Bounty of Empire: Transoceanic Passages, Shipboard Ecologies, and the Transplantation of the Breadfruit Tree

Juliane Braun takes up the problem of provisioning the forced labor colonies of the Caribbean as an ecological issue within the larger domain of extractive imperialism. Her paper examines in particular the transplantation of... [ view full abstract ]

Juliane Braun takes up the problem of provisioning the forced labor colonies of the Caribbean as an ecological issue within the larger domain of extractive imperialism. Her paper examines in particular the transplantation of the breadfruit tree from the islands of the South Pacific to the British Caribbean colony of Jamaica, uncovering the impact of this transaction on the indigenous and enslaved communities in both oceanic sites. In the wake of James Cook’s voyages, British government officials cast the breadfruit tree as an eighteenth-century superfood capable of solving the hunger crisis in the empire’s West Indian colonies. In 1787, the British government commissioned Captain William Bligh to bring the plant from Tahiti to Jamaica aboard his ship the Bounty, an attempt at specimen transport that famously ended in mutiny and the destruction of more than a thousand breadfruit saplings. Analyzing the writings of John Ellis, Bligh, and Olaudah Equiano, Braun shows how the British Empire’s participation in the Atlantic slave trade informed its actions in the Pacific, and demonstrates the ways material and social realities of specimen transport and shipboard ecosystems influenced government policies, imperial expansion, and anti-colonialist struggles.