Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-x5gtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-02T06:04:59.265Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

SIR JOSEPH BANKS'S PROVINCIAL TURN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 August 2017

JULIAN HOPPIT*
Affiliation:
University College London
*
Department of History, University College London, Gower Street, London, wc1e 6btj.hoppit@ucl.ac.uk

Abstract

The rise of global history has been a major development in historical studies in recent years, with the history of globalization a central part of that. But did the global matter as much to people in the past as to historians now? This article addresses that question with reference to Britain as viewed through some neglected aspects of the life of the botanist Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820). He is usually remembered for his extensive global preoccupations. Yet his ability to be a citizen of the world, most famously on Cook's first voyage of exploration, rested on his considerable landed wealth. Indeed, as the years passed, he became more interested in improving both his own estates and the wider region, especially his beloved county of Lincolnshire in England. There, global pressures exerted some indirect influences, but local ones, especially environmental and legal, remained more important, often addressed by resort to parliamentary legislation.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I am very grateful to Margot Finn and Renaud Morieux for commenting on a draft of this article.

References

1 Bayly, C. A., The birth of the modern world, 1780–1914: global connections and comparisons (Oxford, 2004), p. 469Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., pp. 2, 468.

3 Major recent general assessments include: Belich, James, Darwin, John, Frenz, Margret, and Wickham, Chris, eds., The prospect of global history (Oxford, 2016)Google Scholar; Berg, Maxine, ed., Writing the history of the global: challenges for the twenty-first century (Oxford, 2013)Google Scholar; Conrad, Sebastian, What is global history? (Princeton, NJ, 2016)Google Scholar; Northrop, Douglas, ed., A companion to world history (Chichester, 2012)Google Scholar; Hunt, Lynn, Writing history in the global era (New York, NY, 2014)Google Scholar.

4 Hunt, Writing history, ch. 1.

5 Ibid., p. 9.

6 Bell, David A., ‘Questioning the global turn: the case of the French Revolution’, French Historical Studies, 37 (2014), p. 1Google Scholar. ‘Turn talk’ has been criticized by Surkis, Judith, ‘When was the linguistic turn? A genealogy’, American Historical Review, 117 (2012), p. 701Google Scholar.

7 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, , ed. Tuck, Richard (Cambridge, 1991), p. 24Google Scholar.

8 Conrad, What is global history?, p. 132; R. Bin Wong, ‘Regions and global history’, in Berg, ed., Writing the history of the global, p. 84; Mazlish, Bruce, ‘An introduction to global history’, in Mazlish, Bruce and Buultjens, Ralph, eds., Conceptualizing global history (Boulder, CO, 1993), p. 6Google Scholar; Withers, Charles W. J., ‘Place and the “spatial turn” in geography and history’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 70 (2009), pp. 637–58Google Scholar. A key figure in developing thinking about glocal is Roland Robertson. See, for example, his Globalisation or glocalisation?’, Journal of International Communication, 1 (1994), pp. 3352Google Scholar. ‘Regions’ is often used variously, sometimes for fairly small areas, if larger than ‘localities’, sometimes for several nations. See Paul A. Kramer, ‘Region in global history’, in Northrop, ed., World history, p. 201. On localities, see Anne Gerritsen, ‘Scales of a local: the place of locality in a globalizing world’, in Northrop, ed., World history, pp. 213–26.

9 David A. Bell, ‘This is what happens when historians overuse the idea of the network’, New Republic, 26 Oct. 2013, https://newrepublic.com/article/114709/world-connecting-reviewed-historians-overuse-network-metaphor; Maxine Berg, ‘Global history: approaches and new directions’, in idem, ed., Writing the history of the global, pp. 11–12.

10 Examples particularly relevant to this article include: Colley, Linda, The ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: a woman in world history (London, 2007)Google Scholar; Ogborn, Miles, Global lives: Britain and the world, 1550–1800 (Cambridge, 2008)Google Scholar; Rothschild, Emma, The inner life of empires: an eighteenth-century history (Princeton, NJ, 2011)Google Scholar.

