On the colonial frontier: gender, exploration and plant‐hunting on Mount Victoria in early 20th‐century Burma

Abstract

In April 1922 Charlotte Wheeler‐Cuffe was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. This honour was in recognition of her contribution to plant hunting and exploration, botanical illustration and anthropological knowledge accumulated about Burma during the quarter of a century (1897–1922) she spent there with her husband as part of the colonial service. While historical geographers have acknowledged that the colonies, in particular, often afforded women the space for practising science, the work of female naturalists in the field has received limited detailed scholarly attention. For Charlotte Wheeler‐Cuffe, her plant‐hunting expeditions across Burma allow us to extend the epistemic reach of a spatial perspective developed by geographers and to demonstrate how the web of connections she developed in the colonies enabled her to circulate scientific knowledge across the globe. By focusing on a major expedition to Mount Victoria undertaken by Wheeler‐Cuffe, this paper unravels the complexity of the practice of natural history within a global imperial framework through an examination of the private correspondence and pictorial archive maintained during her time in Burma.

Off the beaten track? Critical approaches to exploration studies

“…Others, meanwhile, have considered gender and exploration in different ways and have highlighted the historically important roles that women have played in expeditionary history (Blunt, 1994;Rose, 1993;Rose, 1995;Monk, 2003;Monk, 2004;Mills, 1991;Johnson, 2015;Johnson, 2017). Feminist and gender studies scholars have shown that the contributions made by women to exploratory activity have been regularly overlooked or simply ignored within many histories.…”

Historical geography in Transactions

“…In his paper on German Enlightenment print culture, Bond argues for greater attention to ‘periodical geography’, that is to ‘the geographies of knowledge, reading, commerce and colonialism that shaped how periodicals were produced, circulated and read’ (2017, 59). Meanwhile, Johnson () considers the botanical illustrations of Charlotte Wheeler‐Cuffe, who travelled, observed and hunted plants in Burma in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Johnson shows that Wheeler‐Cuffe's long residency in Burma allowed her to ‘develop some personal local prestige as an expert on the colony's plant geographies’ (2017, 429).…”