Dr. Luke Keogh

Now, what's quite interesting about the tea story is that, yes, Fortune found a lot of tea seedlings.

Yes, he started to grow them.

Yes, he started to move them from China to India quite successfully.

But in this process of setting up a tea industry in India is that

They also start to look at their own plants there.

And they started to realize, wait up, we also have tea here.

And so many of the native varieties of Indian tea are the ones that thrive today and we still use.

But it was at this moment of impetus of trying to take tea from China to India and using Wardian cases successfully that they were able to start to look at their own plants.

So rubber is probably one of the really significant stories with the Wardian case that I find interesting.

And moving rubber seedlings became really important because they needed to move it from a place that wasn't controlled by the British to a place that would become controlled by the British.

And so one of the

I'm just going to get a bit geeky in the history of science, is that at this same time, we have a lot of scientists traveling to try and map the biogeography of the world.

And this is really important, because if you know what plants grow where, you can also move a plant from one location to a location in which

you have imperial control.

This is where the history starts to blend with the history of imperialism.

If you were to take your rubber plantations from Brazil, let's say, and put it in Southeast Asia, which has some very similar biogeographical elements, then you'll be able to have rubber plantations in Southeast Asia.

Those seedlings were then packed into wading cases, lots of wading cases, which were then shipped to places like Singapore or Malaysia, where there were significant plantations being set up.

I think it does change lives for Europeans.

It also changes lives for many people in Southeast Asia who are forced into these rubber plantations and these sorts of things as well.

It also changes people in South America who relied on rubber plantations for their well-being or for finance and these sorts of things because Brazil didn't want rubber to be taken away.