Alix Cooper's fascinating book explores the European reaction to exploration of the Americas in the early modern period. She argues that people in Europe created the idea of the “indigenous” to defend against the foreign and strange influences that entered European culture following the Columbian encounter. Much scholarship in the past few decades has focused on the significance of issues of geography for the explorers and settlers who left Europe, but Cooper's is the first attempt to show that people looked inward as well as outward when constructing identity at this crucial time. The definition of “local knowledge” mentioned in her title is acknowledged as problematic; after all, what is “local” in an era of ever-changing boundaries and religious and political allegiances? Cooper's aim is to show how naturalists working in the context of their town, village, borough, or shire came to serve as arbiters of what she calls “world floristic knowledge.” The local approach was conducive to and not contradictory to the world of international scholarship.

The world of herbalists and apothecaries is described in chapter 1 and offers a prime example of the connections and tensions between the “local” and “exotic,” the roots of which stretched back to Roman times. Many, like Nicholas Culpepper in 1652, asserted that only local herbs were suitable for English bodies, and Paracelsus had argued the same thing a few decades earlier. But alongside that opinion, apothecaries made large profits from selling exotic spices and peppers. The “local” came to be connected with the world of the peasant, and while some saw travelers and importers and transplanters of flora as adventurers with wider horizons, others argued that their activities broke with the natural order. This view was harder to maintain later in the seventeenth century once New World species had been successfully grown in Europe.

Cooper then traces the origins of the “local floras,” the surveys of plant life that were conducted in continental university towns by enthusiastic scholars for the benefit of medical students. These local floras were written in Latin, thus having a Europe-wide audience in contrast to travel narratives describing exotic flora that were usually written in the vernacular. Cooper also engages with the idea of these herbals as artifacts and not just texts, describing how their small pocketbook dimensions enabled a very different reading experience to that of the massive and unwieldy herbals that could never be used “in the field.”

Developing out of this tradition were mineralogies. The value of minerals as symbols of colonial wealth was obvious, but local mining literature, especially in the German territories, had a long tradition. Both the floras and mineralogies were full of thick description of the locales concerned, encouraging the development of folklore and even tourism. These texts were not only of local interest; they reflected a challenge to the mercantilist system, arguing that the way to economic success was not through trade but rather via territorial self-sufficiency. The development of a European natural history tradition is traced through the influence of Baconian ideas and the intellectuals of the Samuel Hartlib circle, among others. The search for patronage by early eighteenth-century authors took their activities out of the academic realm and into the world of princely power.

A final chapter brings the argument together, describing how these traditions affected the ways Europeans saw themselves, their landscape, and their identity. This development did not take place uniformly across Europe; Spain, for example, showed little interest in the flora or mineral wealth of her own land, as most Spaniards focused their attention on their New World territories. Unsurprisingly, Cooper sees 1730 as the turning point away from the local and toward standardization with the coming of the Linnaean method. There were later flourishings of botanical nativism, ironically in the New World with the Boston Tea Party, for example, when colonists rejected Indian tea imports to encourage consumption of local varieties such as sassafras.

Overall this book is a scholarly and novel approach to a topic that will be of wide interest to historians of early modern intellectual and cultural history and historians of science. Its ambitious scope touches on England, continental Europe, and the Americas, and Cooper ably illustrates the connections between the three regions. The book is well written and should be useful to teachers and students as well as researchers. It is hard to find fault with the book, but if one had to be sought, it is a shame that the volume is not more liberally illustrated, the topic seeming to lend itself to visual as well as textual representation. That minor point aside, this book will provide an entertaining and useful addition to any bookshelf.