This chapter has a sociocultural approach to the quest for nutmeg and cloves. It analyses human, cross-cultural encounters in South East Asia, the native countries of numerous spices introduced in Mauritius over the course of the eighteenth century. As this chapter reveals, the French colonial spice project involved actors from different backgrounds for patronage, protection, and assistance. They used a mix of languages, promises, and informal relations mainly in South East Asian islands (the Maluku islands and the Philippines). The purpose of this chapter is to understand the movements of knowledge and people within cross-cultural interactions in the Indo-Pacific through the lens of plant exchange. These cross-cultural connections were essential for this project: Asian merchants and brokers were indispensable for acquiring spice plants and grains from Dutch colonial territory in today’s Indonesia. Insisting on the cross-cultural nature of the acquisition of spice plants, this chapter challenges existing narratives of the cultural components of the French empire.

The introduction provides the key features and argument, divided into six sections. Besides a discussion of creolisation as a concept, the introduction lays out the central tenets of this monograph. This book is about the practices of plant knowledge; that is, the knowing how, but not the knowing that. By looking at the interconnections between people, materials, and nature, this book argues that creolisation took place in the social, cultural, epistemological, and material terms that determined the application of knowledge. As a creolising process, the knowledge of plants derived from cultures all over the world was integrated into the emerging practices within the island space. The cultivators included the Europeans who had migrated to Mauritius by choice, settlers born there, labourers, and enslaved people brought in by forced migration. Unsurprisingly, the agricultural knowledge of these individuals varied widely. Consequently, cultivation turned out to be a complex process of creolising the expertise that had originated in the local populations of the plants’ native habitats with the varying degrees of horticultural knowledge of the people living in Mauritius.

Government policies, stories, and institutions lie at the heart of the argument. Widely embodying the term ‘applied science’, they made it visible and real. They have also been sites of interplay between organisational and professional promotion and public discourse about Britain’s prospects. Summarising the book, this chapter reflects on the continuity between the nineteenth-century emphasis on pedagogy and the twentieth-century focus on research. It suggests that because the meaning of applied science is rooted in national debate and experience, it differed from terms growing out of other national experiences, such as the German Technik. Its trajectory in other English-speaking countries should also be studied individually. The imperial experience meant the term may have been transformed as it travelled. In sum, its meaning was not the work of just a few intellectuals. Instead, the character of applied science developed through the complexities of history and widespread public debate.

Remarkably, the classification of science is only now being studied historically. The introduction specifies this book’s question: What made applied science seem such a potent economic, cultural, and political elixir in the United Kingdom for many decades and then saw it superseded? The book explores the meaning of the term that gave it such potency using five tools: institutions, narratives, sociotechnical imaginaries, concepts, and ideologies. The term has epistemic connotations; it has been promoted and blamed for its science policy implications, and cultural reality once weighed heavily. The book explores the relationship between ‘applied science’ and ‘technology’ with their different emphases to describe the space between pure science and the market. The argument has three parts: the nineteenth-century concern with pedagogy, the early twentieth century as attention shifted to research, and the period after World War Two in which the visibility of applied science first rose and then collapsed.

In the era of the colleges’ foundation around 1880, ‘applied science’ dominated the space between science and practice in British education. However, ‘technology’ was an increasingly popular competitor. These two categories of knowledge were associated with different institutions and classes of students, and between the 1870s and World War Two, educators treated the two as complementary. So, this chapter asks how ‘technology’ was used in this period and how it related to ‘applied science’. ‘Technology’ was popularised by the technical education examined first by the Society of Arts and then by the City and Guilds. While carefully differentiated from workplace apprenticeship, it was much more practical than applied science. Government concern not to interfere with the free market and industrial anxieties about proprietary knowledge defended the divide. In the early twentieth century, emulating American and German models, ‘higher technological education’ taught at its own elite centres, particularly at Imperial College, in Manchester, and in Glasgow, came to be differentiated from technical education.

This chapter asks what processes erased applied science from public view from the late 1960s. It explores the public talk of a second industrial revolution in the 1950s, and the increasing popularity of ‘technology’, gaining the support of the Labour Party, which founded the Ministry of Technology in 1964. Meanwhile, funds for scientific research became tighter, and the public popularity of science waned. Increasingly, as economists became interested in ‘innovation’, analysts questioned the efficacy of the applied science route to wealth. By the end of the 1960s, science-push was giving way to demand-pull as a government-favoured model of innovation. Scientific research was seen as just one of several important inputs into successful development. As a result, the use of the term ‘applied science’ fell precipitously. However, in the twenty-first century, the new concept of ‘translational research’ emerged in the ever-more prominent biosciences to fill the gap between bench and bedside.

After World War One, new institutions and gadgets gave reality to a changing landscape of public culture. Therefore, in this chapter, we explore applied science in the inter-war public realm. Society’s usage interacted with officials’ language as public and bureaucratic discussions of applied science intertwined. Talk about applied science connected intimately with an intense discussion of ‘modern civilisation’ to make sense of science too. Amidst anxiety, the separation of pure and applied became important to science’s standing. To some, the process by which scientific research led to a multitude of new gadgets was frighteningly dangerous. To others, science was exploited too slowly due to the historical inadequacy of British industry. Both branch of government and a cathedral of applied science, the Science Museum displayed linkages between science and technical wonders. Debates were conducted over the new radio service and in newspapers, and were contested by bishops as well as politicians.