Tucker on Drayton

“It is only now, a generation after Decolonization, that we are beginning to put back together the histories of Britain and its empire.” So begins Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World, an ambitious study by Richard Drayton that investigates the interrelationships of science and government through a history of the idea of colonizing imperial natural resources for national, economic, and professional gain. Drayton explains: “Nature’s Government is an experiment at writing a history which does justice to both the ‘big’ and the ‘small’” (xi). It is, on the one hand, he elaborates, “a ‘world history’: it seeks to explain the origins of how we live and think today in terms of processes which operated over several centuries, and through all the continents of human experience” (xi). But “it also ‘zooms’ in, describing and explaining the particular circumstances of Europe, Britain, and ultimately it focuses on a small cast of scientific and political actors” (xi). Elegantly produced by Yale University Press, the book contains fourteen colored plates and several illustrations. It offers five “major reinterpretations”: (1) that Christian assumptions about “man’s place in nature” played a “central role in the making of Imperial Britain”; (2) that the British empire had “agrarian origins”; (3) that “dirigiste strains of political economy” shaped domestic and imperial policy; (4) that political support for “vast new territories” depended on “confidence in the capacity of administration”; and (5) that European expansion should be conceived as “the colonization of Europe by extra-European interests,” a collaboration among merchants, bankers, rulers, savants, soldiers, “restless peasants,” missionaries, and others (xviii). “We may eventually discover,” Drayton suggests, that “the modern world was produced through the collaboration of the labour, wit, and learning of all of the world” (xviii).

Part I, “Adam Out of Eden,” follows the developments that led to the inclusion of the natural sciences in eighteenth-century ideologies of rational resource management. Using examples drawn from the history of natural history and gardens, Drayton considers “how monarchy, nobility, and ordinary people came to patronize botany and gardening” (xvi). As monarchs and nobles aestheticized nature, they demonstrated the wisdom and virtue of their rule. However, by the eighteenth century, Drayton argues, new ideals of agricultural “improvement” provided the right conditions for appeals by Sir Joseph Banks and others to transform Kew Gardens from a royal “pleasure garden” to a garden with “use beyond beauty” (192). Part II, “Nature and Empire,” which builds on Drayton’s doctoral dissertation, follows a narrative course via four chapters, each of which addresses about thirty years in the life of Kew from 1772 to 1903. Drawing on archival correspondence between Kew’s directors and patrons as well as internal Kew documents, Drayton shows how the Whig theory of landscape permeated nineteenth-century political visions that centered on the use of economic botany to support “New Imperialist” schemes. He suggests that “it is easy to see in this spectacle the outline of the Garden of Eden, with the merchant, instead of the farmer, turned into the agent of Creation’s redemption” (270). Drayton demonstrates that English elites based their assertions of authority over global conservation efforts on the prevalent myth of the “Profligate Native” and the notion that those who best managed the land and labor had “the right to control both”(229).

Drayton concludes by drawing parallels between Kew and the Royal Exchange, both of them entrepots through which commodities moved from east to west, north to south. He states: “In the aftermath of the European empires, every part of the world is part of one system of exchange of goods, services, ideas, embodied in the inexorable progress of the English language” (271). Evoking what he calls the “charisma of the marketplace,” he suggests that we might learn from this history how to “rescue from the Royal Exchange” the “gracious idea” of “encounter and reconciliation” (271). “Will we not one day “reach that era of cosmopolitan abundance, harmony, and...