Today, the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) remains overshadowed by his close friends and allies, Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley. But, as Jim Endersby shows, he was much more than a sidekick: his “career helped define the key issues concerning the status of nineteenth-century science” (5). Historians of science have largely overlooked Hooker's importance because the glare of theory and public controversy have blinded them to the mundane but fundamental daily activities of naturalists: “we have a rich history of scientific ideas but almost nothing on the scientific practices that made those ideas possible” (6).

Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science successfully digs the larger history of Victorian natural history out from under “an avalanche of isms” (326) and reorients it toward quotidian practical and material culture. Endersby does not originate the careful examination of practice—Robert Kohler's study of Drosophila genetics, in particular, pioneered the study of doing in biology—but this meticulous case study of Hooker provides one of the most compelling and sophisticated illustrations of the approach.

Hooker's father, William, a regius professor of botany at Glasgow University and subsequently director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, bequeathed to his son extensive social connections, one of the world's most valuable herbaria, and an enormous botanical research library. These assets shaped Hooker's career, but they could not by themselves keep him or his family housed and fed. He had to find the income to maintain gentility without—and this was the delicate part—violating the exacting cultural norms that defined a gentleman. Take a truly disinterested approach to financial reward, and he starved. Appear mercenary, and his social status collapsed. Lose status, and his intellectual authority leeched away with it.

During the formative years of his career, institutional affiliation and formal credentials had not yet become powerful markers of scientific credibility, “so good manners, courtesy, and an aura of respectability had to do the work” (29). This was not just Hooker's dilemma but, as Endersby rightly notes, one that faced a rising generation of Victorian men of science. Hooker's own career remained on a knife edge until early middle age. He and his allies benefited from the transformation of science into a secular, reputable, paid profession, but Endersby insists that their success in establishing “science as a respectable way for a gentleman to earn a living” was never inevitable (5–7).

Once we understand the social pressures Victorian men of science like Hooker faced, we can better grasp the choices they made in their daily lives, Endersby convincingly argues. Those choices, in turn, created the defining constraints for higher-level theorizing. The concerns of earning a respectable living from science influenced the work and ideas even of those who did not feel the dilemma acutely themselves. The independently wealthy Darwin never had to worry about his bank account, but he did worry about his friends, and their concerns deeply influenced the development of his theories. Everything he wrote after 1850 is covered in Hooker's fingerprints.

In Hooker's individual case, the gravitational center of his ambition was his father's herbarium. A herbarium is a collection of dried plant specimens for research purposes, and none in private hands achieved such comprehensiveness. The ability to examine a comprehensive global suite of specimens was key to the classificatory work that built reputations. “As the herbarium grew,” Endersby observes, “so did Hooker's authority” (110). Acquiring useful specimens required the complex craft skill of countless botanists who painstakingly transformed innumerable natural objects into artifacts suitable for scientific study.

The Hooker herbarium, and analogous collections of both plant and animal specimens, depended absolutely on the infrastructure of European imperialism. Hooker deeply exploited the institutions of British imperial governance on several foreign expeditions. But no one could personally collect more than a miniscule slice of the world's flora. The Hookers used their position at Kew to build one of the century's most formidable networks of correspondence and exchange. Dozens of individuals collected plants for their herbarium. Only a distinct minority expected to be paid.

The friendly, noncommercial nature of Hooker's relationship with colonial botanists presented a challenge, however. He could not simply order them about. Endersby demonstrates that at the nexus of Hooker's life, work, and ideas was the problem of getting overseas collectors to create specimens that were useful to him and, in particular, to dissuade them from doing the naming, classifying, and theorizing he felt passionately were the exclusive reserve of those, like him, with access to large herbaria. Endersby shows that Hooker's combination of sweet talking, gift giving, arm twisting, and compromise ultimately worked because these exchange networks were glued together by the values of Victorian male friendship.

Endersby deliberately pushes Darwin to the background until the concluding chapter. This decision makes ample sense. He rightly notes that Hooker evaluated evolution primarily in light of “the practical difficulties of earning a living from science” (6). To place theory at the start rather than the end would invert and undermine the core argument about the primacy of practice. But this decision carries a cost. It does not allow him to demonstrate his provocative claim that “a history of everyday, mundane scientific practices forces us to reevaluate even” the eminent Darwin (316). One of the biggest gaps in the history of biology is an adequate understanding of the vital relationship between the “origin of species” as material artifacts created for and held in collections like the Hooker herbarium and Darwin's theoretical “origin of species by means of natural selection”; Endersby sets this story up but does not tell it.

Imperial Nature has other gaps. Hooker's close friendship with Huxley is treated cursorily. Endersby does point out that Huxley's enjoyment of public brawling frequently offended Hooker's notions of scientific etiquette; it is unclear whether this simply reflected different temperaments or exposed, more profoundly, divergent strategies for earning a living and a reputation. The book's imperial theme rarely engages the perspectives of non-Europeans, which leaves the unfortunate, if obviously unintentional, impression that native collectors, informants, and artists were as passive as Hooker wished them to be. The Hooker women also remain absent, even though both his mother and his first wife were married explicitly for their considerable scientific skills. Scientific practice was a family affair for the Hookers.

The occasional hole does not undermine the success of Imperial Nature's broad and important argument. Endersby does not simply paint in a few details about a well-known but little-understood Victorian naturalist. His sophisticated attention to the impact of daily scientific practice forces us to reevaluate our understanding of, and historiographical approach to, Victorian British natural history. It will provoke and inform much fresh research.