A Contribution to the History of Dutch Colonial Botany (1986)

Johannes Heniger’s 1986 monograph, Hendrik Adriaan van Reede tot Drakenstein (1636–1691) and Hortus Malabaricus: A Contribution to the History of Dutch Colonial Botany, published by A.A. Balkema, explores one of the most remarkable botanical and historical cross-cultural collaborations of the 17th century.

Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein was a Dutch East India Company (VOC) administrator, military officer, and Governor of Dutch Malabar (modern-day Kerala, India). His ancestral name lives on directly in South African geography; during his 18th-century VOC inspections, the Drakenstein valley and Drakenstein Mountains in the Western Cape were named in his honour.

Van Rheede spent over a decade producing Hortus Malabaricus ("Garden of Malabar"), a massive 12-volume folio work published in Amsterdam between 1678 and 1693. It details the medicinal properties and descriptions of over 700 plants native to the Malabar region, complete with 794 copperplate engravings.

Hortus Malabaricus is celebrated as a rare example of collaborative colonial scholarship. Van Rheede relied heavily on local indigenous knowledge, working alongside Malayalam physicians (notably Itty Achudan), Konkani scholars, Brahmin physicians, local artists, and European scholars. Plant names in the original volumes were recorded in four scripts: Latin, Malayalam, Arabic, and Devanagari.

The data and engravings compiled by Van Rheede were so comprehensive that Carl Linnaeus relied heavily on Hortus Malabaricus nearly a century later to classify Asian flora in his landmark Species Plantarum (1753).

Published by A.A. Balkema (Rotterdam/Cape Town), a house celebrated among Africana and botanical bibliophiles for producing scholarly, high-quality reference works on natural history, exploration, and colonial history.

210mm x 285mm x 30mm

Small tears on the dust jacket.

R1,250