Sarah Easterby-Smith rewrites the histories of botany and horticulture from the perspectives of plant merchants who sold botanical specimens in the decades around 1800. These merchants were not professional botanists, nor were they the social equals of refined amateurs of botany. Nevertheless, they participated in Enlightenment scholarly networks, acting as intermediaries who communicated information and specimens. Thanks to their practical expertise, they also became sources of new knowledge in their own right. Cultivating Commerce argues that these merchants made essential contributions to...

This book examines how and why British imperial rule shaped scientific knowledge about malaria and its cures in nineteenth-century India. This title is also available as Open Access.

Edward J. Gillin explores the extraordinary role of scientific knowledge in the building of the Houses of Parliament in Victorian Britain.

An observatory and a lighthouse form the nexus of this major new investigation of science, religion, and the state in late Ottoman Egypt. Astronomy, imperial bureaucrats, traditionally educated Muslim scholars, and reformist Islamic publications, such as The Lighthouse, are linked to examine the making of knowledge, the performance of piety, and the operation of political power through scientific practice. Contrary to ideas of Islamic scientific decline, Muslim scholars in the nineteenth century used a dynamic tradition of knowledge to measure time, compute calendars, and predict planetary...

An innovative account of the trials and tribulations of first-generation Victorian mail steamship lines, their passengers and the public.

Nieto-Galan explores the links between chemistry and industrial and military projects, national rivalries and international endeavours in twentieth-century Spain. He unveils the chemists' positions of power and their engagement in fierce ideological battles, drawing out elements of co-production between science and politics.

In this first systematic exploration of the intriguing connections between Victorian physical sciences and what we now call the paranormal, Richard Noakes challenges our view of the history of physics, and deepens our understandings of the relationships between science and the occult, and science and religion.

Cultivating Commerce is an accessibly written and beautifully illustrated new social history of botany in Britain and France. It will appeal to all students and scholars working on British and French culture, the history of science and social and gender history in the late eighteenth century.