’ He concludes, ‘I would be happy if, through my ef-
fort and expenditure, some poor invalid finds relief—that is the only
Fig. 1: The frontispiece of the Jardin de Lorixa. © Bibliothèque Centrale,
Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris.

34 Relocating Modern Science
aim I had in undertaking this botanical treatise’—statements obvi-
ously directed to appeal to Catholic missionary sentiment.10
Fortunately, both trade and religious leads prove fruitful: following
them helps unearth a substantial correspondence in various collections
of commercial, scientific, and religious archives spread across France.11
Among the many stories these documents tell, the most remarkable is
the one concerning the conception, making, arrival in France, and
ultimate fate of the Jardin de Lorixa. Briefly, we learn that it was started
in Orissa in the late 1690s, completed in Bengal and shipped to Paris
in 1725. But to fully appreciate the story a few words about the French
presence in South Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are
necesssary.
. . .to Eastern India in the Seventeenth Century
Formally arriving only in 1664, with the foundation of the Compagnie
des Indes Orientales, the French were latecomers to Asia. Indeed, they
were the last of the major European powers to enter the Indian Ocean
trading world, over half a century after the Dutch and the English,
and more than 150 years after the Portuguese. However, unlike other
European companies, the Compagnie des Indes was set up by royal
edict, with capital raised from the royal family, courtiers, and finan-
ciers, and only reluctantly from France’s merchant communities. This
factor was to play a crucial role in all domains, including that of know-
ledge making and legitimization.12
The Indian subcontinent being the pivot of Asian maritime trade,
and inter-European rivalry the mainspring of its dynamism, the
French Company’s purpose in finding a foothold there was to obtain
those goods which were already being supplied to Europe by the Dutch
10 MNHN, Ms. 1915: ‘Preface’, f. IIIv. This passage and all following have
been translated by the present author.
11 The Archives Nationales, Paris (AN); the Centre des Archives d’Outre-
Mer, Aix-en-Provence (CAOM); the archives of the Laboratoire de Phanérogamie
(LP), MNHN; the archives of the Missions Étrangères de Paris, Paris (MEP);
and the archives of the Académie des Sciences, Paris (AS).
12 For a comprehensive history of the French in Asia, see Philippe Haudrère,
La Compagnie française des Indes au XVIIIe siècle: 1719–1795, 4 volumes (Paris:
Librairie de l’Inde, 1989).

Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen 35
and the English. Textiles, pepper, coffee, saltpetre and a range of items
covered by the term drogues formed the bulk of the cargoes bound for
France, occasionally varied by wild animals—such as rhinoceroses
for the royal menagerie—precious stones, books, and works of art. In
order to obtain these commodities the French settled in close proxi-
mity to other Europeans, initially on the west coast in Surat, then on
the east coast in Pondicherry, and finally in Chandernagore in Bengal,
close to the important Dutch and English townships of Chinsura and
Calcutta. As these settlements were on the Hooghly, the main but
hazardous distributary of the Ganges, the Europeans set up lodges in
the 1630s at the mouth of the great river, in Balasore in Orissa, in order
to house pilots to guide their ships upstream to their trading centres.
It was there, soon after the French established themselves in 1686, that
L’Empereur found employment as a surgeon to the Compagnie des
Indes.13
The Origins of the Jardin de Lorixa
Nicolas L’Empereur was born in Normandy around 1660. His writ-
ings and correspondence suggest that he received a reasonable ele-
mentary education. There is no record showing that he trained in any
medical or surgical academy in France. Instead, he must in all prob-
ability have enrolled as a surgeon’s apprentice on an East Indiaman—
a common way of entering the profession until the end of the eight-
eenth century.14 At the end of a ten-year apprenticeship, around 1688,
he finally earned the title of Surgeon Major and settled down to a
sedentary life. Unlike most of his fellow apprentices who went back to
the French provinces, however, L’Empereur sought to make his living
in the employ of the Compagnie des Indes and was posted at Balasore.
Here a decade later L’Empereur developed his plan for the herbal,
first, because the herbs and medicines Europeans normally carried
with them deteriorated at sea and lost their efficacy by the time they
arrived in India. Second, Europeans met with a multitude of hitherto
13 CAOM, Colonies, Série C2 115, f. 358.
14 Claude Chaligne, ‘Chirurgiens de la Compagnie des Indes. Histoire du
service de santé de la Compagnie, 1664–1793’, unpublished doctoral disserta-
tion, Faculté de Medecine, Université de Paris V, 1961, pp. 42–6.

36 Relocating Modern Science
unknown diseases in these distant, tropical climes. Third, the number
of medicinal plants, traditionally known to Europeans was relatively
small, leading them to look for new remedies overseas.15 It is important
to note that maintaining health at sea was a major problem for Europ-
eans until as late as the nineteenth century. Indeed, out of the 120,000
Frenchmen who sailed to the East between 1664 and 1789, whether
as ordinary sailors or important officials, 35,000 died during the voy-
age.16 In 1698, for instance, the very year that L’Empereur conceived
of his scheme, a French naval squadron was ravaged by disease in the
Bay of Bengal, losing over 600 men within days, including almost all
its surgeons and medics.17 L’Empereur reported on this catastrophe to
his friend Gabriel Delavigne (1657–1710), who had returned to Paris
from Asia the previous year to head the powerful Société des Missions
Étrangères de Paris, a Catholic order set up by the French crown in
1664 in order to proselytize Asians. He went on to describe his plan
to buy ‘all the books on medicine that the people here have and find
out how they use them. I plan to translate these into French so that we
know all the cures, great and small, that are as yet unknown to Europ-
eans. We will thereby be able to constitute a library of medical works
for India as well as a pharmacy.’18 The latter was all the more important
because ‘Indians usually compose their remedies themselves as and
when they need them. There are no druggists because it is not worth
their while except in Surat in Gujarat where one finds drugs imported
by sea from far and wide.’19 A couple of years later, he elaborated his
scheme: ‘This work will be of considerable size and, once printed,
nothing [of Indian medicine] will be left unknown to the European
surgeon.’20
15 MNHN, Ms. 1915: ‘Preface’, f. IIIr.
16 Chaligne, op. cit., Dedication and p. 85. See also John Joyce Keevil, Charles
Christopher Lloyd and Jack Leonard Sagar Coulter, Medicine and the Navy,
1200–1900, 4 volumes (Edinburgh & London: E. & S. Livingstone, 1957–63),
vol. 2, pp. 1649–1714.
17 Anne Kroell, ‘Une escadre décimée par la maladie dans le Golfe du Bengale
en 1698’, Chronique d’histoire maritime, vol. 16 (1987), pp. 24–35.
18 MEP, V 959, f. 153: L’Empereur to Delavigne, 20 January 1699.
19 MNHN, Ms. 1915, ‘Avis au lecteur’, ff. IVr.
20 MEP, V 990, f. 533: L’Empereur to Delavigne, 6 January 1701.

Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen 37
L’Empereur was, of course, not the first European to conceive such
a plan. Already, during the sixteenth century, a number of Portuguese
had begun gathering material on Asian natural history for similar
reasons. The best known of these were Garcia da Orta (c.1500–c.1568)
and Cristovão da Costa (or Christoval Acosta) (c.1515–c.1592) both
of whom had spent many years on the Malabar coast. It is significant
that the first non-religious book to be published in the Portuguese
colony of Goa was da Orta’s Coloquios dos simples e drogas...da
India . . . in 1563—so strategically important was Asian botanical
knowledge for Europeans.21 It was almost immediately translated into
Latin (1567) by Charles de l’Escluse (Carolus Clusius), perhaps the
most eminent botanist of the sixteenth century and founder of the
Leiden botanical garden.
Almost immediately upon establishing themselves in the Indian
Ocean, the Dutch Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) had
set up in Batavia (present-day Jakarta) a surgeon’s shop in the 1610s,
followed by a proto-botanical garden to grow medicinal plants brought
from various parts of South East Asia. In the 1670s, the Dutch Com-
mander of Malabar, Hendrik Adriaan Van Reede tot Drakenstein
(1636–91), had a gigantic work commissioned on the flora of this
region.22 Its pen-and-ink-wash drawings of some 720 species were
accompanied by a detailed description of each. The herbal was pub-
lished, partly posthumously, under the title of Hortus Indicus Mala-
baricus in twelve folio volumes in Amsterdam between 1678 and 1693
and was soon to become the standard reference work for the flora of
south-western India. Indeed, Van Reede’s work, and that of Paul Her-
mann (1646–95)—another Dutchman—on Ceylon, were to form
21 Garcia da Orta, Coloquios dos simples e drogas he cousas mediçinais da India
e assi d’algunas frutas achadas nella onde se tratam algunas cousas tocantes a
mediçina pratica e outras cousas boas pera saber compostos pello Dor. Garcia Dorta
(Goa, 1563); and Christoval Acosta, Tractado de las drogas y medicinas de las Indias
Orientales, con sus plantas debuxadas al bivo (Burgos, 1578).
22 Van Reede’s family name has been variously spelt. I adopt the form used in
Heniger’s authoritative biography: Johannes Heniger, Hendrik Adriaan Van
Reede tot Drakenstein (1636–1691) and Hortus Malabaricus: A Contribution
to the History of Dutch Colonial Botany (Rotterdam & Boston: A.A. Balkema,
1986).

38 Relocating Modern Science
Linnaeus’s main sources for the flora of Asia.23 Mention must also be
made of another VOC medic, Georg Eberhard Rumpf or Rumphius
(1627–1702), who spent a large part of his life botanizing in the
Molucca Islands, gaining renown as Plinus Indicus. The Dutch used
their knowledge of the tropical flora of Asia to transfer plants to stra-
tegic stations in the region, like the Cape of Good Hope, Batavia, and
Ceylon, in order to provide a distributed stock of medicaments, fresh
vegetables, timber for ship-building and repair, and commercial crops
like the areca palm for the regional market.24
The English, too, were busy collecting Asian plants and sending
them back to London with whatever details they could gather of their
therapeutic and other properties, sometimes even in local languages.25
By the mid-seventeenth century both the Dutch and the English Com-
panies had supplemented Asian luxury goods and spices with a vast
range of exotic plants for sale on European medicinal markets.26
Dutch and English presence in Balasore, and perennial inter-
European rivalry, played no small role in spurring L’Empereur to
23 Paul Hermann’s Herbarium is now held at the Natural History Museum,
London. For the VOC’s interest in scientific knowledge, see Johan Leonard
Blussé and Ilonka Ooms, eds, Kennis en Compagnie: De Vereigde Oost-Indische
Compagnie en de moderne Wetenshap (Amsterdam: Balans, 2002). More gener-
ally, see Kapil Raj, ‘Eighteenth-Century Pacific Voyages of Discovery, “Big
Science”, and the Shaping of an European Scientific and Technological Culture’,
History and Technology, vol. 17, no. 2 (2000), pp. 79–98.
24 See Peter Boomgaard, ‘The VOC Trade in Forest Products in the Seven-
teenth Century’, in Richard Grove, Vinita Damodaran and Satpal Sangwan, eds,
Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 375–95.
25 See Samuel Browne, ‘An Account of Part of a Collection of Curious Plants
and Drugs, lately given to the Royal Society by the East India Company’, Philo-
sophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vols 20, 22, 23 (1700–1), pp. 313–35,
579–94, 699–721, 843–58, 933–46, 1007–22, 1055–65, 1251–65, 1450–60;
another surgeon, Edward Bulkley (1651–1714), sent home at least five volumes
of dried plants, fruits, and drugs, with their local names sometimes transcribed
in local characters. These are preserved in the Sloan Herbarium, Natural History
Museum, London.
26 See Harold J. Cook, ‘Physicians and Natural History’, in Nicholas Jardine,
James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary, eds, Cultures of Natural History (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 91–105, especially p. 95.

Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen 39
embark on his ambitious project. ‘While we [the French] ...are the
poorest’, he complained to Delavigne, ‘the English flourish through
their trade everywhere.’27 In 1706 L’Empereur moved as senior sur-
geon to Chandernagore in Bengal, the most important French settle-
ment in South Asia at the time. He was now at the nerve centre of
European activity in eastern India and could report on it closely. ‘The
English send a large quantity of calumba wood to England each year’,
he writes to Antoine de Jussieu (1686–1758), professor at the Jardin
du Roi in Paris, ‘as they have taken the trouble to test it and spare
no means to obtain all that is curious.’ Or again: ‘The Dutch buy 300
pounds of redovar [Telugu for spurge wort] each year, which they ship
to Batavia for their own use, as well as to Europe.’28
While it was relatively easy to report on rivals’ exports, knowledge
of the properties and uses of these botanical products was difficult to
obtain from fellow Europeans, who did everything in their power to
keep it secret or to mislead the others. Thus, John Ovington (1653–
1731), an English chaplain at Surat in the 1690s, was sceptical about
the Dutch account of the propagation of nutmeg. ‘They relate a pas-
sage somewhat strange and surprising concerning the nature of the
nutmeg-tree’, he writes,
that it is never planted, and if it be it never thrives; but such of them as
fructify and arrive at perfection, arise from a ripe nutmeg swallowed whole
by a certain bird in those islands, which disgorges it again without digesting
it, and this falling to the ground with that slimy matter it brought along
with it, takes root and grows a useful tree: But this may be a subtle contrived
story of the Dutch, to keep men from endeavouring to transplant them.29
Each nation spared no efforts to spy on the others. The Jesuit, Guy
Tachard (1651–1712), Louis XIV’s savant-ambassador to Siam in the
1680s, met Van Reede (who was at the time investigating the dysfunc-
tions of the VOC in the Indian Ocean) several times during his fifteen-
day halt at the Cape of Good Hope in June 1685. Tachard wrote a long
27 MEP, V 958, f. 207: L’Empereur to Delavigne, 4 December 1702.
28 MNHN, LP, GGA/52766/1: L’Empereur to Antoine de Jussieu, 25 De-
cember 1729.
29 John Ovington, A Voyage to Suratt in the Year 1689 (London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1929, originally published 1696), p. 99.

40 Relocating Modern Science
report on the latter’s progress in preparing a Hortus Africus (sic) along
the lines of his Hortus Malabaricus. He even managed to entice one of
Van Reede’s draftsmen, Hendrik Claudius, to hand him the report of
an expedition into the interior of South Africa, a map, and some draw-
ings of plants and animals made in the process. Back in France, he lost
no time in publishing the material in his own memoirs.30 The in-
discretion cost Claudius his job, disgrace, and banishment from the
Cape colony.31
Ultimately, in order to garner natural knowledge, Europeans had to
work their way into specialized local networks. Thus, Garcia da Orta
who, besides practising medicine, was also a trader—chiefly in materia
medica and jewels—and shipowner, depended chiefly on his Asian
medical and trading partners for his knowledge, and on a vast network
of paid correspondents and agents who sent him plants and seeds from
all over Asia.32 And it was as commander of the Dutch possessions
in Malabar that Van Reede, who was not instructed in medicine or
botany, used his relations with the Raja of Cochin and his institutional
authority to mobilize the various human resources of the colony to
make the Hortus Malabaricus.
Making the Jardin de Lorixa
In his ‘Note to the Reader’, L’Empereur explains how he obtained his
botanical knowledge:
There are fakirs who travel all their lives and many have a lot of wisdom.
However, it is difficult to get them to share any of it, unless you know them
intimately and offer them alms. Otherwise, . .. they inform you coldly
that they are not interested in money. But I have been friendly with two of
30 Guy Tachard, Voyage au Siam, des peres Jesuites, envoyez par le roy aux Indes
et à la Chine. Avec leurs observations astronomiques, et leurs remarques de Physique,
de Géographie, d’Hydrographie, d’Histoire (Paris, 1686), pp. 87–112.
31 Mary Gunn and Lesley Edward Wostall Codd, Botanical Exploration of
Southern Africa (Cape Town: Botanical Research Institute/A.A. Balkema, 1981),
p. 118.
32 Augusto da Silva Carvalho, ‘Garcia d’Orta. Comemoração do quarto
centenário da sua partida para a India em 12 de Março de 1534’, Revista da Uni-
versidade de Coimbra, vol. 12, no. 1 (1934), pp. 61–246, particularly pp. 103,
126. See also Charles Ralph Boxer, Two Pioneers of Tropical Medicine: Garcia

Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen 41
them for twelve or fifteen years and through them I meet other passing
fakirs. Whenever I find a simple, they instruct me about its properties and
uses.33
In a letter, he gives further details: ‘The fakirs who have the best
remedies come every winter to bathe in the Ganges. By giving them
something and speaking to them in [Hindustani], directly without
interpreters, they let you into their secrets. It was a fakir who thus
taught me the great remedy for epilepsy.’34
In addition to his duties as surgeon major and member of the Coun-
cil of Chandernagore, L’Empereur set himself up in private trade,
selling uncut emeralds from South America bought for him in Europe,
became part-owner of a small ship and bought and sold property for
profit.35 His daily experience with locally available simples convinced
him of their efficacy and he began purchasing indigenous books on
medicine through his peripatetic friends.36 These works, which he
informs us ‘are very difficult to obtain’,37 circulated most commonly
in the form of palm-leaf manuscripts in the various vernaculars of
the subcontinent, from the Dravidian languages of the South to the
Sanskrit-based ones of the North. Judging from the plant names in the
Jardin de Lorixa, some, like china malli (small jasmine), are clearly in
Tamil. But L’Empereur seems not to be aware of this linguistic diver-
sity, considering all his material to be in Oriya which, he declares, he
translated into French.38 The process was, however, more complex. By
his own admission, L’Empereur did not know Oriya: he got everything
translated into Hindustani, the main language of intercourse between
Europeans and South Asians in the region. It was this that he himself
d’Orta and Nicolás Monardes (London: The Hispanic Luso-Brazilian Councils,
1963).
33 MNHN, Ms. 1915: ‘Avis au lecteur’, ff. IVv–Vr.
34 CAOM, F5 19: L’Empereur to the Abbé Raguet, 20 January 1727.
35 MEP, V 990, ff. 533, 539: L’Empereur to Delavigne, 6 January and 29 Jan-
uary 1701, respectively; and CAOM, Inde, Notariat de Chandernagore, O 2:
Power of Attorney, dated 7 September 1712.
36 MEP, V 957, f. 153 and V 990, f. 533: L’Empereur to Delavigne, 20 January
1699 and 6 January 1701, respectively.
37 MNHN, Ms. 1915: ‘Avis au Lecteur’, IVr.
38 MNHN, Ms. 1915: Title page and Index.

