The growing professionalisation of the law and the natural sciences owed much to the spread of the empire – and Cambridge intellectuals would benefit more than most from these processes. Natural philosophers travelled across the empire amassing botantical, geological, and antiquarian collections and expanding scientific knowledge, with much of the credit for their findings owed to local enslavers or enslaved Africans. Britons with financial investments in slave-trading organisations also donated to found professorships. In the case of the law, experts in international law and treaty-making, particularly Sir Nathaniel Lloyd, applied their expert knowledge to cases concerning piracy, plantation holdings, and imperial companies. As with missionary organisations, the problem of enslavement continued to be a source of debate in the eighteenth century, as philosophers of natural law and rights considered the ethical justifications for racial enslavement.

This chapter addresses early modern England’s ‘useful’ genres of plant writing – printed herbals and gardening manuals. As they developed in printed formats across the sixteenth century, received by enthusiastic users and consumers, both genres of plant literature promised to improve the lives of their readers, bringing them pleasure and profit and guiding them in the cultivation, identification, appreciation, and therapeutic application of vegetable beings. This chapter explores more deeply exactly what it meant for these works to be ‘useful’, and the various uses to which they were put, through a consideration of their bibliographic and literary form, extant evidence of readerly engagement, and their long-reaching effects when it came to cultural and scientific authority and the development of botany as a colonial science.

This chapter discusses literary representations of plants in the French and francophone tradition, referencing texts and writers from Europe, the Caribbean, North America, Western Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia. Without pretending to offer an impossibly exhaustive history or a complete list of references, this essay considers a diverse set of examples to signal the broad range of these imaginary encounters with the vegetal, as well as shifting (though sometimes overlapping) approaches to botanical knowledge from the Middle Ages to the present. It also examines how and why plants have served as potent allegorical figures, and then focuses on select images of the plants themselves, noting some of their most popular species as well as the ways in which literary authors have tried to understand the otherness of the vegetal.

This essay revisits the relationship between Clare’s mental and physical health and his writings by considering the importance of taking him on his own terms. Appraising the critical history of diagnostic approaches towards Clare’s mental and physical distress, it suggests that such categoric approaches to the poet’s psychophysiological life are unsatisfactory. It turns instead to a key term that Clare used repeatedly to describe his varied forms of disorder – his ‘indisposition’ – and argues that it remains important to Clare and to us as readers of him because of its dislocating and indecisive potential. Considering his unsettled position within the medical and literary culture in which he lived, and broadening the range of his medical encounters and vocabulary beyond the narrow context of the asylum, the essay discuss Clare’s symptoms and his poetic representations of them as entangled with his mobility across, and unstable status within, different places, social worlds, and identities.

Contrary to some accounts, particularly older ones, which portray Clare as a lonely, isolated, and somewhat misanthropic figure, he was a man with a rich social life who had many friends, including literary figures, antiquarians, ornithologists, entomologists, botanists, and artists. Through these friendships, he was abreast of contemporary thought and techniques, and, if only at second hand, he was in touch with the activities of some of the leading naturalists in this country and abroad. This obviously led to an increased knowledge and sophistication in Clare’s understanding of nature, as well as leading to subtle changes in his attitude to the natural world. In particular, it meant that he no longer regarded a love of nature as something to be rather ashamed of, but instead as something which he was able to celebrate.

It is widely believed that one of Charles Darwin’s most important accomplishments was to have banished teleology from biology. Darwin’s view of teleology was a much-debated question in the 19th century, when both advocates and opponents of teleology equated it with divine design (Asa Gray and Karl Ernst Von Baer, for example). Darwin himself, however, did not think he had done so, and didn’t think that teleology should be banished from biology. This chapter will challenge the myth of Darwin the anti-teleologist by looking at two distinct kinds of evidence. First, we will look at his correspondence with Harvard Botanist Asa Gray, who praised Darwin’s use of teleological explanation. While Gray and Darwin agree on the value of teleological thinking in biology, Darwin disagrees with Gray that this counts as evidence for divine design in nature. Then we will look at Darwin’s own biology, especially his botanical works written after the publication of On the Origin of Species, to better understand his use of teleological explanation in biology.

