Abstract
Sir Joseph Banks, explorer, botanist, President of the Royal Society and member of the Privy Council, was one of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century architects of empire. Despite the ‘extreme aversion’ to study that he is reputed to have shown at Eton, Banks was also a great bibliophile. Indeed, his botanic interests may have been inspired by finding ‘on his mother’s dressing-table an old torn copy of Gerard’s Herbal’.1 John Gerard’s The Herball or General Historie of Plantes was first published in 1597 and, true or not, the anecdote attests to two of the Privy Councillor’s lifelong passions – botany and books – both of which served the project of empire: the former supporting trade, commerce and scientific knowledge as part of the international rivalry of the Enlightenment; the latter as repositories of information which shaped decisions about voyages of commerce, colonisation, exploration and discovery.2
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Notes
J.D. Hooker (ed.) (1896) Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks, xxiv.
Banks’s love of his library is evident from N. Chambers (ed.) (2000) The Letters of Sir Joseph Banks: A Selection 1768–1820 (London: Imperial College Press), pp. 140.
J. Gascoigne (1998) Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), passim.
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For the relationship of travel narratives to the Transactions of the Royal Society, see M. McKeon (1987) The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), pp. 100–5.
Daniel Carey (1996) ‘Locke, Travel Literature and the Natural History of Man’, The Seventeenth Century, 11:2, 259–80.
J.R. Forster – the naturalist who accompanied Cook on his second voyage claimed to have ‘a collection of about 700 volumes of voyages’, in J.R. Forster (1786) History of the Voyages and Discoveries Made in the North (London), p. 428.
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Day, M. (2013). The Roots of Empire: Early Modern Travel Collections and International Politics in the Long Eighteenth Century. In: Farr, M., Guégan, X. (eds) The British Abroad Since the Eighteenth Century, Volume 2. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304186_2
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