Imperial science and a scientific empire: Kew Gardens and the uses of nature, 1772-1903

This study examines both how science developed with the process of European expansion, and conversely how science contributed to the scope and form of empire. I trace how the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew became part of an Imperialism of the Enlightenment after 1772. I argue for the rise of a 'British Physiocracy,' which joined a mercantilist agrarianism to Continental ideas of the state as the pioneer of public progress. Joseph Banks, in collaboration with Pitt & Dundas, and in direct imitation of French policy and experiment, transformed Kew after 1772 into the centre of a system of plant transfers and botanical surveys which stretched from the Pacific, to Bengal and the West Indies. Professional British botany emerged from this imperial sphere. Throughout the 19th century botanists attached themselves to the reconnaissance and consolidation of empire to escape the limited opportunities within Britain. Under William Hooker (from 1841 to 1865), Joseph Hooker (1865-1885), and William Thistleton-Dyer (1885-1905), Kew flourished as the centre of British botany. Kew served both as a metropolitan museum for imperial raw materials, and a source of advice for Governors and the Colonial Office on agriculture. Drawn into new urban leisure patterns, the gardens presented imperial nature to thousands of visitors. I examine how this service to agriculture, industry, and horticulture, affected both herbarium taxonomy and the "New Botany" of the laboratory. Kew reached its climax as a scientific empire under the "New Imperialism"--largely, I argue, as a result of Joseph Chamberlain renovating the physiocratic colonial policies under which it first had prospered. In conclusion, I consider empire as an ecological system: how relations to nature--from the pleasure gardens of London to the plantations of Malaya, the poles of conservation and exploitation--represent connected legacies.