Reading the World: British Practices of Natural History, 1760-1820

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a period that marked the emergence of a global modernity—educated landowners, or “gentlemen,” dominated the development of British natural history, utilizing networks of trade and empire to inventory nature and understand events across the world. Specimens, ranging from a Welsh bittern to the plants of Botany Bay, were collected, recorded, and classified, while books were produced in London and copies distributed and used across Britain, Continental Europe, the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas. Natural history connected a diverse range of individuals, from European landowners to Polynesian priests, incorporating, distributing, synthesizing, and appropriating information collected on a global scale._x000D_ _x000D_ In Reading the World, Edwin D. Rose positions books, natural history specimens, and people in a close cycle of literary production and consumption. His book reveals new aspects of scientific practice and the specific roles of individuals employed to collect, synthesize, and distribute knowledge—reevaluating Joseph Banks’s and Daniel Solander’s investigations during James Cook’s Endeavour voyage to the Pacific. Uncovering the range of skills involved in knowledge production, Rose expands our understanding of natural history as a cyclical process, from the initial collection and identification of specimens to the formal publication of descriptions to the eventual printing of sources.

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.

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.

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.