It is widely believed that one of Charles Darwin’s most important accomplishments was to have banished teleology from biology. Darwin’s view of teleology was a much-debated question in the 19th century, when both advocates and opponents of teleology equated it with divine design (Asa Gray and Karl Ernst Von Baer, for example). Darwin himself, however, did not think he had done so, and didn’t think that teleology should be banished from biology. This chapter will challenge the myth of Darwin the anti-teleologist by looking at two distinct kinds of evidence. First, we will look at his correspondence with Harvard Botanist Asa Gray, who praised Darwin’s use of teleological explanation. While Gray and Darwin agree on the value of teleological thinking in biology, Darwin disagrees with Gray that this counts as evidence for divine design in nature. Then we will look at Darwin’s own biology, especially his botanical works written after the publication of On the Origin of Species, to better understand his use of teleological explanation in biology.

This chapter presents a new, annotated translation of the three fragments of a satirical sketch of southern Greek communities, now attributed to one Herakleides Kritikos and probably written between 279 and 239 BC, together with an additional testimonium. An appendix presents a fragmentary papyrus (P. Hawara 80–1) containing a contemporary description of the Piraeus. The chapter introduction recognizes the literary and performative character of the text, its selective use of geographical information (as far as we can judge from the surviving passages, extending from Attica to Thessaly where we have the original ending of the work), its use of irony, and its geopolitical claims about the extent of ‘Hellas’. A new map clarifies the route followed by the first part of the text.

Although Alexander’s campaign has received less attention than it might from the perspective of geographical studies, the image of Alexander himself as an explorer has, paradoxically, enjoyed great success in the modern historiography. This is partly to be explained by the widespread belief that Aristotle had a great influence on his student. From this perspective, the image of Alexander as an intellectual and a friend of knowledge fits perfectly with that of an explorer eager to know the world. In the eyes of many scholars, an assumption of this sort has allowed Alexander to become more than a mere conqueror. A new way of understanding this problem is proposed here, since we consider that both Alexander the conqueror and Alexander the explorer were essential and indissociable elements of Alexander the king, that is to say, they were indispensable characteristics of any Argead monarch, and these two facets of rulership must be studied together. In other words, knowing the world was one more way to conquer it and rule it.

This chapter begins with varying definitions of the Anthropocene and articulates the ways in which essayists have responded to the environmental destruction, contamination, reshaping of the earth’s surface, and exhaustion of shared resources represented by this new geological epoch. In these types of essays, science writing meets nature writing, activism meets lyricism. The essay has always been a space for ethical reflection, and those essays featured in this chapter – by writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Barry Lopez, Camille Dungy, Donna Harraway, Fred Moten, and Christina Nichol – ponder the ethics of the violence that is part of our new environmental status quo. The chapter also investigates the relationship between the Anthropocene and various bleak contemporary and historical realities: the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonization, appropriation of land, extraction of resources, genocide, and dispossession.

Part I, “Before Breadfruit: Natural History, Sociability, and Colonial Identity in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” explores the multiple meanings of science for Jamaican colonists by reconstructing the careers of Patrick Browne and Anthony Robinson, two naturalists active from the 1740s into the 1750s. The introduction situates their work in a chronology of naturalists working in Jamaica from the late seventeenth to the 1790s, when the dream of Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society of London, and botanically inclined Jamaicans culminated in the successful importation of the breadfruit from the South Pacific. It briefly sketches the social, economic, and political circumstances in which Browne and Robinson worked; it signals Part I’s emphasis on the circulation of information about the island’s natural history within Jamaica and between Jamaicans instead of the connections between colonists and metropolitan naturalists and institutions. Part I reveals how colonial naturalists worked in the field; how enslaved and free Jamaicans acquired and deployed knowledge about their environment; and how natural history promoted an affectively rich male intellectual sociability among White colonists.

The conclusion draws together the threads of the three key fields of colonial knowledge and shows some of the later trajectories of these rich archives. Australian data proved central to key ideas that were fomented during the nineteenth century, and which continue to affect contemporary society. Debates about civilisational orders, and about the role of science and religion in relation to the extension of imperial power and economic privilege, were widespread. The distinctive nature of the Australian colonial experiment continues to make important contributions to global debates about the history of humanitarianism and human rights, apologies and reparations sought by colonised and displaced peoples for the wrongs of imperialism and colonial governance, and the uneven distribution of wealth, up to the twenty-first century.

