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Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and "Improvement" of the World, by Richard Drayton; pp. xxi + 346. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000, $40.00, l25.00.
This is a remarkable book-elegantly produced, handsomely illustrated, conceptually bold, and contextually sweeping. Focusing on the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, Richard Drayton explores the interactions of science and imperial expansion so as to shed new light on both. He shows how Kew not only promoted imperial expansion but also benefitted from it. In the process, he offers a fresh sense of the centrality of imperialism and the Empire to modern British history, and he offers new interpretations of the imperial impulse. Drayton's argument is complex, but it is persuasive.
The main part of Drayton's narrative covers the founding and development of Kew Gardens from the mid-eighteenth to the early-twentieth centuries, but Drayton also reaches back in time to discuss the biblical and classical ideal of gardens. He says that early Christians viewed the garden as an ideal between the lost Eden and Paradise, a place where humanity might recover the perfection, order, and abundance of the original divine creation. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European monarchs established the first formal gardens for the purposes of studying God's creation and the capacity of plants to cure diseases, the assumption being that God in his wisdom and goodness had provided...