Tom Brooking is Professor of History at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He is co-editor (with Eric Pawson) of Environmental Histories of New Zealand (2002) and is a member of the Council of the Agricultural History Society. Eric Pawson is Professor of Geography at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He chaired the Advisory Committee for the New Zeland Historical Atlas. In 2007 he received the Distinguished New Zealand Geographer Medal.

'Starting with a seemingly simple question - How did New Zealand come to be covered in exotic grasses? - Seeds of Empire unfolds a fascinating history with a pertinence far beyond New Zealand. It is the story not just of a country transformed by a 'productivist paradigm' and a belief in a moral landscape that suppressed biodiversity: it also shows how such changes are inseparable from larger transformations in global power and exchange. This interdisciplinary volume, in tracing the movement of people, plants, ideas, technologies and the networks they created, make a convincing case that the British Empire was built on grasses and the sea.' - Professor Richard White, Stanford University

• PrefaceContributorsTerminology, Maori language conventions, place names and measurements Figures and Tables1Introduction2The contours of transformation3Learning about the environment in early colonial New Zealand4Pioneer grassland farming: pragmatism, innovation and experimentation5Pastoralism and the transformation of the open grasslands6Mobilising capital and trade7The grass seed trade8Flows of agricultural information9The farmer, science and the state in New Zealand10Remaking the grasslands: the 1920s and 1930s11ConclusionAppendix 1: Common and formal names of plants Appendix 2: Short biographies of twelve pasture plants Notes Index