This chapter analyses colonial botanical collection to reveal the role of non-elite collectors and Indigenous interlocutors in providing knowledge that underpinned British science. The Endeavour brought the new taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus to the Southern Hemisphere. Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander and Sydney Parkinson recorded findings and took over 30,000 plants back to London, many of them viewed for the first time by Europeans swept up in the rage for botany. Knowledge production after James Cook’s first voyage was exponential, and it had both scientific and territorial consequences. New kinds of scientific writing also emerged from the controversial publication of Parkinson’s journal, and scientific bodies used innovative magazines to broaden access to and public support of science in the service of empire. Reliable collectors in the settler colonies worked with Indigenous collaborators to identify novel plant and animal materials, and send them to Britain. These included George Caley who worked with the Eora youth Daniel Moowaatin. The history of colonial science was informed by diverse participants, interests and motivations, and it changed how field work was conceived and scientific authority was established.

This chapter examines the influence of William Bartram´s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida on the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the 1790s and highlights the uniqueness of Bartram´s eco-centric approach to sublimity in early American thinking about the natural world. A practiced botanist and natural illustrator, Bartram delights in cataloguing plant and animal lives, but the Travels also offers a significant intervention into trans-Atlantic discourses of sublimity. Bartram´s sublime overwhelms the perceiver with plentitude rather than terror, and he narrates experiences of sublimity from amidst the rich life he delights to describe rather than at a distance. He emphasizes continuity between human and more-than-human lives. Bartram also resists the nationalistic orientation of his American contemporaries, attending to native and local epistemologies. The chapter concludes with comparisons between passages of the Travels, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and Wordsworth’s “Ruth.”

The chapter charts the cultural and literary responses to the British Admiralty’s decision to explore the Arctic after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. The main impetus for launching these explorations was reports of vanishing sea ice. Because it was erroneously thought that ice had hemmed in the Eastern Settlement on Greenland’s east coast, hopes were raised that the Admiralty’s Arctic programme would lead to a recovery of the ‘lost colony’. Several studies have dealt with Britain’s early nineteenth-century ambitions in the Arctic, but the role Greenland played in these considerations has not received the attention it warrants. By collecting and juxtaposing diverse sources, the chapter produces a new perspective on British imperial thinking. Focus is on how the hope of discovering the lost European settlers of Greenland was expressed in several nationalist poems published around 1818. Among the poets examined in the chapter are Anna Jane Vardill and Eleanor Anne Porden, whose verses about British interest in Greenland are analysed.

Elena Fratto examines Chekhov’s interests in the scientific advancements of his time, showing how his passion for horticulture, his knowledge of botany, and his interests in astronomy, optics, thermodynamics, and evolutionary and degenerative theory transferred directly to his fiction.

Aristotle links the practice of virtue to the achievement of happiness as both short-term pleasures and a long-term telos. This chapter on eudaimonia concentrates on the ethical dimension of this form of delight as it unfolds in some botanical metaphors in Shakespeare's Henry V and 1 Henry IV. I contextualize Shakespeare's plays with contemporary English Renaissance works in natural philosophy and natural history, which draw from Aristotle's notion of humanity’s tripartite soul to define the good life as dependent on the wellbeing of the civic collective rather than individual growth. In this model, the human spirit shares a lifeforce in common with plants (the nutritive) and animals (the sensitive), while also holding unique access to reason. Delight signals one’s immersion into this vegetative spirit, which functions as the ontological ground of a universal nature that thrives on weedy growth and uncultivated entanglements. At a time when considerations of virtue dominated a range of cultural, ecclesiastical, political, and soteriological theories of human flourishing, Shakespeare keys eudaimonia to the process of moving away from a focus on singular or distinctive excellence to an embrace of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all living things.

