It is by now a truism that science was handmaid to empire. The truism used to hold most strongly in relation to nineteenth-century imperialism; only recently has a spate of essays and monographs looked at the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in order to determine the connections between science and colonialism. These works owe a debt to Lucile Brockway's pathbreaking Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Botanic Gardens (1979), the first systematic study of Britain's domestic investment in institutions in which colonialism and natural science converged, a convergence beginning in the eighteenth century. But after Brockway, few scholars took up the topic. Two other and more recent developments are probably more directly responsible for the recent outpouring of works on colonialism and science. The first development was the study of “public science,” particularly the critical apparatus that historians of science have used to cast a harsh light on modern science's complicity with elite, state, and Western power over subordinated classes, local interests, and colonized peoples. At present, historians of science take an almost universally negative tone in examining the fortunes of modern science, seeing it as all-too ready to assist the powers-that-were, whether domestic or imperial.
Second, scholars of empire and science have been galvanized by the new study of the eighteenth-century British state and of its struggle, recovery, and expansion in the era of the American and French Revolutions. This new attention has made scholars of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain focus on the individuals, events, institutions, and mechanisms by which state and empire expanded. The work of John Brewer and Linda Colley, in particular, has excited interest in the “sinews of power” and the “forging” of the British nation up through the Napoleonic wars. These trends—along with a generally heightened awareness of all things imperial among British historians—have sent scholars back to look at the nexus of science and empire that Brockway proposed.
Both John Gascoigne and Richard Drayton have now contributed works to this mature subfield and both amply demonstrate just why it is such a vibrant and important field of inquiry. Each author puts forward a case study in science and colonization: Gascoigne examines Sir Joseph Banks; Drayton, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Each author therefore identifies an important actor or arena and, by so doing, shows the deep and important interplay between domestic and imperial politics in Britain. The two books intersect rather than overlap. That is, while they present similar arguments for the increased significance of science to the modern, imperial British state, they disagree over when this occurred, not how or why it did so. Their interpretations emphasize how slowly the British state supported science's role in colonization, though Drayton puts the important shift somewhat later than Gascoigne does.
Gascoigne's study extends his 1994 Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment, which traced Banks's early career and, as in the present volume, presented him as a litmus by which we could discern the changing place of natural history in the intellectual worlds of eighteenth-century England. Science in the Service of Empire looks at an older and more powerful Banks, wealthy and well-connected, so much so, in fact, that Gascoigne characterizes the British state as dependent on him, not the other way around. This is the central point of the book: before professional scientists existed and before the creation of a true bureaucracy that could integrate experts into government office, the state found it necessary to maintain less formal connections to men like Banks. This was in contrast to France, where centralized authority over scientific and colonizing activities would inspire both fear and emulation among Britons. While some movement toward bureaucracy and classification of expertise would occur during the era of the American and French Revolutions, it would not be until after the Napoleonic Wars that Britain had “firm central direction” of colonial issues (p. 168). In the meantime, Banks and other interested parties had significant albeit advisory roles in relation to government.
Because they tended to be from the elite, such men favored rather conservative directions for the state. Banks abhorred the American Revolution, feared that of the French, supported the Corn Laws, and opposed investigation into the Peterloo Massacre. Yet he thought the British state had an important role in regulating economy and colonies. Gascoigne characterizes Banks's vision of Britain and empire as one of “neo-mercantilism,” an emphasis at home on agricultural improvement by the landed interest and abroad on a commercial empire that avoided the difficulties of settler societies such as had recently revolted and constituted the republican United States. Thus Banks took an interest in British activity in the Pacific (especially Australia), Iceland, Africa, and East India. These were all places where native populations or small groups of easily controlled settlers (like convicts) produced strategic commodities and where the expansion of British trading interests would enrich Britain without undue political controversy or overt use of political and military might. For this task, naturalists could lend their expertise, much as the landed gentry and aristocracy could experiment with and promulgate knowledge of domestic agricultural improvements.
It would have been easy to reduce Banks's story to one in which certain class interests were consolidating their claim to govern Britain, but, in fact, Gascoigne points out that, at his death in 1820, “Banks represented a splendid anachronism” (p. 199). He had in some degree planned his own obsolescence, thus allowing naturalists to form themselves into professionals and for the government to designate them as experts, obviating the continued informal use of privileged and educated elite men. It is this later stage of things that Drayton analyzes in the bulk of his work.
While Drayton's true focus is on Kew Gardens, he establishes a large context for this specific site. His aim is to interrogate the origins of modernity, as exemplified in Britain's imperial activities. The first part of his book analyzes the Western, Christian program that humans should govern nature, an ideal that was the beginning, Drayton argues, of concepts of imperium. The garden was the most tangible expression of this desire: a place with natural features ordered in ways that would never occur in nature at large. A garden implied the lost Eden of Scripture, the paradise of the exotic Near East, the origin of mercantile wealth, the place of quiet cultivation and experimentation. It could be a site to exhibit wealth and power or one of contemplation and retreat from the world. Voltaire's Candide may have famously wanted simply to cultivate his garden, but Drayton suspects that such a desire was never simple. Rather, gardening is a complex cultural statement about engagement with the greater world, however microcosmically.
