35 Introduction Over the last fifty years, historians of science and medicine have demonstrated that natural knowledge was central to the process of early modern European expansion. Networks of botanical gardens, plant collectors and plantations eventually aided European powers in increasing their control over colonial territories by using exotic plants as food, medicine and valuable articles of trade. 1 However, with some exceptions, such studies have emphasized the importance of European capitals and the scientists working within them as what Bruno Latour calls ‘centres of calculation’. 2 While the role of colonial collectors, natu- ralists, doctors and surgeons working on the ground is recognised by Latour and others, their immediate contexts have often been neglected and their interests in collecting subordinated to those of the metro- politan collector. 3 However, the activities that made up the ‘scientific revolution’: the assiduous collection and detailed study of natural objects, the amassing of libraries and ‘repositories’ of curiosities and books of dried plants, the exchange of information through networks of scholarly correspondence and the formulation of theories about the natural world also took place in colonial settlements and outposts. Furthermore, each settlement was embedded within webs of local and international connections and the collection and deployment of natu- ral knowledge had immediate political consequences on the ground as well as distant ones in Europe. In this chapter, I will examine the process of collecting, describing and using plants in Madras: the English East India Company (EIC)’s most important settlement on India’s Coromandel Coast with the substantial population of 8,000 by the late seventeenth century. 4 I will demonstrate that the town’s survival as an 2 Medicine and Botany in the Making of Madras, 1680–1720 Anna Winterbottom V. Damodaran et al. (eds.), The East India Company and the Natural World © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2015