Pacific Exploration, Botany, and Revolution

Edwin Rose talks about Joseph Banks and Georg Forster, naturalists on the Cook expeditions, and how political ideas shaped the way these specimens were understood back in Europe. Rose is completing a PhD. in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and will soon be the Munby Fellow in Bibliography at Cambridge University Library and a research fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge. He’s the author of “Publishing Nature in the Age of Revolutions: Joseph Banks, Georg Forster, and the Plants of the Pacific,” published in the April 2020 edition of the Historical Journal.