Economic botany has a long history in colonial South Asia. From the late 18th century the region became an important site for the institutionalisation of economic botany with the establishment of botanic gardens, 'improving' farms, plantations (e.g., opium, indigo, tea), and a range of agrarian research institutes. However, economic botany in colonial South Asia is largely seen as an initiative emanating from the imperial centre in which South Asians played an unequal, peripheral, and coerced (essentially labouring) role. This fellowship aims to reframe this understanding of South Asian participation and involvement with economic botany in colonial South Asia. The proposed research will explore the ways in which the South Asian contribution to colonial economic botany went beyond translators, scribes, illustrators, or plantation labourers. Instead, the fellowship aims to demonstrate how a wide range of South Asians, most notably landowners with estates of various sizes; merchants; Indian capitalists; and different sections of the emerging middle class were involved in varying degrees with these imperial initiatives for various reasons including a genuine belief in 'improving' agriculture, to the evident material benefits to be accrued from plantations. At a related level, the fellowship will also underline how this South Asian involvement mediated and shaped the agrarian economy of the region in hitherto unexamined ways. The nature and scale of South Asian participation in colonial economic botany will be explored by analysing a wide range of collections (including botanical specimens and artefacts) and records spread over three sites - RBG Kew; the British Library; and the archive of the AJC Bose Indian Botanic Garden in Kolkata. Additionally, the fellowship will draw upon the Fellow's native fluency in Bengali and Hindi to examine non-English sources, including scientific and non-scientific publications, letters, memoirs, and newspapers etc., to enrich current understandings of the multiple forms of South Asian participation in economic botany. By exploring South Asians' participation in shaping the outcomes of an imperial initiative, this fellowship will demonstrate the complex and negotiated nature of the transfer of scientific knowledge in a colonial milieu. Equally relevantly, the fellowship will provide an empirically rich, and historically informed narrative to support current research and conservation initiatives in contemporary South Asia by offering a long-term view of local influences in shaping the natural environment in the region. Lastly, the proposed research will make a major contribution towards diversifying the narratives associated with collections-based research in the UK by illustrating the various registers through which colonised peoples participated and shaped imperial interventions.