Biotic Exchange in an Imperial World: Developments in the Grass Seed Trade

The establishment of new and improved grasslands was central to the trade prospects of the British Empire as well as a defining characteristic of its environmental transformation. ‘In this colony we annually import an immense quantity of agricultural seeds’ said the Canterbury Times in New Zealand on 20 November 1885. ‘A new country begins of necessity by importing many commodities which require special skill in the production of them’ (in Mackay 1887, 124–5). The increasing demand for wool, meat and dairy products in urban America, Britain and continental Europe drove the conversion of huge areas of forest, wetland and rangeland, in north and south America, and in Australasia, into ‘empires of grass’. ¹ By the 1920s it could be said that: ‘Of every five-pound note that Great Britain expends on overseas products of any and every kind, twenty-five shillings goes in purchasing what is, in essence, worked-up grass’ (in Stapledon 1928, v).