Conclusion: Of Place, Moment, and Source

The closing chapter of Unmaking Botany provides a summarized comparison of the objectives, practices, and personnel of Spanish and US colonial botany in the Philippines. A more symmetrical study of the two not only corrects historiographical simplifications but also allows for a more serious consideration of the political and social realities of the Philippines at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More significantly, important local actors come to the fore, and their labor and knowledge point to an important time of intellectual effervescence in the late nineteenth century, continuities of knowledge, and adaptations to a changing colonial environment. The concluding chapter emphasizes the importance of places, moments, and sources in the history of botany and how the specificities of each can render a more complicated historical picture of science in a colonial setting. These aspects stand to bear on how historians may consider conducting research, paying careful attention to source material that may fall outside of the conventional purview of science or to knowledges that may be considered fleeting. Cherishing such material and knowledges allows for greater recognition of the myriad ways historical actors came to know plants and how many of these ways may have never been recorded by botanists or will ever be fully recovered by working historians.