53 Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 29 (March 2016), pp. 53–70 © Museum Ethnographers Group 2016 SEEDS OF INDUSTRY AND EMPIRE: ECONOMIC BOTANY COLLECTIONS BETWEEN NATURE AND CULTURE MARK NESBITT AND CAROLINE CORNISH Machines did not merely run on coal, they consumed cotton, wool, dyes, and vegetable oils,and the strength of the peripheral populations which provided these…There was, in short, a concern with economic botany across the British Empire. (Drayton 2000: 194–5) Introduction These words by imperial historian Richard Drayton aptly reflect the importance of plant raw materials to economic life in the nineteenth century. Scientists such as Kew’s Sir William Hooker structured their botanical research programmes in order to satisfy the ever–increasing demand for useful plants, and thus a new discipline was born—economic botany.This paper is concerned with economic botany collections, which may not appear to be of immediate interest to the museum ethnographer. However, such biocultural collections were, and still are, very much concerned with the accumulation of ethnographic material culture and offer an alternative insight into the notion of ‘nature and culture,’ one in which nature and culture are juxtaposed within a single interpretative framework. But first that term—nature and culture—requires some unpacking. Whilst a more general definition of the term is that of the ‘relationships that societies, civilizations, empires, regions, nation–states have with Nature,’ (Berghahn website) when used within the context of museum studies, it carries with it a set of historical and epistemological implications. It has been used in reference to the multi–disciplinarity of those universal institutions such as the original British Museum (Alberti 2009: 2), in which natural history specimens and human material culture, exhibited in discrete displays but nonetheless within the same building, formed part of a singular depiction of the world. But with the rise of anthropology in the late nineteenth century this juxtaposition became problematic, according to a number of writers (Bal 1992; Coombes 1994; Haraway 1985; Hooper–Greenhill 1992, Karp and Lavine 1991). By this stage natural history and art collections had become separated— spatially as well as epistemologically—by the definition and reinforcement of