VISIONS OF

EMPIRE
Voyages, botany, and
representations of nature
Edited by

DAVID PHILIP MILLER

and
PETER HANNS REILL

Published in association with the UCLA Center for

Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of illustrations
List of contributors
Preface
1

page xi
xv
xix

Introduction
David Philip Miller

PART I: THE BANKSIAN EMPIRE

Joseph Banks, empire, and "centers of calculation" in late

Hanoverian London
David Philip Miller
Agents of empire: the Banksian collectors and evaluation of
new lands
David Mackay
The antipodean exchange: European horticulture and imperial
designs
Alan Frost
Disciplining disease: scurvy, the navy, and imperial expansion,

21

38

58

1750-1825

Christopher Lawrence
The ordering of nature and the ordering of empire: a
commentary
John Gascoigne

80

107

PART II: THE USES OF BOTANY

7
8

Purposes of Linnaean travel: a preliminary research report

Lisbet Koerner
Botany in the boudoir and garden: the Banksian context
Janet Browne
'
ix

117
153

Contents
"On the Banks of the South Sea": botany and sexual
controversy in the late eighteenth century
Alan Bewell
PART III: REPRESENTATIONS OF LIVING NATURE AND
THEIR USES

10

11

12

13

"Implanted in our Natures": humans, plants, and the stories

of art
Martin Kemp
Images of ambiguity: eighteenth-century microscopy and the
neither/nor
Barbara M. Stafford
Global physics and aesthetic empire: Humboldt's physical
portrait of the tropics
Michael Dettelbach
Seeing and understanding: a commentary
Peter Hanns Reill

197

230

258
293

PART IV: THE INDIGENOUS ENVIRONMENT:

ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES

14
15

16

Index

The scientific endeavor and the natives

Ingjerd Ho'e'm
Mediated encounters with Pacific cultures: three Samoan
dinners
Alessandro Duranti

326

Visions of empire: afterword

Simon Schaffer

335

305

313