Cultivating Commerce : Cultures of Botany in Britain and France, 1760-1815

'An impressive comparison between France and Britain which succeeds in restoring horticulture to a central place in the polite practice of natural history. Easterby-Smith's carefully-researched account of the social world of public botany in the decades around 1800 makes a valuable contribution to the field. The book is a model for future research in its attentiveness to paper technologies, social status, gender and taste as sites for constructing the cosmopolitan network of collecting and consuming plants where botanists and gardeners exchanged specimens and knowledge, as well as in its insights into the nursery trade.' E. C. Spary, University of Cambridge 'In this ambitious, wide-ranging and elegantly-written monograph, Sarah Easterby-Smith unlocks the door leading into the unsuspected world of plant traders in England and France in the late Enlightenment and early nineteenth century. Neglected in standard histories of botany, these modest figures established transnational global mercantile connections, stimulated botanical collecting and helped trigger the emergence of a public audience for gardening lore, in so doing refashioning themselves in ways that allowed them to bridge the worlds of commercial culture and polite science. Cultivating Commerce will be warmly welcomed by all scholars of Enlightenment science, culture and commerce - and by gardening enthusiasts everywhere.' Colin Jones, Queen Mary University of London 'Cultivating Commerce very convincingly retraces the protean pathways of knowledge through the logic of the marketplace, while at the same time highlighting how the elite nurseries played out their rivalries within scientific fields that they had contributed to broaden. This work will stand as an essential contribution to the history of science in the public sphere.' Therese Bru, Metascience