Negotiating People, Plants and Empires: The field work of Johann Gerhard König in South and South East Asia, 1768-1785

This chapter explores a known yet understudied example of how Linnaean natural history was practised, structured and exchanged across colonial South and South East Asia in the second half of the eighteenth century. As in the chapter on Pehr Löfling by Nyberg and Lucena Giraldo, the main character here is one of Carl Linnaeus’s travelling students. His name was Johann Gerhard König (1728-1785), but contrary to Löfling, König has never been included as one of the Linnaean ‘apostles’. Indeed, he is rarely mentioned at all in research on Linnaeus’s students. This is curious since standard works on the history of science in India recognise him as the first person to introduce Linnaean taxonomy to India and as the first formally employed naturalist of the powerful English East India Company (EIC). König’s influence on Indian botany is an important element in recent research which suggests that the informal scientific networks established by less significant colonial powers like Denmark-Norway and Sweden may provide the key to a reevaluation of current views of ‘colonial science’.