From Gardens to Techno Utopia: Honduras and Malaysia as Botanical Experiments

Separated by 18,000 kilometers, continental Malaysia and Honduras could hardly stand any further from each other geographically. In contrast, this text by Semine Long-Callesen and Nancy Dayanne Valladares traces bridges between the two territories through British colonial and, later, US imperial past and present histories of botanical displacement and agricultural endeavors.

Much of what we learned about each other’s cultures began in the kitchen. We began noticing how certain flavor combinations echoed foods we had tried in our respective food cultures. The aroma of ginger, garlic, and chilies frying in coconut oil called to the Caribbean, and Malaysia sang back. We learned of tropical fruit that, to our surprise, we both grew up eating despite being geographically distant. How did the rambutan, the mangosteen, and the Malayan gutta-percha rubber end up in Central America?

Our shared kitchen experiments led us to uncover, at the personal scale, how the engineering of our respective tropical ecologies shaped labor, national identity and natural resources. We spent time comparing how European and American botanists and scientists travelled, collected, and transplanted seeds around the tropics throughout the 19th century and early 20th century. From the US transnational’s introduction of fruit via Lancetilla Botanical Gardens in Tela, Honduras; to the British empire’s botanical experiments in agri-horticultural gardens in Singapore and Perak, Malaya.

As an artist and a historian, respectively, the task of learning about these histories was a labor of curiosity and grief: of connecting nodes across planetary geographies, and realizing how entire ecosystems and economies can be reshaped by the introduction of a singular species. Over time, land development and extraction culminated in shared patterns of cultivation, for instance, of the rambután, a Malayan fruit now found ubiquitously in Honduras.

For us, the two geographies embody the long-durée shift from colonialism to neoliberalism. The continuation of structures that no longer relies on empire alone, but now persists through state-backed private actors who extend the same legacy of extraction and control. For us, the histories of Malaysia and Honduras can be read as parallel trajectories — distinct yet resonant, shaped by shared imperial logics that reverberate across what we might call planetary nodes of economic trade and extraction. What began as colonial plant science continues to dictate labor, everyday life and land sovereignty in today’s Malaysia and Honduras, as in other tropical geographies around the globe. ​​

Semine: Malaya, Museums, and Rubber ///
When I was a child, I visited the natural history museum of my dad’s town in Malaysia. I remember the rows of snakes, crocodiles, and jungle cats. I later realized that the museum was not a cabinet of curiosities but an institution of the British Empire that had served an essential role in the transformation of the Malaysian landscape. In 2016, I returned to Malaysia as a researcher for the first time to study the early scientific experiments of the empire that had shaped resource extraction of Malaya.

In 1883, Hugh Low, British Administrator of the state of Perak, established what is known today as the Perak Museum in the town of Taiping. At the time, museums were akin to scientific experimental labs, and they were founded to help the colonial administration divide the world into regions with specific climates. These divisions, which would delineate the tropical and subtropical regions via weather conditions, later facilitated the transplantation of distinct cash crops from one area of the globe to another. By 1910, the British Empire had about 2,000 museums concerned with specifying the empire’s nature. The founding of the museum in Perak was part of a shift in British power: first, the British administration governed port infrastructure in Penang and Singapore. In the late 19th century, the British empire expanded to territorial control in the Malay Peninsula and turned the land into a profitable resource.

Low devoted himself to experiments with acclimatizing non-native plants such as coffee, tea, and rubber on his Residency estate in Kuala Kangsar, Perak. He even procured seven rubber seedlings from the Kew Gardens in London and took them to British Malaya. The museum played a key role in documenting latex harvesting techniques in the museum journals and exhibited rubber in the museum.

Further south from Perak, in the British Colony of Singapore, similar museological activities were happening: James Collins who served as the first economic botanist, librarian, and curator at the Raffles Museum, spearheaded collaboration with trade companies. The Raffles Museum’s roots in colonial trade solidified: in the years of international expositions, the collection’s focus narrowed down to exhibits of export.

At the Agri-Horticultural Gardens, later the Botanical Gardens in Singapore, Collins continued to experiment with seedlings as he tried to strengthen the correlation between colonial exports and the museum’s enterprise. Rubber was exhibited to the public in 1891 at the Gardens as a new source of revenue. By the early 20th century, rubber was Singapore’s biggest export alongside other economic botanical products including palm oil, coconut oil, and black pepper. Similarly, After 1900, the rubber industry made Malaya one of Britain’s most prosperous colonies.​​

Nancy: Honduras and the US Transnationals ///
In December of 2019, Semine and I drove up to the north coast of Honduras; the single road that precariously connects the mountains to the beaches of Tela. This highway is lined with rows and rows of African palm, creeping up mountains and hills that previously housed lush jungles and forests. Many of these are small scale farms, managed by road-side communities that grow their own palm crops as part of their economy. As we ate from bags of sweet rambután, I shared with Semine stories I heard from my grandfather, who worked as a mason for the railroads built by the transnationals in the 1940–50s.
Despite embodying such a small territory, Honduras has functioned as a port for various species of plants, acting as a nexus through which vegetal matter would pass through to other destinations. Some would remain and transform the landscape, some would continue on to thrive in other soils.

In an attempt to emulate successful botanical experiments that began in Southeast Asia, Honduras became both the port of entry and laboratory through which various species were introduced into the region from all over the world. Imported by US transnational companies from places like Sri Lanka, Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaya, several of these new introductions became crucial for the production and extraction of materials like tinder, rubber and palm oil when US trade routes and supply lines in the Pacific were cut off during World War II.