42 Relocating Modern Science
then undertook to translate into French—‘a tedious task’, he writes,
‘except for me since I speak Hindustani.’39
Yet not all the descriptions came from written texts. As mentioned
earlier, L’Empereur also acquired medicinal plants, identifying them
with the help of his ascetic friends. He had employed a number of gard-
eners whom he sent at considerable cost to the mountains and forests,
sometimes more than 300 miles away, to bring back plants of medici-
nal and economic interest.40 In time, he also established trade links
with merchants as far away as Nepal, who would send him valuable
plants. Some of these were unknown to the fakirs, leading him to start
experimenting on local patients with compounds he himself pro-
duced. ‘Monsieur Noguest [a French missionary suffering from lep-
rosy] did not want to take the remedy that I wanted to give him’, he
complains to Delavigne. ‘I had sent it to him after having successfully
tried it out on a man from the country festered with ulcers. Indeed, I
have treated a number of others to observe the different effects of this
remedy.’41
L’Empereur organized his descriptions in a standardized format,
starting with a physical description of each plant, its roots, flower,
fruit, and seed, its habitat, and finally its properties and uses. But
not all the plants were medicinal. Some were dyes, others aromatics,
while a few had no apparent use at all. Some were even exotic—like the
papaya, chili, custard apple and potato—introduced from South
America in the sixteenth century by the Portuguese. However, L’Empe-
reur, like other Europeans, did not distinguish between local and
exotic varieties: he gives the distinct impression that they form part of
the region’s traditional flora. This is certainly not because they were not
aware of plant transfer, as they themselves were involved in moving
flora around the Indian Ocean—if not from the Americas to Asia. Ins-
tead, their purpose was to catalogue the indigenous uses of the plants
in each region. The fact that within a century these new additions to
the local fauna had already found therapeutic and economic uses is an
39 MEP, V 990, f. 533: L’Empereur to Delavigne, 6 January 1701.
40 MNHN, LP, GGA/52766/1: L’Empereur to Antoine de Jussieu, 25 De-
cember 1729.
41 MEP, V 957, f. 153: L’Empereur to Delavigne, 20 January 1699.

Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen 43
interesting indication of the dynamism of the region’s own specialized
communities.
While collecting medical texts and plants, L’Empereur also set
about employing local artists to draw and paint each plant, with its
flowers and fruits, and a cross-sectional representation of the seeds at
the bottom. Chandernagore being a major trading port, tens of thou-
sands of Asian merchants, interpreters, bankers, and craftsmen worked
for the European export market.42 Many were painters who earned
their livelihood executing floral designs on the painted cloth that
formed one of the main Indian exports to Europe. L’Empereur thus
found it ‘easy to get natives to draw the plants. The paper and other
materials cost a lot more.’43 The 725 paintings on double folio sheets,
pasted on separate slips, were finally bound into twelve volumes.
As the above account suggests, the Jardin de Lorixa is not a trans-
lation of indigenous texts in a purely linguistic sense. Furthermore, it
differs from Indian palm-leaf materia medica in that the latter do not
describe the plants, but enumerate their properties and uses and, above
all, contain no illustrations. There was, of course, an established tradi-
tion, since the late sixteenth century, of illustrating natural history
memoirs and albums for the South Asian nobility. The floral borders
and stylized plant representations from these very soon found their
way into a number of pictorial arts, from cloth printing and wall paint-
ings to illustrations of popular tales and religious epics, but not into
medical practitioners’ vade mecums.44
The typically Indian style of the paintings and L’Empereur’s own
claims to having simply translated Oriya works notwithstanding, the
42 See Monique Dussolin, ‘Etude d’un groupe social: les Européens à Chander-
nagor, 1ère moitié du XVIIIe siècle’, unpublished dissertation maîtrise, Université
de Paris VII, 1971, pp. 60–90, especially pp. 67–8.
43 MNHN, LP: GGA/52766/1: L’Empereur to Antoine de Jussieu, 25 De-
cember 1729.
44 For further details on illustrated palm-leaf manuscripts, see Jeremiah P.
Losty, Krishna. A Hindu Vision of God: Scenes from the Life of Krishna Illustrated
in Orissan and Other Eastern Indian Manuscripts in the British Library (London:
The British Library, 1980); and John Guy, Palm-Leaf and Paper: Illustrated
Manuscripts of India and Southeast Asia (Melbourne: National Gallery of
Victoria, 1982).

44 Relocating Modern Science
Jardin is also a recognizably European botanical work in its general
organization and presentation: it is a hybrid work containing a num-
ber of disparate elements reconfigured into a new homogeneity. Of
course, L’Empereur was no medical neophyte and knew the conven-
tions of European medico-botanical treatises, but, as remarked upon
earlier, there was a substantial corpus of such works that had been
produced in Asia and it would be interesting to examine the relation-
ship of the Jardin with this corpus.
The Jardin de Lorixa and the Hortus Malabaricus
The most obvious candidate is Van Reede’s renowned Hortus Mala-
baricus, the last volume of which appeared just a few years before
L’Empereur embarked on his own scheme. In addition to their remark-
ably similar formats and number of plant descriptions, they bear an
uncanny resemblance in a number of other ways.
The first similarity concerns the heterogeneity of the agents in-
volved in their construction. Like L’Empereur, Van Reede employed
several different specialists—a council of at least four physicians from
the Malabar coast to supervise the collection of plants, help identify
them and provide information on their medicinal uses, local arbori-
culturists and gardeners, a Luso-Indian translator, and a team of Dutch
draftsmen. In the Preface to Volume 3 of the Hortus Malabaricus, a
volume dedicated to the Raja of Cochin, he describes the construction
of his herbal:
By my orders, Brahmin and other physicians made lists of the best known
and most frequently occurring plants in their languages. On this basis,
others classified the plants according to the season in which they attracted
notice for their leaves or flowers or fruit. This seasonal catalogue was then
given to experts in plants, who were entrusted, in groups of three, with the
collection of the plants with their leaves, flowers, and fruit, for which they
even climbed the highest tops of trees. Three or four draftsmen, who stayed
with me in a convenient place, would accurately depict the living plants as
the collectors brought them. To these pictures a description was added,
nearly always in my presence.45
45 Van Reede, Hortus Indicus Malabaricus, vol. 3 (1682), p. viii.

Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen 45
The descriptions were then translated from the numerous local
languages and dialects into Portuguese by a Luso-Indian interpreter,
Emanuel Carneiro, and finally rendered into Latin, the language in
which the work was ultimately published.46 In Holland the descrip-
tions were appended to engravings derived from the original ink-and-
wash drawings of the plants and published in twelve volumes between
1678 and 1693. In order to lend credibility to the whole work, Van
Reede included declarations engraved in their original scripts from
each of the principal indigenous physicians and the Luso-Indian trans-
lator, testifying to the veracity of their respective contributions.
The Hortus Malabaricus also contains two other engravings execut-
ed in Holland: Van Reede’s portrait and a frontispiece. This portrays
a vast tropical garden, in the centre of which stands an ornamental
summer house with two caryatids bearing an entablature whose
tympanum is inscribed with the title of the work. In the foreground,
beneath an arched pergola, sits the (apocryphal) goddess of Indian
botany, holding a rake with a pruning knife at her feet, while four knee-
ling Malayali cherubs on the left offer her a potted tree.
At first sight, this engraving looks very different from the painted
frontispiece of the Jardin de Lorixa. Any similarity seems to stop at the
way the plants and human groups are placed in both: the central potted
tree, the Malayali cherubs/group of artists, the goddess of botany/
fakir, all under a pergola/an arch made by two flowering trees, a clas-
sical summer house/Greco-Roman ruin. However, on turning to the
woman carrying plants in a basket on her head, we discover that she
is a replica of the left caryatid of the summer house in the Hortus Mala-
baricus. L’Empereur’s artists clearly had access to this work, but they
tell a very different story from the allegory imagined by the Dutch en-
gravers sitting in faraway Holland. In the same way as the caryatid
carrying a sheaf of corn is brought to life as a real woman carrying in
the plants to be painted and described, so too do all the other figures
of the Hortus take on a real existence as the different actors involved in
the making of the Jardin. The kneeling Malayali cherubs are metamor-
phosed into artists; the goddess into a fakir wielding his palm-leaf
manuscripts instead of a rake and a pruning knife; the pergola into
46 For more details on the making of the Hortus Malabaricus, see Heniger, op.
cit., pp. 144–51.

46 Relocating Modern Science
Fig. 2: The frontispiece of van Reede’s Hortus Malabaricus.
© Bibliothèque Centrale, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris.

Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen 47
an arch formed by flowering trees, inspired from traditional Indian
paintings and embroidery; and the ornamental summer house into a
Greco-Roman ruin. The central tree is now planted in a Chinese pot—
a witness to the lively intra-Asian trade—and serves to demarcate the
different groups, the manual workers to the left and the ‘cerebrals’ to
the right. Thus, L’Empereur, as the patron, finds himself in front of the
ruin, just above the Brahmin.
A close examination of the Hortus further confirms that it provided
the template for European botanical conventions. For it is important
to note that while painting floral motifs was the main livelihood of
Indian artists, their painted calicoes did not, and were not meant to,
respect any botanical conventions. These required, for instance, that
seeds be shown apart, whole and laterally dissected. Flowers were also
to be shown separately and roots were to appear with the plant. Not
only do the paintings in the Jardin respect these conventions, some
of them are more or less directly inspired by the engravings of the
Hortus Malabaricus: as, for example, the banana, the papaya and the
Fig. 3: The banana tree in the Jardin de Lorixa. © Bibliothèque Centrale,
Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris.

48 Relocating Modern Science
jackfruit.47 This, however, does not mean that L’Empereur’s artists
mecha-nically copied the illustrations from the printed book: the very
fact that they coloured their illustrations, getting the colours of all
parts right each time—the Hortus Malabaricus was in black and
white—removes all doubt on the matter. Indeed, the artist’s hand
knew how to render the variety and subtlety of these colours and to
convert the engraver’s hatching into colour variations. Besides, many
like Strychnos Nux Vomica are very differently represented in the two
works.48 Moreover, the vast majority of the plants described respec-
tively in the two works are different, given that they referred to two
regions of different climes and over a thousand miles apart. Once the
local artists had understood what was wanted of them, they could
follow the drift without having to directly copy from a ‘pattern-book’.
47 Cf. Jardin de Lorixa, vol. 3 (MNHN, Ms. 1917), plates 18, 19, 20, 21 and
22; Hortus Malabaricus, vol. 1, figures 12, 13, 14 and 15; vol. 3, figures 26, 27
and 28.
48 Cf. Jardin de Lorixa, vol. 4 (MNHN, Ms. 1918), plate 9, and Hortus
Malabaricus, vol. 1, figure 37.
Fig. 4: The banana tree in the Hortus Malabaricus.
© Bibliothèque Centrale, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris.

Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen 49
Fig. 5: Nux vomica as represented in the Jardin de Lorixa.
© Bibliothèque Centrale, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris.
This conforms to what is al-ready commonly known of the capacity
of Indian weavers and painters to execute floral patterns shown them
by their foreign clientele into the chintzes and palampores that formed
the staple export of Bengal and the Coromandel coast in the period.49
49 On the circulation of floral and scenic patterns between Europe and India,
and their incorporation into Indian cloth painting, see M.K. Brett, ‘Indian
Painted and Dyed Cottons for the European Market’, in Pratapaditya Pal, ed.,
Aspects of Indian Art (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1972), pp. 167–71.

50 Relocating Modern Science
Fig. 6: Van Reede’s representation of Nux vomica.
© Bibliothèque Centrale, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris.
In this respect, it is interesting to note the similarity between the vers-
atility of these artists and the engravers working for European publish-
ing houses.
The verbal descriptions in the two herbals only loosely resemble
each other in that they systematically describe the different parts of the
plant, its flowers, fruit, seeds and roots, its habitus and habitat, before
giving their properties and uses—by then a well established conven-
tion in European botany. L’Empereur, however, systematically gives
the dimensions of each plant in feet and inches and his account of
the properties and uses is markedly different from that of Van Reede.
But the latter transcribes the local names of the plants in the Roman
script and also gives both the Malayalam names, in the Aryaezuthu and
Arabic scripts, and the Konkani names in Nagari; L’Empereur, as
noted earlier, only records the local names he gathers (mostly, but not
always, in Oriya) in the Latin script. And while the Frenchman bor-
rows a hot/cold characterization of the plants from South Asian
medical traditions, Van Reede evokes their effects on bodily humours.

Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen 51
Fig. 7: Early-eighteenth-century painted tent panel from eastern
India with a floral pattern similar to the painted bedspreads that
formed the staple export of the region to Europe.

52 Relocating Modern Science
Neither herbal gives the exact composition of remedies, stopping at a
description of the uses to which the respective indigenous populations
put the different parts of each plant. L’Empereur explicitly states that
he ‘do[es] not describe the dosage because they [Indian physicians] do
not weigh the drugs. Only experience can teach one how to administer
the medicines.’50 Furthermore, while L’Empereur is a professional sur-
geon, Van Reede is a medical neophyte. Finally, while one uses French,
obviously for his compatriots, the other publishes his work in Latin,
the lingua franca of Europe’s savant elites but a language Van Reede
himself does not master!
L’Empereur’s Jardin Comes to Paris . . .
L’Empereur was confident of being suitably rewarded for his entrepre-
neurship. Already, in 1698, he had sent samples of his work to Paris
with Delavigne, hoping he would find a suitable patron. The latter did
not succeed in making much headway and, by 1701, L’Empereur’s
impatience was palpable. ‘No one shall have my work unless I make a
suitable profit from it’, he wrote to Delavigne, informing him that he
had started looking for alternative patronage: he was sending some
samples of his work to a (mysterious) ‘Monsieur Petit’ in London and
to his brother’s friend in Dol, a retired canon who had once been tutor
to the sons of Guy-Crescent Fagon (1638–1718), Louis XIV’s per-
sonal physician and the head of the Jardin du Roi in Paris.51 L’Empereur’s
indefatigable efforts did at some stage pay off. In 1719, through the
good offices of the influential Abbé Jean-Paul Bignon (1662–1743),
a member of the Académie des Sciences, editor of the Journal des
Savants, and the King’s librarian, L’Empereur received two gold
medals, ‘one of Louis XIV and the other of the Regent’, as a token of
royal patronage for the project and ‘a promise to be suitably rewarded
upon completing the work.’52
The flora was finally completed in 1725, and L’Empereur shipped
it to the Académie des Sciences in Paris along with a wonder remedy
for epilepsy. He was now 65 and eagerly looked forward to retiring on
a sizeable reward. L’Empereur had lost his job with the Compagnie des
50 MNHN, Ms. 1915: ‘Avis au lecteur’, f. IVv.
51 MEP, V 990, f. 539: L’Empereur to Delavigne, 29 January 1701.
52 CAOM, F5A 19, ff. 83r–84v: L’Empereur to Abbé Raguet, 20 January
1727.

Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen 53
Indes, and had spent his every last penny on this gigantic work—so
much so that he was reduced to bankruptcy and begging.53 The
volumes and remedy reached safely and were handed over for expert
examination to Antoine de Jussieu, a member of the Académie, profes-
sor of botany at the Jardin du Roi, and the Compagnie des Indes’s bota-
nical expert. L’Empereur, however, received no acknowledgement,
let alone material advantage. After a couple of unanswered letters to
Jussieu,54 he began complaining about the latter’s behaviour to the
directors of the Compagnie and to his numerous correspondents in
Parisian high society—among others, Charles-François de Cisternay
Du Fay (1698–1739) who was head of the Académie des Sciences and
of the Jardin du Roi (1732–9), the Comte de Maurepas who was
minister of the navy, the Abbé Bignon, and the Abbé Gilles-Bernard
Raguet (1668–1748), ecclesiastical director of the Compagnie des
Indes as well as Louis XV’s personal confessor and geography teacher.55
In 1733, the Compagnie reinstated L’Empereur as visitor of its go-
downs in Chandernagore, but, in spite of a number of intercessions on
his behalf, Jussieu stubbornly refused to pay him his due, although he
did admit that the various remedies were indeed effective.56
Nicolas L’Empereur died in anonymity in Chandernagore on
13 February 1742, aged 80, cared for to the last by his Bengali doctor,
to whom he left part of his meagre savings.57
53 CAOM, Colonies, C2 74, ff. 45r–50v; also CAOM, F5A 19, ff. 135r–137r:
Pierre Christophe Lenoir to Abbé Raguet, 25 September 1728.
54 Only a few of these letters have survived. See MNHN, LP, GGA/52766/
1 & 2: L’Empereur to Jussieu, 25 December 1729 and 25 November 1733,
respectively; and AS, Dossier Antoine de Jussieu, ‘Extraits de la correspondance
d’Antoine de Jussieu’, f. 22.
55 See CAOM, C2 285, ff. 11r–12r: L’Empereur to the Directors of the
Compagnie des Indes, 25 January 1737; F5 19, ff. 83r–84v, 116r–117v, 140r–
142v, 169r–171r, 161r–162r and 179r–180r: four letters from L’Empereur to
the Abbé Raguet and two from Raguet to L’Empereur.
56 CAOM, Inde, A102, pp.150–2: Letter, dated 21 January 1733, from the
Directors of the Compagnie des Indes to the Chandernagore Council; F5 19,
ff. 179r–180v: Abbé Raguet to L’Empereur, 20 November 1730; and AN,
Marine, B2 307, f. 465r–v: Maurepas to Du Fay, 16 March 1739.
57 CAOM, Inde, Notariat de Chandernagor, O 17 (1742) N° 39/13e,
unpaginated: declaration, dated 13 February 1742, by Nicolas L’Empereur of his
debts before his death.

