This book brings together an international body of scholars working on eighteenth-century botany within the context of imperial expansion. The eighteenth century saw widespread exploration, a tremendous increase in the traffic in botanical specimens, taxonomic breakthroughs, and horticultural experimentation. The contributors to this volume compare the impact of new developments and discoveries across several regions, broadening the geographical scope of their inquiries to encompass imperial powers that did not have overseas colonial possessions—such as the Russian, Ottoman, and Qing empires and the Tokugawa shogunate—as well as politically borderline regions such as South Africa, Yemen, and New Zealand.

The essays in this volume examine the botanical ambitions of eighteenth-century empires; the figure of the botanical explorer; the links between imperial ambition and the impulse to survey, map, and collect botanical specimens in “new” territories; and the relationships among botanical knowledge, self-representation, and material culture.

Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space opens new and insightful vistas on the nexus between empire and geography. The volume redirects attention from the Atlantic to the space of the eastern Mediterranean shaped by two empires of remarkable duration and territorial extent, the Byzantine and the Ottoman. The essays offer a diachronic and comparative account that spans the medieval and early modern periods and reaches into the nineteenth century. Methodologically rich, the essays combine historical, literary, and theoretical perspectives. Through texts as diverse as court records and chancery manuals, imperial treatises and fictional works, travel literature and theatrical adaptations, the essays explore ways in which the production of geographical knowledge supported imperial authority or revealed its precarious mastery of geography.

Plant Humanities moves plants to the center of critical inquiry, positioning them as biocultural entities with distinct environmental and social histories that have profoundly shaped human cultures. Its thirteen chapters cover a broad geographical range, including the Americas, Europe, the Pacific, the Indian subcontinent, East Asia, and Africa, to explore the dual character of plants as place makers and world travelers. As ecosystem builders and cultural agents constitutive of national, sacred, and domestic ecologies, plants help us trace legacies of colonialism, capitalism, racism, and the related challenges of anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity loss. Plant-focused epistemologies are also central to this volume; several essays explore the interplay between vernacular and scientific paradigms and distinct taxonomic systems to reveal instances of rupture, continuity, and resilience. Plant Humanities concludes with the discussion of the poetics of plants—their foundational role in communal imaginaries—and the ways they shape our understanding of the sacred, probing how notions of value are predicated on human commodification, elevation, or abjection of the vegetal world.