John Gascoigne
Science in the Service of Empire:
Joseph Banks, the British State and the
Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution
CUP $49.95hb, 246pp, 0 521 55069 6

Gascoigne's historical setting is this. By the eighteenth century, an hereditary cast of powerful lords and wealthy gentlemen were becoming the decision-makers in the newly-emerging British state. Central to their concerns were Britain's conduct of warfare, foreign trade and economic expansion. At the same time, science was flourishing. Many of these men were beginning to ask how science could best serve the nation's interests. Often, the figure at their shoulder, prompting them to ask this question and providing them with answers, was Joseph Banks.

Banks was a man of many parts. At heart, he was a wealthy landed gentleman who saw it as his duty to serve in 'public life'. Following the French Revolution, Banks, like most of his class, was cautious of any political reform -- any `grand theory' -- which might weaken their power and influence. But this opposition was not backward-looking. Instead, Banks and his confréres were committed to dynamic change -- to shaping a prosperous and self-reliant nation which only men with their breeding and education could imagine. Gascoigne illustrates this dynamism with the example of the Duke of Bridgewater who tore up his ancestral estate to install a coal mine, and then cut a canal across the rural countryside which linked the mine with his customers in Manchester.

Banks was most in the public eye as President of the Royal Society. Agents of the state sought the Society's advice on a host of matters. The Navy wanted to know whether a newly-invented iron cask was an effective means of storing water on ships. The Excise Office asked how it could determine the alcoholic content of liquor and thereby calculate the import duty which should be paid on it. The Society was even asked (in a splendid piece of bureaucratic understatement) to recommend the best covering for the floors of gunpowder works 'to prevent the bad effect of friction'.

The story is told with some nice touches of humour. Gascoigne relates a Big-endian debate about whether the tips of lightening conductors should be round or pointed. The Royal Society recommended points, whereupon the king let it be known that he was not pleased, since pointed conductors had already been advocated by that rebellious American Benjamin Franklin. The royal mood was further unsettled by the Royal Society's Sir John Pringle, who retorted with startling candour: 'Sire, I cannot reverse the laws and operation of nature.'

Banks's hostility to revolutionary democracy was matched by his dislike of Adam Smith's theories of the free market. Banks subscribed to a 'mercantilist' philosophy which advocated British self-sufficiency in the production of goods and food. Thus he supported the protectionist Corn Laws: the importation of cheap grain, he said, would reduce British production (he was, remember, a major landowner), and make the country reliant for food on its potential enemies. At the same time, Banks regarded the massive imports of tea from China as catastrophic, and lent his authority to the establishment of tea plantations in British-controlled India. He was instrumental in the mythic attempts to exploit the breadfruit plant. He was even involved in a scheme to smuggle cochineal insects (used for dye) out of Mexico.

All this activity was, as Gascoigne puts it, 'an indication of the way in which great power politics could be played out in the realm of economic botany.' But Banks was also a man of contradictions.