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The first overview is presented of the paper contents of Kew's Economic Botany Collections (EBC). There are more than 350 specimens of paper representing nearly 50 plant families and more than a hundred genera. The dominant families numerically – and each for different reasons – are the Moraceae, Gramineae, Thymelaeaceae and Cyperaceae, examples from which are highlighted. Some emphasis is given to the historical context and geographical origin of papers, and to the people who collected or donated them. It is suggested that one focus of a future collecting strategy for the EBC should be the sorts of plant products, including papers, that are under threat due to losses of cultural diversity or biological diversity, or both.

The first overview is presented of the paper contents of Kew's Economic Botany Collections (EBC). There are more than 350 specimens of paper representing nearly 50 plant families and more than a hundred genera. The dominant families numerically – and each for different reasons – are the Moraceae, Gramineae, Thymelaeaceae and Cyperaceae, examples from which are highlighted. Some emphasis is given to the historical context and geographical origin of papers, and to the people who collected or donated them. It is suggested that one focus of a future collecting strategy for the EBC should be the sorts of plant products, including papers, that are under threat due to losses of cultural diversity or biological diversity, or both.

This article explores the Spanish crown's efforts to study, cultivate, and transplant
spices from the East Indies to the West Indies and then to Spain in the sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries. Beginning with Christopher Columbus's first observations
of New World flora, the Spanish crown sought out spices to cultivate for economic
gain. Although they were ultimately unsuccessful in efforts to generate a large-scale
spice trade, colonial officials and local entrepreneurs participated in a coordinated program
of empirical information gathering and botanical experimentation that is itself of
historical significance. For the empirical and experimental—"scientific"—methods
they represented serve to challenge and enhance current understanding of several historiographical
themes: the origins of economic botany and the Scientific Revolution
more generally, the role of human agency in the Columbian exchange, and the dissemination
of knowledge from imperial centers to colonial peripheries.

Plants for Food and Medicine: Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the Society for Economic Botany and the International Society for Ethnopharmacology. H. D. V. Prendergast. N. L. Etkin. D. R. Harris. and P. J. Houghton. eds. Kew, Richmond, UK: Scientific Publications Dept., Royal Botanic Gardens, 1998. 438 pp.

This book deals with arid and semi-arid environments and their classification, and the physiological restraints and adaptations of plants to the environment. Further, it discusses economic botany and the needs and methods of conserving economic plants. A broad view is taken regarding the definition of economic plants, taking into account their value to the environment as well as to man and to livestock. The individual deserts and associated semi-arid regions are described in separate chapters, providing background information on the regional environments in terms of climate and major plant formations. The economic plants within these formations, their usages, geographical distribution together with their morphological and physiological adaptations are treated in detail

This essay provides a fresh view on early history of the botanical garden in Buitenzorg by zooming in on the activities of the gardens' first and second directors: Caspar Georg Carl Reinwardt and Carl Ludwig Blume. In particular under Blume's aegis the garden was under constant threat which eventually led to the temporary closure of the garden in 1826. The essay conceptualizes the garden as a provisional niche, in which collectors, gardeners, merchants, administrators, and plant experts with diverse socio-economic backgrounds and networks came together to negotiate the relationship between botany and imperial politics. Taken together this essay argues that plant science and the garden's institutional development need to be analyzed as part of a much wider history of colonial management and agricultural exploitation.

Flora and economic botany, by Augustine Henry, pp. 16-22. ; (Commercial, no. 1, 1896. In continuation of "Commercial, no. 11, 1893.") ; Mode of access: Internet.

Buchanan arrived in India in 1794 and left in 1815. He was employed by the East India Company for these twenty years in a number of capacities but he is chiefly remembered today for two surveys he conducted: the first of Mysore in 1800 and the second of Bengal in 1807–14. These surveys have long been used by historians, anthropologists and Indian politicians to depict the nature of Indian society in the early years of British rule. Recently economic historians, Bagchi in particular, have used the 'statistical' tables compiled by Buchanan as a data base against which later statistical evidence about the Indian economy is measured. Bagchi believes that by doing this he can furnish firm proof of the extent to which British rule was detrimental to the people of India in the nineteenth century.