Garden-variety Empire: The Nineteenth-century Glasshouse as Colonial Non-site
Once upon a place—namely certain bourgeois print cultures and social circles in and around London circa the first half of the nineteenth century—there were an awful lot of folks prolixly preoccupied with glasshouses. Gardening, indoors and out, was suddenly mass-market material. There were monthlies like Curtis's Botanical Magazine, or, Flower-Garden Displayed; The Gardener's Magazine and Register of Rural and Domestic Improvement; and Gardener’s Chronicle. To keep the Sunday horticulturalists occupied between installments, booksellers offered any number of multihundred-page encyclopedias, guides, and treatises. Those looking for human “companions” might turn to the Horticultural Society of London—distinct from the capital’s Royal and Linnean Societies—for an annual subscription of two guineas (after an initial fee of three guineas). By midcentury, “hothouses for the million . . . combining simplicity, cheapness, excellence, and durability” could be ordered by post; a ready-made, 8 x 10 x 10 1/2–foot conservatory, including the staging and heating apparatus, could be yours for the relatively reasonable price of twenty-five pounds, which included shipping (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Advertisement for Samuel Hereman’s “Hothouses for the Million,” in The Gardeners’ Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette (January 28, 1860), 88. Image courtesy Biodiversity Heritage Library; holding institution: Missouri Botanical Garden, Peter H. Raven Library.
Charming, you might say, but why the pleonastic preoccupation now? Surely, in a “code red” era of human-induced climate change and national repudiation of environmental regulation, there are other, more timely concerns. Yes, acknowledged and cosigned—but I would still argue that this current conjuncture of climate crisis presents precisely the cause for reexamining the glasshouse. Standard architectural histories tend to trumpet this structural type as a technical innovation in rationalized form making possible “conservancy” practices central to the development in the West of modern understandings of the natural world and its interaction with the built environment and its builders. Less lauded are the self-same glasshouses’ entanglements with regimes of colonization and racialization. To allow these elements of the glasshouse’s origins to remain unremarked while continuing to hold it in esteem in the history of the environmental movement dangerously risks exacerbating and reduplicating inequities and violences that have left large swatches of the formerly colonized world to shoulder the disproportionate costs of environmental exploitation.
Many astute scholars have delineated the imbrication of imperialism and state-sponsored glasshouses: projects like Decimus Burton’s Palm House at Kew Gardens and that institution’s eventual move into a network of colonial branch syndicates, the invernadero commissioned by Mariano de la Paz Graells for Madrid’s Real Jardín Botánico, and, of course, Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace. These are less edifices of glass and iron than knowledge projects: epistemological architectures of ordering, enclosing, and domesticating flora extracted from a global landscape.
What interests me, however, are these structures’ small-scale country cousins: the glasshouses of the suburban middle class. These remind us that imperial hegemony, in early nineteenth-century Britain no less than today, is never just a project of the elite, a few bad actors at the top who can be held to atone while the bulk of us can claim impotence as innocence. The reality is the success of Britain’s post-Georgian imperial ambitions depended on the support and consent of a domestic political and consumer public. Decision-makers in Whitehall and on Leadenhall Street cultivated and then pointed to popular demand to justify their actions, accelerating an insidious and highly effective circular logic of colonial capitalism. The suburban glasshouse is a vehicle through which colonialism became a mass cultural intervention and emerges as part of a larger cultural shift reimagining what ownership of Britain’s increasingly expansive colonial properties looks like and charting new political geographies of consumption and empire.
Figure 2. “A Semi-Attached Domed Conservatory” in “Glass Structures and Appliances: Green-Houses and Conservatories,” Cassell’s Popular Gardening 3 (1886): 44. Image courtesy Biodiversity Heritage Library; holding institution: Cornell University Library.
