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This edited collection draws together new historical writing on the
Commonwealth. It features the work of younger scholars, as well as
established academics, and highlights themes such as law and
sovereignty, republicanism and the monarchy, French engagement with
the Commonwealth, the anti-apartheid struggle, race and
immigration, memory and commemoration, and banking. The volume
focusses less on the Commonwealth as an institution than on the
relevance and meaning of the Commonwealth to its member countries
and peoples. By adopting oblique, de-centred, approaches to
Commonwealth history, unusual or overlooked connections are brought
to the fore while old problems are looked at from fresh vantage
points - be this turning points like the relationship between 'old'
and `new' Commonwealth members from 1949, or the distinctive roles
of major figures like Jawaharlal Nehru or Jan Smuts. The volume
thereby aims to refresh interest in Commonwealth history as a field
of comparative international history.
'Nature's Government' is a daring attempt to juxtapose the
histories of Britain, western science, and imperialism. It shows
how colonial expansion, from the age of Alexander the Great to the
twentieth century, led to complex kinds of knowledge. Science, and
botany in particular, was fed by information culled from the
exploration of the globe. At the same time science was useful to
imperialism: it guided the exploitation of exotic environments and
made conquest seem necessary, legitimate, and beneficial. Drayton
traces the history of this idea of 'improvement' from its Christian
agrarian origins in the sixteenth century to its inclusion in
theories of enlightened despotism. It was as providers of
legitimacy, as much as of universal knowledge, aesthetic
perfection, and agricultural plenty, he argues, that botanic
gardens became instruments of government, first in Continental
Europe, and by the late eighteenth century, in Britain and the
British Empire. At the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the rise of
which throughout the nineteenth century is a central theme of this
book, a pioneering scientific institution was added to a
spectacular ornamental garden. At Kew, 'improving' the world became
a potent argument for both the patronage of science at home and
Britain's prerogatives abroad. 'Nature's Government' provides a
portrait of how the ambitions of the Enlightenment shaped the great
age of British power, and how empire changed the British experience
and the modern world. Richard Drayton was born in the Caribbean and
educated at Harvard, Oxford, and Yale. A former Fellow of St.
Catharine's College, Cambridge, and Lincoln College, Oxford, he has
also been Associate Professor of History at the University of
Virginia.
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