Vaderlandse weelde op de kaart gezet. Belgische botanici, wetenschappelijke ijver en nationale motieven
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.6525Keywords:
Nature, IdentityAbstract
Andreas Stynen, Native wealth charted. Belgian botanists, scientific zeal and patriotic motives
This article analyses the importance of patriotic motives in nineteenth-century Belgian botany, without reducing the study of indigenous plants to a vehicle of aggressive, blatantly biased chauvinism. Different forms of more subtle nationalism enabled Belgian field botanists to define their activities as a mature and internationally respected field among the natural sciences. Four different phases can be discerned. During the period of Austrian and French domination, botany was first and foremost a means to economically enrich the state, by reducing its dependence on imports.
After Belgian independence (1830), striving for utility was increasingly overshadowed by a longing for completeness: field trips were fuelled by a desire to collect and chart all Belgian species. From 1860 onwards, individual species mattered less than the geobotanical regions: the national territory was discovered to offer a rich variety of landscapes. The popularity of laboratories at the end of the century threatened to dismiss field botany as merely amateurish, but an ecological approach to the national vegetation, combined with explicit pleas for the protection of Belgian’s natural wealth, provided the impetus for a new round of research.
This article is part of the special issue 'Landschap, natuur en nationale identiteit'.
Downloads
![](https://ojstest.minions.amsterdam/public/journals/1/submission_4953_4953_coverImage_en_US.jpeg)
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
a) Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
b) Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
c) Authors are permitted to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process.
Authors are explicitly encouraged to deposit their published article in their institutional repository.