Western herbal medicine in Britain is often framed within the context of being local, traditional, hedgerow, and folk. I’m not here to dispute this claim entirely, but I would like to untangle it a little. Within our framing of British herbalism, we often forget to include the influence of plants that have been imported because of colonialism, knowledge that has been extracted because of empire, the global trade in herbs and spices, the influence of Arabic, Persian and African medicine, the movement of plants with migration or the importation of plants with medieval monastic gardens. We also fail to look at how plants are grown, the conditions of the growers, where they are stored, and how they are imported. Although herbalism is framed as a bioregional healing system, it is supported by a global economy and so can not be separated from the other wider issues in the global economy.
During the nineteenth century, plants became a huge source of economic wealth for the empire. Many collectors imported plants into their vast gardens or dried pressed plants into their herbariums or into the collections in the Botanical gardens. Gardens such as the Botanical Gardens in Glasgow were set up to grow plants for the medical college in Glasgow, where physicians learnt how to make their own remedies so that they didn’t need to depend on apothecaries. Botanical gardens like Kew in London were set up to determine the economic potential of plants, the viability of growing them in Britain, and their trade potential. They facilitated plant transfers and aimed at developing imperial self-sufficiency. What this meant was that plants were taken from their original habitats and moved into new empire-owned lands where they could grow mono crops of certain species like tea and ginger.
By the nineteenth century, ginger, for example, had become a stapple in the British pharmacopoeia used for its heating and digestive properties. It was a plant that had been found in south-east Asia used in Chinese and Ayurvedic systems. It was a spice that had long travelled along the trade routes into Britain and was used in medieval and Roman medicine. It had become a highly prized and valued spice. The European empires, however, transformed ginger from a regional growing plant into a plantation commodity. Britain, for example, imported it into Jamaica and grew it on their plantations there. It, therefore, became a crop tied to imperial markets , including slave labour, colonial land seizure, and imperial shipping networks.
After Britain abolished slavery many agricultural economies in places like India, where ginger was also grown, moved to indentured labour forces. This included debt-bound labour, exploitative contracts, and racial hierarchies.
Although it is now not the same as in the nineteenth century, it can still be argued that global agriculture continues to be based upon expoitative systems that resemble this indebted nature. For example, Peruvian ginger growth and exportation grew exponentially due to the high demand from the wellness industry. This created opportunities but also concerns over monocrops, deforestation, and export dependence on European and American market forces, which have unequal trade relationships with Peruvian farmers.
This isn’t about saying that ginger shouldn’t be used in our materia medica, but it’s acknowledging the systems surrounding it and recognising the knowledge systems that it came to us from.