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  • Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the "Improvement" of the World
  • Michael A. Osborne
Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the "Improvement" of the World. By Richard Drayton (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000) 346 pp. $40.00

Nature's Government spans the biblical Garden of Eden and William Thistelton-Dyer's accession to the post of botanical advisor to the British Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1902. Well-researched, well-illustrated, and interesting, the book focuses on the origins and elaboration of Kew Gardens, the eventual hub of economic botany for the British empire. Selecting such an important, yet oft-examined, institution for a study of science and imperialism constrains the author to cover ground and personages also treated by Brockway, Desmond, and Headrick, among others.1 Another daunting challenge, that of making administrative and institutional history engaging, the author is largely able to meet. In addition, though this book is not strictly, or even mainly, a comparative history of European or even British botanical gardens, the history of Kew is contextualized with reference to Dutch, French, and German continental and colonial events and institutions. [End Page 464]

The first quarter of the book surveys the history of botanical gardens and the classificatory urge, while touching upon how cameralism, physiocratic thought, and Christian agrarian traditions informed the evolution of botanical science and horticulture. Since so many ideas and centuries are touched upon so lightly, some may feel that this section resembles a survey class in the history of biology, and historians of medicine may quibble about just how the demise of Renaissance hermeticism was linked in any meaningful way to both governance and botany. Although Drayton might have garnered a more interdisciplinary audience by squarely taking on some of the big mythologies of the environmental studies literature-such as White's thesis on Christianity and environmental degradation-or by exploiting the science studies and sociology of science literature in his discussion of Joseph Banks and patronage, this approach by no means detracts from the achievement.2 Drayton has told a good story, and his methodology and reading of the sources is eminently historical.

The heart of the book treats events of the nineteenth century and provides a detailed discussion of the transformation of Kew Gardens from a royal botanical garden to a kind of hybrid institution providing aesthetic pleasures and recreation to the public and scientific assistance to the empire. Historians of scientific institutions will no doubt recognize, from the plight of other European gardens, zoos, and museums, the tensions that Kew Gardens faced trying to be both a public institution and a venue for scientific research. The collections of Kew's herbarium had been linked to, and swelled by, the growth of the British empire since the late eighteenth century. But by the time the aged botanist Joseph Hooker passed on the directorship of Kew to Thistelton-Dyer, the empire had grown in size and complexity.3 Research and activities at Kew, particularly the securing of cinchona and rubber seeds and their transfer to the far corners of the Empire, instigated important industries.

By linking the transformation of colonized landscapes to an important metropolitan institution, which was itself transformed by the dynamic evolution of imperial relations, Drayton has elucidated a topic of global import. Like Raj and Bayly, Drayton challenges diffusionist theories of science and empire enunciated by Basalla and others.3 An example of the genre that we might call the "New Imperial History," this book merits wide consideration. [End Page 465]

Michael A. Osborne
University of California, Santa Barbara

Footnotes

1. Lucile Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York, 1979); Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850-1940 (New York, 1988); Adrian Desmond, "The Making of Institutional Zoology in London, 1822-1836," History of Science, XXIII (1985), 153-185, 223-250.

2. Lynn T. White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," Science. CLV (1967), 1203-1207.

3. Christopher A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830 (London, 1989); Kapil Raj, "Colonial Encounters and the Forging of New Knowledge...

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