Paper Colonialism: Instructions and Institutions at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 1770–1820

This paper examines instructions as the mechanism by which Kew's unofficial first director, Joseph Banks, established the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew as a center of colonial knowledge. Drawing on paperwork studies and deploying literary analysis, it illuminates internal institutional documents as prospective texts that created the illusion of centrality amidst the unruly practicalities of colonial knowledge production. Banks's instructions overwrote the realities of colonial collecting, creating instead a textual imaginary of Kew's operations, and even the conception of its plants as 'exotic,' revealing how the rhetoric and poetics of institutional documentation helped to manage colonial knowledge and colonial power.