How Natural History Connected Diverse Individuals and Information Across the Globe. The last decades of the eighteenth-century witnessed attempts to structure nature with educated landowners dominating the development of the sciences. Many utilized networks of global trade and empire to inventory nature and understand events across the world. Specimens ranging from a North-Welsh bittern to the plants of Botany Bay were collected, recorded and classified. Texts were produced, distributed and used across the globe. Reading the World locates books, natural history specimens and people in a close cycle of literary production to reveal new aspects of scientific practice in the eighteenth-century. Rose uncovers the complex material connections between books, specimens and manuscripts that came to dominate practices of natural history across the British Empire in a period often seen to mark the emergence of a global modernity. AUTHOR: Dr. Edwin Rose is currently an AHRC Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and an Advanced Research Fellow at Darwin College Cambridge. 62 b/w illustrations, 10 colour plates
About the Author :
Edwin D. Rose is a Leverhulme Trust early career research fellow in the School of Philosophy, Religion, and History of Science at the University of Leeds and a Bye-Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge.
Review :
A nuanced account of natural history as a collaborative and materially grounded endeavour, revealing how books functioned not only as outputs but also as crucial tools in the circulation and expansion of natural-historical knowledge.
Rose is meticulous in his analysis...[he] brings to life not only the practicalities of being a naturalist in the 18th century...but also the different publishing strategies available to each of these men. Reading the World is bound to become an excellent reference work for scholars of natural history and historians of the book.
Reading the World stands out for the quality of the research done, the argumentation and also the beauty of its production...Rose’s book is exemplary in foregrounding the contributions that book history can make to history of science.
Rose is meticulous in his analysis. . . [he] brings to life not only the practicalities of being a naturalist in the 18th century. . . but also the different publishing strategies available to each of these men. Reading the World is bound to become an excellent reference work for scholars of natural history and historians of the book.
Rose’s work showcases admirable and innovative archival research drawn together cleverly into an exposition of the paper technologies idea in practice. His exposition of all the marginalia, specimens, and botanical correspondences that surrounded these books meant for genteel consumption is important reading for anyone with an interest in natural history publishing in the period.
Edwin Rose’s fascinating study shows how the great natural history collections of the early British empire were transformed into printed information. With exciting new insights into paper technologies, Reading the World links book production with ideas about plant and animal classification and reveals the ways notable natural history publications fostered imperial agendas, built global networks of naturalists, and defined English gentlemen. Highly recommended.
Reading the World is a richly detailed exploration of the interplay between natural history and book culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rose reveals how ‘paper technologies’—from collection slips to natural history books—transformed amassing, classifying, and the global knowledge networks throughout the British empire. This groundbreaking work masterfully offers us a new perspective of how print culture and innovative collecting practices reshaped scientific authority and knowledge production in the making of the modern world.