Drawing on narrative theory, performance studies and the history and philosophy of science, this chapter explores the distinct kinds and functions of what we might call plant narratives – the stories we tell about botanical life, but also the stories that plants tell us. Charles Darwin’s botanical studies developed various techniques to study plant behaviour and record their movements in time. These methods drew scientific observers into an experimental ‘dance’ that aligned human and plant actions in order narratively to reconstruct evolutionary histories, especially histories of exaptation. These culminated in his last study, The Power of Movement in Plants (1880), which uses extensive illustrations to record and then reconfigure these individual micro-histories as what Darwin termed the ‘life history of a plant’. Ultimately, its holistic account integrates these individual narratives and evolutionary history through a unified narrative, a conclusive Bildungsroman detailing a generic plant’s experiences over the course of its life.

While much has been written about tea utensils as signs of politeness, by comparison very little has been discussed about the box of tea, an indispensable article in the East India Company’s China trade. Still less has been written about the smallness of the box, which facilitated the movement of tea across ocean and land and shaped the aesthetics of protest in North America. Might the box of tea enable us to reassess how the material culture of an emergent British empire was fundamentally an empire of small things? This chapter analyzes smallness as the hallmark of a British colonial aesthetic sharpened by the complexities of the China trade. It examines boxes of tea as maritime merchandise before turning to botanical containers and tea caddies as sites of sensory engagement. Smallness, this chapter contends, emerged as a paradigm of intimacy that embedded an article of botany and commerce into the ebb and flow of domestic life. Like porcelain tea utensils, the small box played its part in tea ceremonies, while securing the careful management of a luxury product.

This chapter examines East India Company botanical gardens at Saharanpur and Mussoorie. The history of colonial gardens has borne much fruit in recent years, but in the case of India, this has overwhelmingly focused on Calcutta. Instead, this chapter follows the largely untold story of the ‘northern’ gardens, and their roles in the remaking of the Himalaya in European scientific and imperial imaginations. In focusing on the ambiguous position of these gardens – straddling the uplands and lowlands – this chapter demonstrates the inherent complexity in attempts to categorise the vertical globe. The chapter begins with the modification of the existing Mughal garden at Saharanpur for the purposes of scientific botany. Next, it considers debates around the need for a higher garden and the way altitude factored in the acclimatisation of plants. This is followed by a discussion of the centrality of two South Asian gardeners – Hari Singh and Murdan Ali – to the functioning of Saharanpur, and the role of indigenous collectors in the mountains. The final section considers the problems of distance and limited resources as the gardens became spaces for an increasingly globally oriented science.

This chapter demonstrates how and why the little Herball became such an amazing commercial success, and it raises the possibility that the audience for English herbals did not rise and fall with the expensive texts preferred by elite scholarly readers or gentry. The publishing history of the little Herball reveals that the purchasing preferences of Tudor London’s middling readers, as well as the regulatory constraints upon bookmaking and bookselling, created the economic conditions that later enabled the large, illustrated folio herbals of Turner, Gerard, and Parkinson to come into being. In other words, these large books with named authors on their title pages were a secondary development in the tradition of the printed English herbal, suggesting that the “author-function” that governed a text’s authoritative value was initially irrelevant to English readers. The association between herbals and particular botanical authorities did not result from readers’ perceptions of their accuracy but can be traced to commercial concerns: their publishers’ desire to sell an old and profitable text in innovative new ways.

To reveal the sophisticated and nuanced calculus of English stationers, this chapter explores the recursive relationship between readers’ responses to printed herbals and the activities of the publishers who catered to them, as well as the shifting regulatory mechanisms that enabled stationers to navigate the amount of financial risk that herbal publication increasingly asked of them.

Turner’s attitude towards printed books, and the uses to which they can be put by clever authors, can be seen to shift over the course of his interrelated careers as a physician, divine, and naturalist. This chapter demonstrates how Turner’s three herbals reflect a bibliographic self-consciousness in English botany that was emerging simultaneously with the efforts of English physicians to assert their influence over all elements of medicine. Anonymous bestselling English works like the little Herball as well as The Grete Herball were widely available during Turner’s undergraduate studies at Cambridge, but despite their popularity with readers, Turner claimed that those works offered little of use to professional medical practitioners. It was to remedy what he called the “unlearned cacography” of these texts that Turner was prompted in 1538 to first offer up his own botanical studies in English for the good of the commonweal despite his fellow physicians’ concerns that such an endeavor would make specialized professional knowledge widely available to laypeople.