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Accepted Paper:

Plant importation in British India from 19th to 20th century: an appendage to environmental manoeuvring and artificial selection.  
Priyanka Guha Roy (Kazi Nazrul University)

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Paper short abstract:

The paper tries to interweave Darwin's Artificial Selection of profit-oriented species and Plant importation, both characterizing Environmental modernity and ecological maneuvering dawning the age of radical evolutionism.

Paper long abstract:

Darwin’s natural and artificial selection established that species (both plants and animals) achieve mutation from their parent species. Human selection or Artificial Selection also helps to multiply species as asserted by Darwin and his critics incepting materialistic or radical evolutionism. Thus, Robert Chambers and Herbert Spencer tied biological and social progress together with an emphasis on humans' cumulative efforts. Thus, Biogeography became an emergent field of environmental modernity that was made more inventive through the working of colonial botanists and biologists. Thus the environment was programmed to preserve only rare and valuable species. The environment turned racist, mute, anonymous and external to serve the ill-imperialism that trended the notion of Bio-conquest. Plant importation was one of the weapons that bio-conquest employed in British India in the late 19th and early 20th century spreading plant diseases from imported invasive pests ,insects and fungi . Woolly Louse of the apple, pests from American cotton plants , Cotton stem weevil from Cambodia cotton, were to name a few. The paper thus locating the environment as a major gate pass to understanding Victorian modernity clubs several historical flaps that attach many transitional themes such as Artificial Selection, Colonial Botany, Plant Transfer and importation, and colonial ecology all conjoined to understand post-Darwinian calculable, and manipulable environmental modernity that never kept the environment at a distance but only stopped communicating with it.

Keywords: Artificial Selection, Evolutionism, Environmental Modernity, Plant Importation, Bio-conquest.

Dr.Priyanka Guha Roy

Assistant Professor

Kazi Nazrul University

email-basupriyanka1983@gmail.com

Panel Pract09
The Environment Around Us: Relational Approaches as Common Ground
  Session 2 Tuesday 20 August, 2024, -