Book Review
Science in the Service of Empire:
Joseph Banks, the British State and
the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution
Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution. By John Gascoigne (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 247 pp. $64.95
Joseph Banks, the foremost British naturalist of the later eighteenth century, enjoyed a career that was varied even by the dilettantish standards of his own time. Born into England's landed gentry, Banks was an accomplished amateur who helped found the Royal Gardens at Kew and the African Association, accompanied Captain James Cook on his first voyage around the world, and served from 1778 until his death in 1820 as president of the Royal Society. Although remembered chiefly for his collection of botanical species, Banks' interests ranged from agricultural improvement to overseas colonization and the abolition of slavery. He advised every prime minister, starting with Lord North, on these and other matters, and he was sufficiently intimate with George III to be a trusted confidant during the king's first bout with porphyria.
Gascoigne's brief study uses the methods of high political history to weave the strands of this multifaceted story into a coherent account of Banks' development as a scientist. According to Gascoigne, the key to Banks' success was his ability to meet the British state's need for scientific expertise, especially in matters of imperial administration, amid the upheavals wrought by the American, French, and industrial revolutions. In an argument reminiscent of Namier's work, Gascoigne maintains [End Page 90] that Banks could play this role in part because he came from the same landed class as the politicians who controlled the "levers of power" at court and in Parliament (34-64). 1 But it was the growing demand for scientific expertise--a demand driven by the complexity of Britain's problems following the American Revolution--that made Banks' services seem so indispensable (21-23). Banks represented a kind of transitional figure in the marriage of public policy and science. Although imbued with the landed ethos of England's "ancien régime," he spent his life serving an aggressively modernizing state.
One of the more interesting parts of Gascoigne's book is his discussion of Banks' political principles. As the king's loyal subject, Banks partook of many of the same conservative and xenophobic convictions that Colley and others have identified as a conspicuous feature of British politics during the final quarter of the eighteenth century. 2 In an especially revealing vignette, Gascoigne notes that, although Banks briefly considered adopting the metric system of weights and measures in Britain, he ultimately changed his mind because of "its close association with the French Revolution" (28). Just as often, however, Banks' patriotism revealed the cosmopolitanism that scholars associate with the European Enlightenment. Despite his opposition to the American Revolution, for example, his friendship with Benjamin Franklin helped secure American guarantees of safe passage for Cook's final expedition during the war for independence (158). Likewise, at the time of his death, Banks belonged to nearly fifty foreign academies, including the American Philosophical Society and France's Institut National, to which he was elected in 1801 (150, 152, 155). Gascoigne is clearly alive to recent trends in the study of British political culture; however, his grounding in the literature on the Enlightenment and Europe's republic of letters enables him to tailor his conclusions to the reality of Banks' own convictions and beliefs.
Although Gascoigne does an admirable job of combining the history of science with an analysis of high politics and political culture, he has surprisingly little to say about the postcolonial questions that currently dominate the field of imperial history. Given Banks' close association with Cook and his much-studied voyages, one would like to know more about how the imperial attitudes that defined Banks' subsequent career relate to his early encounters in the exotic waters of the South Pacific. Similarly, one wonders how Banks' experience influenced emerging Orientalist views in Britain. Yet, even though Gascoigne has left questions for others to answer, anyone interested in the role of science in Britain's imperial expansion should read this concise, thoughtful book.
Eliga H. Gould
University of New Hampshire
Notes
1. Lewis Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution (New York, 1961; 2d ed.).
2. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, 1992).
