Reading List
These books fed the thinking behind Imperial Fruit Thieves — some directly, some obliquely. Notes on what each one opened up, and why it's here.
Empireworld
by Sathnam Sanghera
2024
The chapter on Kew Gardens was the trigger. Sanghera traces how Britain's botanical institutions — framed as scientific, benevolent, curious — were engines of economic extraction, cataloguing the plant wealth of colonised territories and routing it toward British commercial advantage. That argument is the spine of this project. The first IFT print ever made went to Sanghera as a gift.
colonial botany · Kew Gardens · economic history · British empireAtlas of AI
by Kate Crawford
2024
Crawford's chapter on gutta percha does something most writing on technology rarely manages: it grounds the digital in the material. The gutta percha tree — native to Malaya, harvested to extinction within a decade to insulate the first transatlantic telegraph cables — connects natural world, colonial labour, and technological infrastructure in a single chain. That link between ecology and technology runs through the whole IFT project.