A 19th-Century Settler Capitalist in the Empire of Science: Re-entangling Currents of Modernity

Second-generation settler Australian William Macarthur (1800-1882) embodies relationships between capital investment and scientific knowledge formation that propelled the emergence of modern practices in animal husbandry and horticulture. Macarthur was a linchpin in his family’s vertically integrated business in wool for export and in domestic trade of nursery plants and grape wine, while also participating in wider colonial processes. He developed wool-cleaning standards through years of trial and error, with “aching eyes”. He imported, acclimatised and sold exotic plants. He spearheaded a colonial wine industry. Macarthur was also a leading collector of Australian plant specimens, exchanging letters with British and European scientists during the formalisation of modern botany. Several Australian trees are taxonomically suffixed Macarthurii. Macarthur sought Aboriginal plant knowledge and shared this internationally. He served in a colonial legislature and on the Senate of Australia’s first university.

The empire of science, as described in the mid-nineteenth century by agricultural chemist Justus Liebig, was a self-reflexive intellectual community of amateurs and professionals concerned with identifying and classifying nature and natural laws. Liebig perceived this global community as above practice and more ideologically pure than the competitive political economy of nations and states. Macarthur, for his part, was a settler capitalist in the empire of science: farmer, businessperson, amateur botanist, leader in international exhibitions, and politician. This paper investigates Macarthur not as an exemplar of economic or scientific progress, but as a conductive interlocutor of knowledge for profit at the ‘vector of assemblage’ (Chambers & Gillespie 2011) of a ‘science-capitalism nexus’ (Rieppel et al, 2018), as explored by American historians of science. During Macarthur’s lifetime, the structures of the Australian state within the British Empire were taking shape. Attention to his intra- and interimperial networks and practices contributes to illuminating the politics of the co-production and mobilities of science and capital.