This chapter presents a new, annotated translation of the three fragments of a satirical sketch of southern Greek communities, now attributed to one Herakleides Kritikos and probably written between 279 and 239 BC, together with an additional testimonium. An appendix presents a fragmentary papyrus (P. Hawara 80–1) containing a contemporary description of the Piraeus. The chapter introduction recognizes the literary and performative character of the text, its selective use of geographical information (as far as we can judge from the surviving passages, extending from Attica to Thessaly where we have the original ending of the work), its use of irony, and its geopolitical claims about the extent of ‘Hellas’. A new map clarifies the route followed by the first part of the text.

Although Alexander’s campaign has received less attention than it might from the perspective of geographical studies, the image of Alexander himself as an explorer has, paradoxically, enjoyed great success in the modern historiography. This is partly to be explained by the widespread belief that Aristotle had a great influence on his student. From this perspective, the image of Alexander as an intellectual and a friend of knowledge fits perfectly with that of an explorer eager to know the world. In the eyes of many scholars, an assumption of this sort has allowed Alexander to become more than a mere conqueror. A new way of understanding this problem is proposed here, since we consider that both Alexander the conqueror and Alexander the explorer were essential and indissociable elements of Alexander the king, that is to say, they were indispensable characteristics of any Argead monarch, and these two facets of rulership must be studied together. In other words, knowing the world was one more way to conquer it and rule it.

This chapter begins with varying definitions of the Anthropocene and articulates the ways in which essayists have responded to the environmental destruction, contamination, reshaping of the earth’s surface, and exhaustion of shared resources represented by this new geological epoch. In these types of essays, science writing meets nature writing, activism meets lyricism. The essay has always been a space for ethical reflection, and those essays featured in this chapter – by writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Barry Lopez, Camille Dungy, Donna Harraway, Fred Moten, and Christina Nichol – ponder the ethics of the violence that is part of our new environmental status quo. The chapter also investigates the relationship between the Anthropocene and various bleak contemporary and historical realities: the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonization, appropriation of land, extraction of resources, genocide, and dispossession.

Part I, “Before Breadfruit: Natural History, Sociability, and Colonial Identity in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” explores the multiple meanings of science for Jamaican colonists by reconstructing the careers of Patrick Browne and Anthony Robinson, two naturalists active from the 1740s into the 1750s. The introduction situates their work in a chronology of naturalists working in Jamaica from the late seventeenth to the 1790s, when the dream of Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society of London, and botanically inclined Jamaicans culminated in the successful importation of the breadfruit from the South Pacific. It briefly sketches the social, economic, and political circumstances in which Browne and Robinson worked; it signals Part I’s emphasis on the circulation of information about the island’s natural history within Jamaica and between Jamaicans instead of the connections between colonists and metropolitan naturalists and institutions. Part I reveals how colonial naturalists worked in the field; how enslaved and free Jamaicans acquired and deployed knowledge about their environment; and how natural history promoted an affectively rich male intellectual sociability among White colonists.

The conclusion draws together the threads of the three key fields of colonial knowledge and shows some of the later trajectories of these rich archives. Australian data proved central to key ideas that were fomented during the nineteenth century, and which continue to affect contemporary society. Debates about civilisational orders, and about the role of science and religion in relation to the extension of imperial power and economic privilege, were widespread. The distinctive nature of the Australian colonial experiment continues to make important contributions to global debates about the history of humanitarianism and human rights, apologies and reparations sought by colonised and displaced peoples for the wrongs of imperialism and colonial governance, and the uneven distribution of wealth, up to the twenty-first century.

This chapter analyses colonial botanical collection to reveal the role of non-elite collectors and Indigenous interlocutors in providing knowledge that underpinned British science. The Endeavour brought the new taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus to the Southern Hemisphere. Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander and Sydney Parkinson recorded findings and took over 30,000 plants back to London, many of them viewed for the first time by Europeans swept up in the rage for botany. Knowledge production after James Cook’s first voyage was exponential, and it had both scientific and territorial consequences. New kinds of scientific writing also emerged from the controversial publication of Parkinson’s journal, and scientific bodies used innovative magazines to broaden access to and public support of science in the service of empire. Reliable collectors in the settler colonies worked with Indigenous collaborators to identify novel plant and animal materials, and send them to Britain. These included George Caley who worked with the Eora youth Daniel Moowaatin. The history of colonial science was informed by diverse participants, interests and motivations, and it changed how field work was conceived and scientific authority was established.

