Much scholarly writing presents the history of botany since early modernity as a predominantly western European enterprise, with the rest of the world relegated to a vast natural storehouse, waiting to be collected by Europeans and repatriated to the cabinets and museums of European centres for taxonomic classification and arrangement. But a vast amount of crucial natural knowledge during this period was actually made in a far more distributed fashion across the globe, oftentimes involving sustained, complex and multilayered interactions between the vastly disparate natural-historical practices of various peoples, including those of western Europeans. India occupies an important place in this globally spread, multisited history.

So does the Royal Botanic Gardens of Edinburgh (RBGE). It has a treasure trove of drawings and herbarium specimens from India, as many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naturalists constituted a closely connected network of Scots with deep relations with the university, the botanic gardens and the region. Henry Noltie, a taxonomist and historian at the RBGE, has already researched and published parts of these and other collections in several works on natural history and natural-historical illustrations executed by Chinese, Indian and various European artists. This sumptuously illustrated and wonderfully well-produced quarto three-volume work is the result of the author's own extensive travels in Britain and India (which are described in one of the volumes) to research the life and work of the Scottish medic Robert Wight (1796–1872). The latter spent several decades in peninsular India as a British East India Company (EIC) official, and was arguably the most prolific taxonomist working there in the first half of the nineteenth century, having collected hundreds of thousands of plant specimens and described over 1,250 species and a hundred genera of South Indian flora.

Noltie's work is much more than a simple biography or even a microhistory, however. Not only does he provide an elaborate picture, down to the minutest available details, of Wight's professional and personal life – an emblematic embodiment of natural history in the nineteenth-century imperial context – he reveals the wider, complex interrelationships between natural-historical training, ideas, and metropolitan and colonial economies, including their hierarchies, sociabilities and practices. Indeed, the intimate and sustained interests of the Scottish intellectual, commercial and political elites in the EIC underpin the whole narrative. They not only help render Wight's work intelligible but bring to life the larger material, economic and political contexts which actually made it possible. The book also provides a window into the workings of the EIC which, although always on the lookout for potentially exploitable natural resources, did not pay for Wight's botanical activities, though it did encourage them and more generally played a significant role in facilitating the publication and circulation of natural-historical knowledge within South Asia and beyond. Likewise, the reconstruction of Wight's genealogy, childhood and years as a medical student in Edinburgh at once provides a fine-grained picture of the social and intellectual atmosphere of the Scottish capital in the early decades of the nineteenth century and helps us grasp the concreteness of the closely knit interpersonal relations between alumni of the university – relations upon which much of British natural history and, indeed, the imperial administration was built.

With meticulous scholarship, Noltie uses his knowledge of taxonomy to bring to light the geographically dependent, subtly different deployments made by Wight and his metropolitan correspondents of the botanical theories of Linnaeus, Jussieu and Candolle, and the complex and multidirectional circulation of ideas and material between practitioners in various parts of South Asia, Scotland, London and, indeed, Paris and Geneva, which gave plant taxonomy the shape it took in the nineteenth century. Although this was a predominantly male world – there are only rare glimpses of memsahib collectors and none of Indian women – not all the actors were European. Wight's decades in south India, first as a surgeon (1819–31) and then as an economic botanist (1834–53) for a time in charge of an experimental cotton farm, offer a unique insight into the daily life and work of an EIC official and into the colonial and administrative hierarchies, inherited from earlier indigenous regimes, upon which the former's botanical activities so crucially relied. Interaction with local communities took on myriad forms. For instance, during a brief period in 1824–5, Wight was posted as a vet at the ‘Public Cattle Depot’ in Seringapatam. This was in fact a former farm for 60,000 pack bullocks, built by Tipu Sultan, the erstwhile ruler of Mysore, who was killed by the British in 1799. In Wight's time, it had become a breeding station for the EIC's armies, with some 30,000 cattle, elephants and camels tended to by indigenous vets and its own ‘native draughtsman’. Again, for collecting plants the sedentary Wight had to depend largely upon local people who, Noltie plausibly surmises (for want of any information on them), ‘had a background of indigenous plant knowledge’ (i, p. 40). Naming, too, required local input and, although Wight was mostly wary of deriving any knowledge from vernacular names, he did at times use this source, as in his identification of the ‘true’ cinnamon.

Crucially, Wight was to establish a long-term relationship with a couple of Telugu artists, Rungiah and Govindoo, who probably had connections with the principality of Tanjore, whose Maratha ruler, Serfoji II, had his own natural-historical collections and even naturalists, gardeners and artists in his court. It is in Wight's astonishing collection of botanical illustrations that intercultural collaboration is at its most spectacular, and Noltie excels in describing and analysing its various dimensions. Not only is a whole volume devoted to some 150 illustrations – watercolours and lithographic reproductions executed in India for Wight – but Noltie discusses in great detail the activities of the Indian artists and the multifaceted dimensions of this collaboration, including the role of lithography and the manner in which Indian scribes and artists appropriated this technique. There is also a very instructive discussion of the place of illustration in the context of post-Linnaean natural history, of the circulation and appropriation of botanical patterns from previous works like Van Reede's Hortus Malabaricus and, in turn, the reappropriation of Indian botanical drawings in Victorian Britain.

This work is not light reading, but it is very rewarding. It deserves to be read for its deep insights into the networks and quotidian relationships of professional botanists in an imperial and global context, and into the academic and bureaucratic hierarchies which sustained intercultural encounter and made the botanical practices of the period possible. It is also a timely and well-informed counterpoint both to the naive centre–periphery models presented by many historians of ‘colonial’ science and to sophisticated post-colonial narratives of collecting at the edge of empire.