Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the "Improvement" of the World
Nature's Government is a daring attempt to juxtapose the histories of  Britain, Western science, and imperialism. It shows how colonial expansion, from the age  of Alexander the Great to the twentieth century, led to more complex kinds of  knowledge. Science, and botany in particular, was fed by information culled from the  exploration of the globe. At the same time science was useful to imperialism: it guided  the exploitation of exotic environments and made conquest seem necessary, legitimate,  and beneficial. Richard Drayton traces the history of this idea of "improvement" from its  Christian agrarian origins in the sixteenth century to its inclusion in theories of  enlightened despotism. It was as providers of legitimacy, as much as of universal  knowledge, aesthetic perfection, and agricultural plenty, he argues, that botanic gardens  became instruments of government, first in continental Europe and then, by the late  eighteenth century, in Britain and the British Empire.At the Royal Botanic Gardens at  Kew, the rise of which throughout the nineteenth century is a central theme of this book,  a pioneering scientific institution was added to a spectacular ornamental garden. At Kew,  "improving" the world became a potent argument for both the patronage of science at  home and Britain's prerogatives abroad. This book provides a portrait of how the  ambitions of the Enlightenment shaped the great age of British power and how empire  changed the British experience and the modern world.