20 Oct. 2023 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

Atar David (UT)

“Transplanting Middle Eastern Date Palms and the Question of Scale, 1860–1914”

By the late 19th century, cultivators in Southern Iraq, India, and the American Southwest expanded their date palm (Phoenix Dactylifera L.) groves to supply the growing demand among Western consumers. But to cultivate dates, cultivators had to successfully transplant date palm seeds and offshoots from the Middle East to their plots. My talk focuses on these transplantation attempts and the material and intellectual infrastructure that supported them. I show that transplantation is more than the physical relocation of plants; it is a biopolitical process that involves regimenting plants into crops. Furthermore, adopting transplantation as our main perspective provides a unique opportunity to consider the various economic, geographical, technological, and ecological scales that shape and are being shaped by the regimentation of plants.

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Atar David is a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Texas History Department. His dissertation project, “Chaos and Creation in Imperial Backyards: Date Palm Monoculture Between the Middle East and the American Southwest, 1860–1940,” explores the circulation of date palm (Phoenix Dactylifera L.) commodities and related agronomic knowledge between the Middle East and the American Southwest from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

6 Oct. 2023 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

Raymond Hyser (UT)

“What’s a Forest to a Jungle?: Tropical Forestry in British Ceylon’s Coffee Culture” 

When one thinks of tropical forestry, few, if any, would think of Coffea arabica. This evergreen tree has dominated the coffee trade since its dispersal from the southwestern foothills of Ethiopia sometime in the sixth century CE. In this paper, I highlight the importance of C. arabica in understanding tropical forestry and forestry knowledge in the nineteenth century. I examine the extensive cultivation of C. arabica in British Ceylon by conceptualizing the island’s coffee plantations as complex, anthropogenic forest ecosystems. By exploring these plantations as forest landscapes of natural, human, and human-made elements, I illustrate how tropical ecosystems influenced the construction and maintenance of coffee plantations and, in turn, how coffee planters transformed the island’s tropical environments. In particular, I will demonstrate how perceived knowledge of tropical forest landscapes conditioned plantation development by exploring the categorization of “forest” and “jungle” land. By examining the processes surrounding the creation and management of coffee plantations in the central highlands of Colonial Ceylon, I hope to highlight how coffee cultivation played an integral role in shaping tropical forestry on the island and, subsequently, transforming Ceylon’s forest landscapes.

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Raymond Hyser is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the University of Texas at Austin History Department. He situates his research at the intersection of agricultural history, environmental history, and the history of empires. His dissertation project, “Caribbean Ceylon,” traces the development and movement of agricultural knowledge systems of coffee between the circum-Caribbean and South Asia to explore how European perceptions of the “tropics” and the environmental realities of these landscapes shaped agricultural knowledge of coffee.