In the Honduran government, the US found an ally that could serve as a satellite for its economic interests. In exchange, Honduras would “benefit” from infrastructure projects like the partial construction of a railroad, and what would later become the Panamerican highway, which runs through the entire length of the continent. Inherent to the building of the Honduran state identity was a concession to US interests at the cost of its resources—allowing US corporate interests to move from botanical and resource imperialism towards other forms of control.

Semine: Glove Factory and COVID ///
One of the reasons why rubber was so important to the British Empire was the demand from emerging communication infrastructures at the time. It was rubber, or gutta percha, that coated and insulated submarine telegraphs cables during the mid-19th century, building the infrastructure of today’s global telecommunications. But even after Malaya’s independence in 1957, rubber remained a key resource in the manufacturing industries in Malaysia. Today, it is used by the world’s largest rubber glove producer Top Glove. In many ways, the rubber glove is a reminder of the long-term impact of colonial botany on Malaysia.

During the Movement Control Order of COVID-19, Malaysian hospital cleaners were forced to reuse gloves. Meanwhile, the British National Health Service (NHS) ramped up their import of protective equipment from Top Glove. This contributed to the unequal distribution of protection equipment with a priority given to the global north even as the manufacturing happened in the global south.

Despite knowing that the company used forced and indentured labor, the NHS would continue using Top Glove products. Many of the company’s workforce are indeed migrant workers struggling with debt bondage. At the same time, their factories became hot spots for the virus as workers were forced to take on extra work to meet the frantic demand for gloves while living in cramped hostels.

While NHS health care workers raised concern with the supply chain of the medical equipment they were asked to use, local resistance was and remains difficult. In part because of years of anti-communist legislation that links back to colonialism’s crushing of an independence movement that had communist ideals. Since the 1990s, workers organizing have faced difficulties due to the privatization and defunding of public and state services. British-led Cold War measurements against unionization have resulted in decreasing union membership. The rubber glove thus revealed patterns of forced labor migration and low level of worker security that echo the labor struggles in British colonial rubber plantations. What began as a botanical experiment in a colonial museum, ended up cementing the structure for a highly uneven export-import pattern.

In Honduras, the rubber tree became ornamental, or rather a symbol of its journey across oceans and rivers and mountains, adapted to new climates, new ecologies. As these species adapted, new myths and logics emerged, which paved the way for the creation of the first Banana Republic: a term for countries that rely on the export of singular commodities.​​

Nancy: Land Resistance and Techno Utopias ///
In the 2010s, I was researching the history of the United Fruit Company and the subsequent establishment of Lancetilla Botanical Experimental Station, in Tela Honduras. Visiting Lancetilla and surrounding communities was quite telling of the legacy it had left behind.

Much of the land use in the surrounding communities, is the remnant of land concessions and the towns built by the plantation workers that moved from all over the country in the 1900s. The key realization for me was that Lancetilla was not just a site for botanical experimentation, but a laboratory for testing the boundaries of Honduran legal frameworks and the ability of corporations and private actors to operate with impunity. In this nexus of environmental and political struggle, is the realization that even amid the local resistance, internationalist struggles are connected. Organizations like COPINH ( Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras ) and COFRANEH ( The Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras), and PROLANSATE, are the face of environmental struggle in the Central American nation. As my work at the time, intersected with the history of Tela and the monoculture of African Palm, I was invested in the story of Honduran Palestinian environmental activist Jeanette Kawas.

A two hour drive west from Lancetilla, deep into a protected forest area is the bay of Tela. It was founded in the early 1990s by a group of Tela citizens, who sought to protect one of the most biodiverse regions of the country from private corporate interests and the expansion of African palm plantations. It was a beacon of hope for an environmental movement that rose in opposition to the predatory extractive model of state interests and private enterprise. Jeanette Kawas was murdered for her activism, by two men in her home in Tela on February 6, 1995. Despite international pressures, as of today, nobody has been charged for her murder.

Jeanette was not the first nor the last environmentalist who was martyred for their beliefs in the small Central American nation. Despite colonial endeavors that have morphed into new shapes, Garifuna communities of the north coast and other coalitions of land defenders, continue to resist the encroachment of behemoth plantations and the construction of resorts in their ancestral lands.

One thing remained clear to me, that paying close attention to these experiments is crucial to the ongoing environmental resistance around the globe. Once tested, these structures such as the plantation logics and infrastructures of the banana republic, gave teeth to newer, more technical forms of exploitation. One example of this new shape of techno-extraction is Próspera, on the island of Roatán, Bay Islands. Seeking to reshape the legal landscape of experimental cities: it promises deregulation, autonomy, and speed for technocrats and US libertarians. This start-up city that claims legal autonomy, is host to longevity clinics, pickleball courts and Montessori schools, slowly encroaching on the community of Crawfish Rock in Roatán.

Próspera represents the latest coup by foreign techno-oligarchs and libertarians, where corporations operate at the same level as nation states.In the past, the brutal exploitation of transnationals like United Fruit Company, were catalysts for an explosion of labor movements in the 1950s, ushering in a new era of labor reforms. Even in the most advanced forms of techno-capitalist worldbuilding, we cannot forget that systems like Próspera, have back doors and fragile leverage points. They depend on the availability of local labor for the care of their infrastructure, and are still connected to the global supply chains. Despite this, residents of Crawfish Rock and Honduran civil rights organizations continue to demand accountability, despite Próspera’s shareholders threatening with a 10.775 billion dollar lawsuit – a quantity equivalent to the country’s yearly expenditure.

The history of land struggle from Malaya and Honduras reveal a continuous and entangled history of botany and power.

Honduras was imagined to be a replica of Southeast Asian agricultural success but emulated its initial goal. The legal frameworks that once allowed the British imperial companies to take over port infrastructure and territory, now paved the way for US tech corporations to operate from Honduras. Colonial land no longer occupies a dream of territorial ownership; this has now shifted towards a cyber expansionist control. ■