54 Relocating Modern Science
. . . and Gets Anonymized in the Jardin du Roi
Why the Jardin de Lorixa should have suffered a fate so different from
that of the Hortus Malabaricus cannot be explained in terms of its con-
tents or structure. Exotic herbals and pharmacopoeias were highly
coveted as much for their use to naturalists and medics as for their com-
mercial potential. By the eighteenth century, illustrated herbals had
also made their place as prized items on the European art market. Per-
sonal animosity on the part of Jussieu, as L’Empereur seems to suggest,
cannot entirely explain the Jardin’s failure.58 A definitive answer to this
intriguing question must await the discovery of Jussieu’s full report on
the Jardin. For the moment, one can only speculate in the light of cir-
cumstantial evidence.
At any rate, we can be certain that it was not out of disinterest for
Asian flora that Jussieu was unmoved by the Jardin de Lorixa, for, as
the botanical expert to the Compagnie des Indes, he was well aware of
the Dutch monopoly over the European drug market, a monopoly
which, by his own admission, ‘they acquired by gaining a thorough
knowledge of the natural history and uses of drugs in the lands they
visit.’ Consequently, if the French hoped to carve out a place on the
drug market, they had to encourage the Compagnie’s servants overseas
to collect useful plants, ‘send them for expertise to Paris’, and eventual-
ly ‘transplant the most useful of them in our newly founded colo-
nies.’59 Jussieu maintained a regular correspondence with Frenchmen
in the East and even secretly sent a certain Jean-Claude Barbé (born
c.1700) to botanize in Chandernagore in 1725! (Upon the latter’s
sudden death in 1729, L’Empereur rummaged through his affairs and
was furious to discover Jussieu’s duplicity.60)
However, Jussieu seems to have thought that knowledge outside of
Europe could be gained without expense and was not embedded in the
larger economy. L’Empereur did not lose the opportunity to point out
to him the folly of this assumption :
58 CAOM, C2 285, ff. 11r–12r: L’Empereur to the Directors of the Compagnie
des Indes, 25 January 1737.
59 MNHN, Jussieu manuscripts, Ms. 284: ‘Mémoire pour Messieurs de la
Compagnie des Indes’, undated.
60 MNHN, LP, GGA/52766/1: L’Empereur to Antoine de Jussieu, 25 De-
cember 1729, Post scriptum.

Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen 55
With 1200 livres, a botanist cannot do much considering that food, cloth-
ing, wine at 30 sous a bottle, the local doctor, housing, servants, interpreters
and other domestics, and presents cost a lot more. Moreover, your bota-
nists come during the monsoons, the worst time to botanize. Besides, they
have to learn the language and buy books from the natives.61
Nor was he the only one to remind Jussieu that, as in Europe, know-
ledge even in these remote parts was part of the larger economy: Barbé,
too, wrote to let him know of the snares of botanizing in Asia: ‘You
asked me for the Indian spikenard, for cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg.
I assure you that although we might be closer to Ceylon and the
Molucca Islands, these trees are as unknown, if not more, to us here as
they are to you. It is not easy to acquire them because they are the jeal-
ously guarded prerogative of the Dutch.’ And, in reply to a request
from Jussieu for plants from South India, Pierre Christophe Lenoir,
Governor of Pondicherry, wrote back explaining to him the intricacies
of knowledge gathering and the need for local guidance.62 The Asian
world was as commercially organized and segmented as the European
one. Jussieu, being ignorant of this, was not to make much headway
in collecting nature at a distance in the East.
However, one of Jussieu’s writings does throw direct light on his
assessment of L’Empereur’s herbal. ‘Des avantages que nous pouvons
tirer d’un commerce littéraire avec les botanistes etrangers’, a manuscript
note most probably written in 1732, provides an interesting insight
into Antoine de Jussieu’s notion of the botanical enterprise. ‘It is
neither simple curiosity’, he states,
nor the desire to adorn one’s garden with exotic and hitherto unknown
plants that are the main reasons for corresponding with botanists abroad—
no, if botany is to have any place in the progress of medicine and other arts,
then it must be to establish comparisons between European flora and those
sent by correspondents abroad. It is only thus that one can identify plants
of the same type, know their uses in medicine and the arts, and finally im-
prove the quality of the European flora.
According to Jussieu, it is this correspondence that helped establish
that the Ipecacuanha was none other than the common violet, that the
61 MNHN, LP, GGA/52766/1: L’Empereur to Jussieu, 25 December 1729.
62 AS, ‘Extraits de la correspondance d’Antoine de Jussieu’, ff. 23, 24: letters
from Barbé (27 December 1728) and Lenoir (10 January 1729).

56 Relocating Modern Science
‘scammony is the turbith, these purgatives so much in use are nothing
but imported bindweeds, and the plants from which Japanese paper is
made are merely a species of white mulberry and althaea.’
Jussieu then goes on to give five practical examples to show the
utility of such correspondence—the second being none other than
that of Nicolas L’Empereur:
The second letter, dated 20 January 1729, is from Mr L’Empereur, form-
erly surgeon at Chandernagore in the kingdom of Bengal. It contains a
number of observations on the plants of that country drawn and painted
by him in 12 folio volumes that he sent to the Academy and that are now
with me. The observations are mainly on the uses in Bengal of most of the
plants described in this collection, which is almost a corpus of medicine in
this distant kingdom.
However, an examination of the plants has led me to remark that most
of those that grow there naturally and are, so to speak, wild, are to be found
here among our vegetables which are cultivated and have thus developed
a different taste.63
Surprisingly, Jussieu and L’Empereur concur on the performativity
of botany, but what they mean by it is very different. For the former,
knowledge of foreign flora was of interest only inasmuch as it helped
compare foreign plants with local ones and thus establish concordan-
ces between them in order for France to find import substitutes and
protect both its markets and powerful professional groups from Dutch
competition. This was certainly not L’Empereur’s purpose. His was
a scheme, inspired from the Dutch model in the Indian Ocean, of gain-
ing knowledge of regional pharmacopoeias in order to commodify
them. At any rate, it was Jussieu who, as a senior civil servant and
savant-expert in the network of French royal institutions, had the last
word. He thus sounded the knell of the Jardin de Lorixa. Exiled from
the world of certified knowledge, it lay in his personal library at the
Jardin du Roi, before ending up as an anonymous, exotic curiosity in
the Muséum’s library in the course of the nineteenth century.
Conclusion
The L’Empereur corpus, as also the works of other Europeans in Asia,
all throw considerable light on the triangular relationship between
63 MNHN, Jussieu manuscripts, Ms. 1116, undated.

Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen 57
Europeans at large, their indigenous interlocutors, and their armchair
metropolitan colleagues. These also bring out the relationship be-
tween knowledge practices and the broader economic and political
context, and help illustrate some of the principal themes of this book.
Early-modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean turn out to be
spaces in which knowledge was intellectually and socially constituted
prior to European contact. The knowledge that circulated there was
not some form of popular knowledge but the prerogative of discrete,
well-defined groups. This was clearly acknowledged by Europeans
both outside and inside Europe. L’Empereur’s enterprise, as much as
that of Van Reede and da Orta, thus consisted not in gathering infor-
mation held by undifferentiated, autochthonous groups, but in reconfig-
uring and constructing knowledge, skills and specialized practices—
for the regional, as much as for the European, knowledge markets.
Using the market metaphor here is not out of place: it is used by the
actors themselves—L’Empereur himself refers to trade and profit as
does Jussieu (‘literary trade’, for example). It brings to the fore the
material and economic dimensions of knowledge formation and
circulation. Science has so far been commonly presented as a special
‘symbolic’ economy distinct from other dimensions of human inter-
course. Instead of freely circulating in an idyllic and seamless republic
of letters, science in Europe, when observed from the vantage point of
the Indian Ocean, moved in fragmented and bounded spaces condi-
tioned by national political and economic interests, spaces shaped by
different régimes of performativity within which alone can the mean-
ingfulness of knowledge be determined.64 L’Empereur’s example and
the others evoked here argue for an understanding of early-modern
science as part of the market economy that partakes of the larger poli-
tical economies of burgeoning nation-states, of early-modern mercantil-
ism, and of nascent European colonialism.65 It is only by considering
64 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Con-
ditions of the Progress of Reason’, Social Science Information, vol. 14, no. 6
(1975), pp. 19–47; Lorraine Daston, ‘The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of
Letters in the Enlightenment’, Science in Context, vol. 4, no. 2 (1991), pp. 367–
86. For the relationship between science, technology and the market, see Michel
Callon, ed., The Laws of the Market (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); and Dominique
Pestre, Science, argent et politique: Un essai d’interprétation (Paris: INRA, 2003).
65 This adds a material-economic dimension to Lorraine Daston’s rather

58 Relocating Modern Science
it thus that we can begin to clarify the complex nexus between know-
ledge and power.
In addition, even more than L’Empereur’s experience, that of da
Orta, da Costa, Van Reede, Hermann, and Rumphius plead for study-
ing knowledge construction in the Asian context not as an extension
of its construction within Europe but as a phenomenon in its own
right. Their experience brings to light the fact that these men gained
their credibility not in providing information to European armchair
savants, but by making and circulating knowledge through nego-
tiations with local Asian groups. Each of them either published their
work in Asia, as in the case of da Orta, or else, as in the case of Van
Reede, Hermann, and Rumphius, made their name by circulating it
in manuscript form within the Indian Ocean world, mainly through
Batavia, without appealing to European metropolitan authority. In-
deed, as Rumphius noted in the preface to his most major work, the
Herbarium Amboinense (made between 1663 and 1697), he under-
took it for the ‘use and service to those who live in the East-Indies’, a
work that was not published in printed form in Europe until the mid-
eighteenth century.66
The change in historiographical perspective attempted here thus
makes it possible to begin to look at the site of knowledge production
itself and ask what the dynamics of knowledge making sets in motion
there. As we have seen, the translation from South Asian vernaculars
to a European language was only one of the many translations that
L’Empereur’s enterprise involved. Indeed, L’Empereur’s exercise was
one that consisted in translating a motley of medical, religious, econo-
abstract list of moral-cultural values of science that she thinks ought to be closely
examined by science studies in her ‘The Moral Economy of Science’, in Arnold
Thackray, ed., Constructing Knowledge in the History of Science, Osiris (2nd series),
vol. 10 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 2–26.
66 Georg Eberhard Rumpf, Herbarium amboinense: plurimas conplectens arbores,
frutices, herbas, plantas terrestres & aquaticas, quae in Amboina et adjacentibus re-
periuntur insulis ...Omnia...belgice conscripsit Georg. Everhard Rumphius...
Nunc primum in lucem edidit, & in latinum sermonem vertit Joannes Burman-
nus . . . qui varia adjecit synonyma, suasque observationes . . ., 6 volumes (Amster-
dam, 1741–50). The citation is from in E.M. Beekman’s Introduction to
Georgius Everhardus Rumphius, The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet (New Haven
& London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. lxxxi.

Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen 59
mic, social, and cultural skills and practices through a series of complex
and contingent negotiations into a single work that obeyed no single
pre-set idiom.67 And, if L’Empereur failed to make it at the far end of
the chain—in France—he did succeed at the near end, in South Asia,
in pulling together and maintaining a complex network of savants,
merchants, missionaries, and craftsmen. Indeed, his enterprise, like
that of other Europeans, was to have a long-term effect on the local
communities with which they interacted. Indigenous painters were to
find natural history drawing and painting an increasingly lucrative
business for the European market throughout the eighteenth century
and were to start specializing in this art form. At first they did this on
an individual basis, but with the British colonization of Bengal and the
Coromandel coast a few decades later, a whole institutional space was
to open up with the founding of botanical gardens and the various
natural historical and geographical surveys. Indian painters and drafts-
men were now employed on a massive scale in these colonial institu-
tions for executing maps, landscapes, and some of the great herbals of
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.68 Likewise, Europ-
ean naturalists were to start finding employment in South Asian
princely courts to set up botanical and medicinal gardens.69 Finally,
this intercultural interaction certainly had long-term effects on the
dynamics of medical and botanical practices in the region itself.
Although difficult to apprehend, these would certainly repay working
out and would be a valuable contribution to the history of Indian
medicine.
67 Translation in this sense bears a definite resemblance to its use in present-
day actor-network theory. See Michel Callon, ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of
Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay’,
in John Law, ed., Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (Lon-
don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 196–233.
68 See William Roxburgh, Plants of the Coast of Coromandel; Selected from
Drawings and Descriptions Presented to the Hon. Court of Directors of the East India
Company, 3 volumes (London, 1795–1820); and Henry J. Noltie, Indian Bota-
nical Drawings 1793–1868 from the Royal Botanic Garden (Edinburgh: Royal
Botanic Garden, 1999).
69 For instance, Johann Gerhard Koenig (1728–85), a student of Linnaeus,
made his name as a botanist in the service of the Nawab of Arcot in South India,
before being employed by the EIC.