This chapter examines the influence of William Bartram´s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida on the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the 1790s and highlights the uniqueness of Bartram´s eco-centric approach to sublimity in early American thinking about the natural world. A practiced botanist and natural illustrator, Bartram delights in cataloguing plant and animal lives, but the Travels also offers a significant intervention into trans-Atlantic discourses of sublimity. Bartram´s sublime overwhelms the perceiver with plentitude rather than terror, and he narrates experiences of sublimity from amidst the rich life he delights to describe rather than at a distance. He emphasizes continuity between human and more-than-human lives. Bartram also resists the nationalistic orientation of his American contemporaries, attending to native and local epistemologies. The chapter concludes with comparisons between passages of the Travels, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and Wordsworth’s “Ruth.”

The chapter charts the cultural and literary responses to the British Admiralty’s decision to explore the Arctic after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. The main impetus for launching these explorations was reports of vanishing sea ice. Because it was erroneously thought that ice had hemmed in the Eastern Settlement on Greenland’s east coast, hopes were raised that the Admiralty’s Arctic programme would lead to a recovery of the ‘lost colony’. Several studies have dealt with Britain’s early nineteenth-century ambitions in the Arctic, but the role Greenland played in these considerations has not received the attention it warrants. By collecting and juxtaposing diverse sources, the chapter produces a new perspective on British imperial thinking. Focus is on how the hope of discovering the lost European settlers of Greenland was expressed in several nationalist poems published around 1818. Among the poets examined in the chapter are Anna Jane Vardill and Eleanor Anne Porden, whose verses about British interest in Greenland are analysed.

Elena Fratto examines Chekhov’s interests in the scientific advancements of his time, showing how his passion for horticulture, his knowledge of botany, and his interests in astronomy, optics, thermodynamics, and evolutionary and degenerative theory transferred directly to his fiction.

Aristotle links the practice of virtue to the achievement of happiness as both short-term pleasures and a long-term telos. This chapter on eudaimonia concentrates on the ethical dimension of this form of delight as it unfolds in some botanical metaphors in Shakespeare's Henry V and 1 Henry IV. I contextualize Shakespeare's plays with contemporary English Renaissance works in natural philosophy and natural history, which draw from Aristotle's notion of humanity’s tripartite soul to define the good life as dependent on the wellbeing of the civic collective rather than individual growth. In this model, the human spirit shares a lifeforce in common with plants (the nutritive) and animals (the sensitive), while also holding unique access to reason. Delight signals one’s immersion into this vegetative spirit, which functions as the ontological ground of a universal nature that thrives on weedy growth and uncultivated entanglements. At a time when considerations of virtue dominated a range of cultural, ecclesiastical, political, and soteriological theories of human flourishing, Shakespeare keys eudaimonia to the process of moving away from a focus on singular or distinctive excellence to an embrace of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all living things.

Drawing on narrative theory, performance studies and the history and philosophy of science, this chapter explores the distinct kinds and functions of what we might call plant narratives – the stories we tell about botanical life, but also the stories that plants tell us. Charles Darwin’s botanical studies developed various techniques to study plant behaviour and record their movements in time. These methods drew scientific observers into an experimental ‘dance’ that aligned human and plant actions in order narratively to reconstruct evolutionary histories, especially histories of exaptation. These culminated in his last study, The Power of Movement in Plants (1880), which uses extensive illustrations to record and then reconfigure these individual micro-histories as what Darwin termed the ‘life history of a plant’. Ultimately, its holistic account integrates these individual narratives and evolutionary history through a unified narrative, a conclusive Bildungsroman detailing a generic plant’s experiences over the course of its life.

While much has been written about tea utensils as signs of politeness, by comparison very little has been discussed about the box of tea, an indispensable article in the East India Company’s China trade. Still less has been written about the smallness of the box, which facilitated the movement of tea across ocean and land and shaped the aesthetics of protest in North America. Might the box of tea enable us to reassess how the material culture of an emergent British empire was fundamentally an empire of small things? This chapter analyzes smallness as the hallmark of a British colonial aesthetic sharpened by the complexities of the China trade. It examines boxes of tea as maritime merchandise before turning to botanical containers and tea caddies as sites of sensory engagement. Smallness, this chapter contends, emerged as a paradigm of intimacy that embedded an article of botany and commerce into the ebb and flow of domestic life. Like porcelain tea utensils, the small box played its part in tea ceremonies, while securing the careful management of a luxury product.