This essay examines the aims, labor regime, and workers of the St. Vincent botanic garden to highlight differences in the infrastructure of government-funded botany across the British empire. It argues that slavery was a foundational element of society and natural history in the Anglo-Caribbean, and the St. Vincent botanic garden was both put into the service of slavery and transformed by it. When viewed from the Caribbean context and the perspective of enslaved workers, the St. Vincent garden's affiliation with imperial improvement becomes less salient than its support of the status quo of slavery as a system and labor regime. The garden was dependent on enslaved laborers, yet the conditions of work and contemporary prejudices led superintendents to see them as undifferentiated labor. The politics of the archive make it impossible for historians to reconstruct the experiences of the garden's enslaved workers as individuals, including the specific labor that they performed or skills that they possessed. Plantation slavery's appropriation of and influence on the infrastructure of colonial botany through the St. Vincent botanic garden suggests that historians should center the local logics of the societies where scientific knowledge making took place to reveal the many meanings of science.

中文翻译：

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种植园植物学：圣文森特植物园的奴隶制和政府科学基础设施，1765-1820 年 s**

本文考察了圣文森特植物园的目标、劳工制度和工人，以突出大英帝国政府资助的植物学基础设施的差异。它认为奴隶制是盎格鲁-加勒比地区社会和自然历史的基本要素，而圣文森特植物园既为奴隶制服务，又受其改造。从加勒比背景和被奴役工人的角度来看，圣文森特花园与帝国改良的联系变得不那么突出，它支持奴隶制作为一种制度和劳动制度的现状。花园依赖于被奴役的劳动者，但工作条件和当代偏见导致管理者将他们视为无差别的劳动。档案的政治性使历史学家无法重建花园被奴役工人作为个体的经历，包括他们所做的具体劳动或他们拥有的技能。种植园奴隶制通过圣文森特植物园对殖民植物学基础设施的占用和影响表明，历史学家应该以科学知识产生的社会的地方逻辑为中心，以揭示科学的许多含义。