“‘Who owned nature in the eighteenth century?’ asks Londa Schiebinger in Plants and Empire, a study of what the Stanford historian of science calls ‘colonial bioprospecting in the Atlantic World.’ The question was largely decided at the time by ‘heroic voyaging botanists’ and ‘biopirates’ who claimed the world’s natural resources as their own. The matter was settled in the next couple centuries by merchants like Thomas Twining and his descendants, proprietors of Twinings tea. Founded as Britain’s first known tea shop in 1706, the company went on to become one of the largest purveyors of teas grown in the British colonies.One of Twining’s descendants, Elizabeth Twining, carried on the legacy as what Schiebinger calls one of many ‘armchair naturalists, who coordinated and synthesized collecting from sinecures in Europe,’ a role often taken on by women who could not travel the world. ...”
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