Patricia Fara is a historian of science at the University of Cambridge and the author of several books on science, empire, and the history of scientific ideas.
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Portraits, caricatures, and other forms of visual media helped establish scientific authority and support Britain’s expanding imperial ambitions.
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Patricia Fara is a historian of science and an affiliated scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, where she is also an emeritus fellow of Clare College. Her research focuses on 18th-century science, scientific imagery, and the cultural history of science. She is the author of several books, including Sex, Botany and Empire: The Stories of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks, and A Lab of One’s Own.
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Science and Suffrage in the First World War
2018
- 2018 is the anniversary of women over 30 getting the vote in the United Kingdom as well as the end of WWI
- Includes substantial discussion of Ray Strachey, who was Virginia Woolf's sister-in-law, and an eminent suffrage leader
- Includes biographical accounts of prominent scientific women who have been neglected (including Isabel Emslie Hutton, Ida Smedley, Helen Gwynne Vaughan, Helena Gleichen, and Martha Whiteley) enlivened by quotations from their letters
- Using original archival research, Patricia Fara unearths forgotten aspects of the War, especially the historically neglected Eastern Front
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Enlightenment botany was replete with sexual symbolism—to the extent that many botanical textbooks were widely considered pornographic. Carl Linnaeus’s controversial new system for classifying plants based on their sexual characteristics, as well as his use of language resonating with erotic allusions, provoked intense public debate over the morality of botanical study. And the renowned Tahitian exploits of Joseph Banks—whose trousers were reportedly stolen while he was inside the tent of Queen Oberea of Tahiti—reinforced scandalous associations with the field. Yet Linnaeus and Banks became powerful political and scientific figures who were able to promote botanical exploration alongside the exploitation of territories, peoples, and natural resources. Sex, Botany, and Empire explores the entwined destinies of these two men and how their influence served both science and imperialism.
Patricia Fara reveals how Enlightenment botany, under the veil of rationality, manifested a drive to conquer, subdue, and deflower—all in the name of British Empire. Linnaeus trained his traveling disciples in a double mission—to bring back specimens for the benefit of the Swedish economy and to spread the gospel of Linnaean taxonomy. Based in London at the hub of an international exchange and correspondence network, Banks ensured that Linnaeus's ideas became established throughout the world. As the president of the Royal Society for more than forty years, Banks revolutionized British science, and his innovations placed science at the heart of trade and politics. He made it a policy to collect and control resources not only for the sake of knowledge but also for the advancement of the empire. Although Linnaeus is often celebrated as modern botany's true founder, Banks has had a greater long-term impact. It was Banks who ensured that science and imperialism flourished together, and it was he who first forged the interdependent relationship between scientific inquiry and the state that endures to this day.