Vegetable

Abstract

Human life under Queen Victoria was built on—or, more accurately, with—vegetables, from sugarcane, tea, and spices to cotton and indigo, tobacco and opium poppies. While the intricate and multiple economies of some of these vegetable staples have been explored in considerable detail, the highly uneven power dynamics of the Victorians’ complex, drawn-out encounters with the vegetable world mostly continue to be glossed over in simplistic terms of human appropriation and control. This essay proposes “vegetable” as a heuristic for critically engaging plants and other nonanimal growy things as sources of action in Victorianist scholarship. Drawing on thinking from the interdisciplinary field of critical plant studies, I argue that human life and ideas cannot be thought apart from vegetable materialities, especially during the Victorian period. The high degree to which human history was entangled in the vegetable world, I suggest, renders a “vegetable” heuristic indispensable to Victorianist scholarship, especially in the struggle to come to terms with its imperial inheritance.