Abstract: This article analyzes the impact of genetics on colonial agriculture in the British Empire, examining two case studies of cotton breeding in early twentieth-century Egypt and Uganda. Scholars have long been skeptical that genetics had any immediate impact on plant breeding. I argue that such skepticism is justified. Genetics made little practical difference to cotton breeding in the first decade of the twentieth century. Colonial administrators and agriculturalists in this period were concerned with longstanding biological problems rooted in persistent social and economic anxieties: notably the degeneration of plants and varietal mixing. In the early 1900s, colonial officials implemented programs of seed selection and—most dramatically—the complete destruction of mixed cotton stocks in Uganda, with the goal of restarting the industry from scratch. These schemes, however, relied not on genetics, but drew on established techniques or existing economic and eugenical principles.
Matthew Holmes (Sun,) studied this question.