In the glasshouse, the imperial domus, a householding of far-flung provincial landscapes and their products, takes built form (Figure 2). The mass-market greenhouse emerges at the intersection of the cultivation of a broader, more bourgeois base of consumers for colonialism’s exotic, now just-within-reach luxuries, and the growth of London’s suburbs as part of a politics of recrafting hierarchies of difference through strategies and fantasies of land ownership. Land, as a preeminent source of generational wealth and social distinction, is a special form of property. In the first half of the nineteenth century, merchants, stockbrokers, and other bourgeois beneficiaries of a thriving political economy fueled by capitalist colonization and resource extraction were suddenly able to acquire for themselves a simulacrum of the elite country house and landed estate in the form of the suburban villa and glasshouse garden. “No duke or prince could be more proud of his conservatory . . . than the Nottingham artisan is of his greenhouse,” rhapsodizes an anonymous contributor to Cassell’s Popular Gardening. “True, he may have to stoop to enter such a structure; but he has stooped to conquer nature to good purpose, and his prodigies of successful culture are to him and his family and friends’ perpetual sources of the highest and purest pleasure.”[1]
Within this context, interconnections between suburban and settler colonial imperatives and imaginaries abound; spatial secession and segregation within the greater metropole was as much a project of redefining whiteness as was the coterminous seizure of “free” land in the colonies. At the time, British practices of racial distinction shifted their emphasis from sumptuary codes and other dictates as to who can or must own what to stickier models of biological and environmental determinism. And with this shift came openings in the class of persons permitted to claim the inestimable property that is whiteness. The pressure of increasingly numerous and diverse colonial Others allowed Britons traditionally denied a stake in whiteness—tenant farmers, unskilled and unhoused peasantry, the Irish, and other groups—to buy into the category through the acquisition of suburban real estate, especially plots with enough space for a glasshouse (Figure 3). Possessing a suburban villa complete with one of these showcases for spatial and consumer practices historically reserved for the landed gentry as paragons of whiteness allowed for much the same social payout, with considerably fewer risks, as uprooting one’s whole existence for territories unknown.
“The suburban glasshouse is a vehicle through which colonialism became a mass cultural intervention.”
Figure 3. Isometric view of a “double detached Suburban Villa, in Porchester Terrace, Bayswater” with an attached “domical conservatory” and detached hot-house and greenhouse in rear in John Claudius Loudon’s The Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion (London: A. Spottiswoode, 1838), 334. Image courtesy Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, and scanned by Google, Inc. for the Google Books Library Project.
Colonization comes in two main flavors, each with its own architectures and spatial politics. There are those acts of seizure understood as time-bound—control over lands just long enough to extract from them all profitable resources—and those positioned toward permanency, or (pardon the pun) putting down roots: i.e., settler colonialism. The suburban glasshouse splits the difference, settling a little patch of foreign territory alongside the home and facilitating the making of settler-colonial space by and as proxy in the homeland. In offering a frisson of that spectacular otherness one otherwise might miss by opting for Kensington over Kolkata, it shapes what I have come to think of as a colonial non-site.
This term borrows advisedly and anachronistically from the work of Robert Smithson. Stay with me now: I know the jump from early nineteenth century Britain to mid-twentieth century United States is, prima facie, quizzical if not outright specious. And I recognize that Smithson himself is scarcely clear of his own entanglements with the ethics and power inequities of land use and (dis)possession. Still, I would contend that rethinking the early nineteenth-century suburban English glasshouse through Smithson’s theory of the non-site is worth entertaining if only as a speculative provocation or provisional thought experiment. After all, given the postwar United States’ proclivity for paracolonial adventures across the tropical environs of the so-called Third World, how far did this apple fall, really, from the boughs of its former imperial parent? And I would like to think that Smithson, an autodidact spatial creator and a proud product of suburban Passaic, would have equally enjoyed a tour of the monuments to conspicuous middlebrow colonialism dotting the landscape of London’s outer fringes some century or so before.
As a conceptual architecture, the non-site is in its own way all about facilitating such spatiotemporal jumps and bridging incongruous contexts. Smithson describes the non-site as a “logical” representation of place, something like “a diagram, ground plan of a house, a street plan to the location of a site, or a topographic map.”[2] The “logic” linking the site and non-site is not that of mimesis but metaphor: the non-site is kin to but not coterminous with its correlated elsewhere. Within Smithson’s practice, the non-site often serves as a displacement—a verbal noun indicating a movement away, in a different direction, or apart from the original place—permitting an open-ended, contrapuntal circulation between the fantasized periphery of, for instance, the United States West or the greater Yucatán Peninsula and art world exhibitionary centers. This is a poetic praxis of containment, a technology of enclosure and domestication.
