Post by nzbc on Nov 7, 2023 11:01:42 GMT 12
Beattie, James. “Thomas McDonnell’s Opium: Circulating, Plants, Patronage, and Power in Britain, China and New Zealand, 1830s-1850s.” In The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Sarah Burke Cahalan and Yota Basaki, 163-88. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard University Press, 2017.
“James Beattie tracks the career of Thomas McDonnell, whose areas of collecting encompassed India, China, and New Zealand. McDonnell illustrates the ways in which the overlapping economies of eighteenth-century botany continued into the nineteenth century. While making his fortune as an opium trader and honing his local status in New Zealand as a collector of exotic Chinese and Indian flora, he nonetheless sought scientific recognition through his publications, in London, on the unassuming plants that grew outside his garden at Horeke. Beattie concludes by arguing that the cultural practices around ‘science making’ and the associated patronage networks it established conferred differing levels of respectability on McDonnell, dependent on the specific social and political contexts of Britain and Australasia.” www.environmentalhistory-au-nz.org/publications/publications-archive/july-october-2017/
“James Beattie tracks the career of Thomas McDonnell, whose areas of collecting encompassed India, China, and New Zealand. McDonnell illustrates the ways in which the overlapping economies of eighteenth-century botany continued into the nineteenth century. While making his fortune as an opium trader and honing his local status in New Zealand as a collector of exotic Chinese and Indian flora, he nonetheless sought scientific recognition through his publications, in London, on the unassuming plants that grew outside his garden at Horeke. Beattie concludes by arguing that the cultural practices around ‘science making’ and the associated patronage networks it established conferred differing levels of respectability on McDonnell, dependent on the specific social and political contexts of Britain and Australasia.” www.environmentalhistory-au-nz.org/publications/publications-archive/july-october-2017/