Cultivating Commerce Cultures of Botany in Britain and France, 1760–1815 Science in History Series

Sarah Easterby-Smith rewrites the histories of botany and horticulture from the perspectives of plant merchants who sold botanical specimens in the decades around 1800. These merchants were not professional botanists, nor were they the social equals of refined amateurs of botany. Nevertheless, they participated in Enlightenment scholarly networks, acting as intermediaries who communicated information and specimens. Thanks to their practical expertise, they also became sources of new knowledge in their own right. Cultivating Commerce argues that these merchants made essential contributions to botanical history, although their relatively humble status means that their contributions have received little sustained attention to date. Exploring how the expert nurseryman emerged as a new social figure in Britain and France, and examining what happened to the elitist, masculine culture of amateur botany when confronted by expanding public participation, Easterby-Smith sheds fresh light on the evolution of transnational Enlightenment networks during the Age of Revolutions.

Introduction: cultivating commerce; 1. Plant traders and expertise; 2. Science, commerce and culture; 3. Amateur botany; 4. Social status and the communication of knowledge; 5. Commerce and cosmopolitanism; 6. Cosmopolitanism under pressure; Conclusion: commerce and cultivation.

Sarah Easterby-Smith is Lecturer in Modern History and Director of the Centre for French History and Culture at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. She has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Warwick and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick, the European University Institute, Florence and the Henry E. Huntington Library, California. She has served on the Executive Committee of the Social History Society and is also a member of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the British Society for the History of Science and the Society for the Study of French History.