The glasshouse as colonial non-site proposes a contiguous chain of imaginative associations between the tropical place and its temperate representatives-qua-replacements: an ecology fragmented into significant metonyms by the forces of profit and in keeping with empire’s paradoxical demands for the in- and hypervisibility of its sites and subjects. For the suburban homeowner of the early nineteenth-century’s greater London, the glasshouse transforms and eventually begins to eclipse its “real” referent sites; the native lands of its cymbidium hyacinthinum (Trinidad, initially seized by the Spanish in the sixteenth century and formally ceded to Britain in 1802), dilatris corymbosa (South Africa, a strategic waystation en route to protect Britain’s developing empire in the Indian subcontinent secured by force in 1806), or humea elegans (southeastern Australia, dumping ground for British undesirables and favorite bioprospecting haunt of Sir Joseph Banks and his would-be successors from the 1770s onward). On the authority of analogy, the glasshouse as colonial non-site re-presents, in an ideological and spatial concretion of absence and presence, a “lost” original: the garden of Eden or its secular cousin, the Rousseauian state of nature outside those knotty social contracts that spell out our obligations to others. The carefully calibrated and controlled environment of the glass-enclosed non-site is a technophilic utopia of what the tropical colony might have been had not the “natural” sloth and sensuous excess of its residents stagnated any progression toward civilizational apotheosis.
“Colonization comes in two main flavors, each with its own architectures and spatial politics. . . . The suburban glasshouse splits the difference, settling a little patch of foreign territory alongside the home and facilitating the making of settler-colonial space by and as proxy in the homeland.”
Concerns over “acclimatization”—a turn-of-the-century neologism—preoccupied biological thinkers throughout the nineteenth century. As the spread of empire made plants and animals (human and otherwise) from increasingly remote regions of the world and distinctly non-European climatic zones available for economic exploitation, the question became how to relocate and domesticate these specimens in a way that preserved their value. The glasshouse was made possible by and precipitated a series of successive innovations in technologies designed to create and control indoor environments, transforming sites abroad into simulacra of domestic temperate climates and selected locations at home into self-contained tropical fantasies (the 1830s, for instance, would bring the world a miniature and alluringly mobile glasshouse in the form of the so-called Wardian case). An understanding of climate as a determining force in and index of civilizational attainment—and thus the eligibility of a people and place for colonization—informed these central heating and forced ventilation practices.
The glasshouse, or conservancy, is, in fact, a form of conservatorship: rule over places, objects, and people deemed unfit to determine their own destinies. If the logic of utopia, that other great concretion of place and its lack, is fundamentally exclusionary—a banishment of whatever ails the topos from its boundaries—then the colonial non-site is predicated on the exclusion of the native (Figure 4). The natural history and botany informing horticulture as pop science pastime and keeping the glass-sheltered beds of London’s commercial nurseries well-stocked with imported novelties were themselves extractive industries. This bioprospecting involved plucking “specimens” from their ecological communities as well as the histories, epistemologies, and social and symbolic systems of their fellow indigenes. Excavated from site and evacuated of meaning, these “exotics” now bespoke cultivated taste and social cachet. And they did so best beneath vaults of glass vaunted for their glittering poetics of transparency and pure reason—an architectural magnifying lens capable of refining the raw material of expropriated Indigenous knowing and natural resources into the kind of “universal” knowledge appropriate to enlightened European audiences, all under the racializing aegis of lady-like and gentlemanly avocation.
Figure 4. “Unique Iron Conservatory” installed on spec at the Royal Horticultural Society’s South Kensington Gardens and available for purchase from Messrs. Trollope, a Belgrave Square–based architectural and engineering contractor, in The Journal of Horticulture and Cottage Gardener (July 25, 1867), 62. Image courtesy Biodiversity Heritage Library; holding institution: New York Botanical Garden, LuEsther T. Mertz Library.
The artificial, carefully controlled environs of the glasshouse, filled with outlandish botanical exotics, provided the metropolitan beneficiaries of modern colonial capitalism a safe space in which anxious concerns over national identity, race and its environmental determinators, and class became the stuff of social leisure, private pleasure, and conspicuous consumption. Less a rational break from the eighteenth-century picturesque and its garden follies, the glasshouse as colonial non-site extends its logics of relocating the othered and outré within the imperial home counties by a burgeoning middle-class of suburbanites in the market for the novel luxuries of the empire’s distant, but eminently possessable, foreign reaches. Glasshouses were thus a biopolitical project of claiming some measure of private ownership and control over the provinces, their products, and by extension, their peoples as well as public belonging to the privileges of whiteness.
Notes
[1] “Glass Structures and Appliances: Green-Houses and Conservatories,” Cassell’s Popular Gardening 3 (1886): 42–43. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/coo.31924002871246?urlappend=%3Bseq=54
[2] Robert Smithson, “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites (1968)” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 364.
Citation
Emily E. Mangione, “Garden-Variety Empire: The Nineteenth-Century Glasshouse as Colonial Non-Site,” PLATFORM, August 22, 2022.
