The Useful Caribbean: Settlers' Botany and Plantation Cultures

guided by their sensory and embodied knowledge of plants' applications in daily life. This style of knowledge formation, which I call "lived botany," was key to establishing colonies. Settlers' schemes of plant classification were influenced by the practices of enslaved Lokono and African people who demonstrated essential applications of tropical vegetation. Although settlers' lived botany was an important source of information for natural historians, colonists approached colonial ecologies differently. Lived botany reveals how multiple forms of botanical knowledge production fueled the growth of the early English empire.