Although Sir Joseph Banks is particularly well known for his role as the botanist on Captain Cook's Endeavour voyage and for his long presidency of the Royal Society, it was his involvement in biotechnics, the control and adaptation of living organisms to the needs and ends of man, that had the greatest long-term effect on the British Empire. Through the development and application of commercially useful species Banks became a central figure in a program of Brish ecological imperialism. This talk will focus primarily on Banks' patronage in the establishment and development of a network of world-wide botanic gardens, an important component of British ecological imperialism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The gardens served four important imperial functions: they (1) promoted the expansion of British territorial borders, (2) served as centres for the discovery and development of new resources, (3) provided a means of promoting the imperial status of Britain through the display of exotic plants, and (4) established a network of inter-connected links for the exchange of natural resources, information, and ideals between widely separated British territories.
|