‘Just acquisitions? Law and ethics over time in Kew’s overseas plant collecting history’

This project, undertaken in RHUL’s Department of Law and Kew Gardens, explores the history and trajectory of Kew’s plant collecting and plant export activities since Kew’s colonial beginnings, including contemporaneous developments in international environmental law, through to global justice and human rights issues.

This project will be jointly supervised by CHINA WILLIAMS, Kew’s Legal Agreements Advisor and PROFESSOR MARK NESBITT, Plant Humanities Research Leader at RBG KEW; and PROFESSOR JILL MARSHALL, Professor of Law at RHUL, and the student will be expected to spend time at both RHUL and RBG KEW, as well as becoming part of the wider cohort of CDP funded students across the UK.

Using critical legal lenses - ‘justice in acquisitions’ and ‘transfer’ theories, this project will explore innovative issues of cultural identity, international law and legal theory in the plant world. It will involve a combination of close analysis of historical documents in Kew’s rich archival record of plant-collecting expeditions as well as more recent overseas collecting agreements fully databased since 2000, and crucially, it uses a legal perspective not previously applied to these sources. The project revisits how specimens were acquired by Kew, known for its global, historic collections of plants and fungi, resulting in its position today as a leading international plant science research centre and visitor attraction. The project thus encompasses rich original archival work from material available at Kew, and critical socio-legal analysis on equality, historical accountability, economic and social justice.

Research questions include: 1. What evidence exists on the planning and organisation of RBG Kew’s plant-collecting expeditions and plant exports, 1840–1950? What agreements were made with in-country authorities? 2. How have these frameworks influenced present-day agreements and how do these now operate? 3. What international laws were/are relevant in this context and how did/do they relate to Kew’s own arrangements? What impact did/do these have? 4. What insights can be drawn from legal theoretical perspectives and scholarship in the fields of human rights law, and racial and ecosystems injustice, when used as frameworks for analysing Kew case studies? 5. What has been discovered to inform debates concerning restitution/ reparations/ remedies in the field of biodiversity?