From Specimen to System

Abstract

The discipline of nineteenth-century botany was central both to the British imperial project and to the development of global theory. This article shows how the work of botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) advanced certain concepts of globalization by exploring scale relationships in two mid-century texts—a systematic botany, Flora Indica (1855), and a travel narrative, Himalayan Journals (1854)—and by analyzing in particular the methodologies that link individual botanical species and their global distribution. In doing so, he drew upon tropes of the sublime and related aesthetic techniques to raise crucial hermeneutical questions and to perform an important scale critique. His contributions underscore the need for new scale critiques in the humanities today and the recognition that such critiques have significant antecedents in the work of nineteenth-century writers and scientists.