This is Drayton's long windup to a pitch for Kew Gardens' central place in Britain's imperial history. Like Gascoigne, he notes aristocratic (and royal) interest in botany and gardens and an uneasy British envy of French state power over learning, natural specimens, and the economy. Likewise, Drayton emphasizes (in his fourth chapter) Sir Joseph Banks's key role at Kew. He reinforces Gascoigne's argument for Banks's conservatism but also identifies George III's and William Pitt the younger's interest in making “improvement” at home and ameliorative colonization abroad the cause of crown and tories. This was a central moment for the marriage of science and empire. Still, Drayton notes the slowness of the premarital courtship: even in the early nineteenth century, as Banks approached his planned obsolescence, the British East India Company alone exceeded Great Britain's entire investment in the patronage of science (p. 116). Private wealth and initiative worked informally to enrich Britain, and Kew's role in this enrichment remained understated.
Three more stages were necessary to make Kew a truly state institution with imperial reach. First, it had to pass from private (and mostly royal) patronage to public support. This process, which Gascoigne posits as inevitable, actually took a circuitous route requiring, as Drayton puts it, “Whig aristocrats” to come “to the rescue of botany in the early nineteenth century” (p. 148) against the indifference of Kew's “philistine administrators” who had allowed the gardens to languish with haphazard private support (p. 132). Well into the 1840s there was debate over whether the gardens should have public rather than private sponsorship, and it was in fact increased interest in state control over imperial activities and economies that finally provided the model for such support at home (pp. 168–69).
Next, Kew needed the services of professionalized natural scientists. The heroes of this part of Drayton's story are Sir William Hooker (the first professional naturalist in charge of Kew) and his son, Joseph, who did pioneering work on the rhododendrons of the Himalayas. As ever, Drayton points out the weaknesses even of this advance in professionalization: the elder Hooker was paid less than half of what the director of the Calcutta Botanical Gardens made as an employee of the East India Company. Also, the Hookers had to struggle to make Kew more than “an entrepôt” for the naturalization of exotics for British gardens. Under their direction, the garden took a more contributory role in relation to imperialism, providing some support for the development of gutta-percha production in Singapore and of cinchona for malaria-plagued colonists. The gutta-percha initiative showed especially well that industrial development was a constitutive element of the economic botany that looked outward to the colonies.
Finally, the professional naturalists now in charge of Kew took up the cause of conservation. Drayton sees this as the ultimate realization of an imperial mission to govern nature, a return to the ancient and scriptural dictate that humans should be true stewards of the material creation. Here he is supporting the contention of Richard Grove, whose Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (1995) has made the most striking recent argument within the burgeoning field of science and imperialism. Rather than agreeing with and adding to the studies that presented colonization and science as forms of extractive imperium over nature, Grove identifies a reforming and somewhat more positive impulse within modern imperialism: a desire to conserve natural resources. (To be sure, this was meant to serve imperial ends by guaranteeing future supplies of key commodities.) While Drayton does engage with Grove's argument (Gascoigne does not), he does so rather late in the story. Grove identified a green imperialism in the late seventeenth century, whereas Drayton does not note its existence until the late nineteenth century. Did it really take two centuries for green imperialism to arrive back home at Kew? If so, Drayton might have explained why.
Reluctance to engage fully with Grove's novel assessment of the idea of science as handmaid to empire is indicative of the difficulty of determining what this relationship meant in the larger scheme of things. Interestingly, neither Gascoigne nor Drayton rushes to judgment, and both avoid the negative tone of many other scholars working on similar material. For the most part, Gascoigne accepts that naturalists like Banks were privileged actors with particular goals that favored the status quo. But by presenting Banks as the last of a dying breed, Gascoigne does not have to join wholeheartedly in the more critical tendencies of some historians of science. Drayton is more forthcoming but seems to sympathize with as well as deplore the advance of scientific colonialism. Both tendencies are apparent in his mixed conclusion, for example, where he deems “this career we call ‘development’” unstoppable despite “Green complaint” yet also decries (rather abstractly) the devastating human cost of Western imperialism and modernity (pp. 271, 272–74).
A broader focus on imperialism that would integrate different aspects of science and that would study colonies as well as metropolis might be helpful. Currently, most studies, like those of Gascoigne and Drayton, focus on natural history, particularly botany, but also zoology and the study of climate. But these modes of inquiry were connected to other aspects of natural science, some of them clearly relevant to colonization. This is especially the case with theories of race, which had, of course, tremendous implications for the peoples and places that Britain colonized. While Drayton explicates a colonizing impulse to appropriate resources perceived as underused by non-Europeans, this is as far as either author goes to talk about how the development of the human sciences affected colonization in tandem with the natural sciences. Furthermore, both of these studies look from the metropolis outward and have much less to say about information or personnel that came “home” from the empire. The current scholarly focus on the British state—in all its fledgling glory from the late eighteenth century onward—has incited much interesting work, but true knowledge of British colonization will need to take the periphery as seriously as the center.
