Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the 'Improvement' of the World

  • Richard Drayton
Yale University Press: 2000. 400 pp. $40, £25
Pioneering plunder: “The Harvest of Peppers in India” from Marco Polo's Book of Wonders.

Today, English stands uncontested as the world's premier scientific language. This hegemony derives in part from the establishment of English-speaking institutions around the world at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Many of these institutions were concerned with exploiting nature for financial profit. In Nature's Government, Richard Drayton reviews how, beginning in the mid- eighteenth century, England established a large network of agricultural-improvement stations throughout its empire.

These institutions, orbiting around Kew Gardens, near London, centralized the botanical knowledge of exotic species, established protocols for moving cultivars around the world, and provided employment for hundreds of technical adepts, allowing many of them to write works on botany. Much of the money came from the public purse.

Unlike the omnibus research university, with its uncanny ability to capitalize on innovation wherever it appears, independent institutions with a particular research focus — from physic gardens and astronomical observatories to model farms and industrial testing laboratories — are perpetually threatened with superannuation. Government establishments in England that extorted profit from the soil of distant lands seem generally to have lagged behind the research front. Chemistry and then microbiology provided great promise for agriculture in the late nineteenth century; but their effects impinged on commercial botany only slowly and unevenly, as did Mendelian genetics in the twentieth century. At Kew, even biogeography and ecology seem to have found little place. Nature's Government is consequently heavy on government and light on nature. In the eighteenth century, Kew's founder Joseph Banks projected the gardens as an imperial repository for plant acculturation; his towering legacy proved hard to shake off.

Focusing on Kew, Drayton takes us from Banks, through the administration of the Hookers (William and Joseph) to the reign of William Thistleton-Dyer. The reader will discover how agricultural improvement and botany were part of a general move towards the professionalization of science in the nineteenth century. And Drayton's awkward prose informs the familiar story with new material.

It would have been good to know how all the political rhetoric was reflected in botanical publications of a putatively dispassionate kind. Did discussion about commercial value find an echo in taxonomic choices and pathogenic identification? Or did botany, secure in its disciplinary norms, master its imperial patron? The answer would tell us much about the extent to which descriptive sciences and practical technologies are embedded in the social fabric of their time and place.