Walchester, K (2025) ‘I Took Every Possible Care to Have Them Well Preserved’: Travelling Plants and Networks of Collection from India to England in the Letters of William Roxburgh to Sir James Edward Smith. Humanities, 14 (2).

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Abstract

The final decades of the eighteenth century saw the significant expansion of botanical propagation and collections across the globe, both as an aesthetic corollary and to provide the underpinning resources for imperialism. The focus of this article is the development of the network between botanists in India and England in the 1790s through the correspondence between William Roxburgh (1751–1815), superintendent of the Botanical Garden in Calcutta from 1793, and Sir James Edward Smith (1759–1820), who as Sarah Law notes, was ‘a focus of correspondence with every serious botanist in the world’ (Law, 2007, 184). Such networks were sustained by letters describing the plants and the treatment they needed, the habitat from which they had been taken, and details of how they had been collected and packed. Epistolary writing between plant hunters and British collectors can be understood, I suggest, as a form of travel writing. This is a form in which correspondence builds connections and relationships between fellow scientists and enthusiasts and the fragmentary focus on place, and the mobility of humans is replaced by close attention to the aesthetic and biological details of plants and the best ways of securing their successful transport across the globe. Using an ecocritical frame, this article explores the position of plants and biological specimens themselves as travellers and considers the ways in which their care and preservation have been articulated through sociable correspondence.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	4705 Literary Studies; 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology; 47 Language, Communication and Culture; 4303 Historical Studies; 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies; 5002 History and Philosophy Of Specific Fields; Complementary and Integrative Health
Subjects:	A General Works > AZ History of Scholarship The Humanities A General Works > AZ History of Scholarship The Humanities H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Divisions:	Humanities and Social Science
Publisher:	MDPI
SWORD Depositor:	A Symplectic
Date Deposited:	19 Mar 2025 16:56
Last Modified:	19 Mar 2025 16:56
DOI or ID number:	10.3390/h14020030
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/25926

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