Richard Drayton – författare

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.

This edited collection draws together new historical writing on the Commonwealth. It features the work of younger scholars, as well as established academics, and highlights themes such as law and sovereignty, republicanism and the monarchy, French engagement with the Commonwealth, the anti-apartheid struggle, race and immigration, memory and commemoration, and banking. The volume focusses less on the Commonwealth as an institution than on the relevance and meaning of the Commonwealth to its member countries and peoples. By adopting oblique, de-centred, approaches to Commonwealth history, unusual or overlooked connections are brought to the fore while old problems are looked at from fresh vantage points – be this turning points like the relationship between ‘old’ and `new’ Commonwealth members from 1949, or the distinctive roles of major figures like Jawaharlal Nehru or Jan Smuts. The volume thereby aims to refresh interest in Commonwealth history as a field of comparative international history.