11 Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory (Oxford, 2005), p. 237Google Scholar; Conrad, What is global history?, pp. 127–8.

12 David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahamanyam, ‘Introduction: the age of revolutions, 1760–1840 – global causation, connection, and comparison’, in idem and idem, eds., The age of revolution in global context, c. 1760–1840 (Basingstoke, 2010)Google Scholar, pp. xxiii, xxix.

13 Bayly, The birth of the modern world; O'Rourke, Kevin H. and Williamson, Jeffrey G., ‘When did globalisation begin?’, European Economic History Review, 6 (2002), pp. 2350Google Scholar.

14 C. A. Bayly, ‘The age of revolutions in global context: an afterword’, in Armitage and Subrahmanyam, eds., Age of revolution, pp. 211–12.

15 The standard and most detailed life is Carter, Harold B., Sir Joseph Banks, 1743–1820 (London, 1988)Google Scholar. But it lacks footnotes, which is very unfortunate given Banks's vast archive has been very widely dispersed.

16 Lincolnshire Archives, Hill 22/2/15, Richard Hobart to Banks, 18 Oct. 1793.

17 Some portraits of Banks have been discussed in Fara, Patricia, ‘The Royal Society's portrait of Joseph Banks’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 51 (1997), pp. 199210Google Scholar.

18 For example, the fine studies by: O'Brian, Patrick, Joseph Banks: a life (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Gascoigne, John, Science in the service of empire: Joseph Banks, the British state and the use of science in the age of revolutions (Cambridge, 1998)Google Scholar; Miller, David Philip and Reill, Peter Hanns, eds., Visions of empire: voyages, botany, and representations of nature (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar, part 1, ‘The Banksian empire’; Mackay, David, In the wake of Cook: exploration, science and empire, 1780–1801 (London, 1985)Google Scholar; Drayton, Richard, Nature's government: science, imperial Britain, and the ‘improvement’ of the world (New Haven, CT, 2000)Google Scholar.

19 Conrad, What is global history?, p. 66. Similarly, of three approaches said to have ‘real promise’ in global history, Banks's career falls well under two, ‘connectedness’ and ‘globalization’. Belich, Darwin, Frenz, and Wickham, eds., ‘Introduction’, in The prospect of global history, p. 3.

21 Smith, Edward, The life of Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, with some notices of his friends and contemporaries (London, 1911)Google Scholar, ch. 20, ‘A fine old English gentleman’; Cameron, Hector Charles, Sir Joseph Banks, K.B., P.R.S.: autocrat of the philosophers (London, 1952)Google Scholar, ch. 11, ‘Life at home’.

22 In the 1760s, Joseph Massie estimated that there were 310 families in England with an income of at least £4,000 per annum. Bank's income from his core estate was £5,500 in the 1790s, though because of inflation this would have been a bit less at inheritance. Massie put a country labourer's annual income at £12.50. Mathias, Peter, The transformation of England: essays in the economic and social history of England in the eighteenth century (London, 1979), p. 186Google Scholar; Carter, Banks, p. 324.

23 Robinson, David, Joseph Banks at Revesby (Horncastle, 2014)Google Scholar; Burton, Jean Shaftoe, Sir Joseph Banks: rooted in Lincolnshire (Horncastle, 2012)Google Scholar; John Farnsworth, ‘A history of Revesby Abbey, 1764–1820’ (Ph.D. thesis, Yale, 1955); William Michael Hunt, ‘The role of Sir Joseph Banks, K.B., P.R.S., in the promotion and development of Lincolnshire canals and navigations’ (3 vols., Ph.D. thesis, Open University, 1986).

24 Gascoigne, John, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: useful knowledge and polite culture (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar; Gascoigne, Science in the service of empire.

25 Bayly, C. A., Imperial meridian: the British empire and the world, 1780–1830 (London, 1989), pp. 155–60Google Scholar; Drayton, Nature's government, pp. 78–99, especially p. 97. On the concept of ‘improvement’ in England, see Slack, Paul, The invention of improvement: information and material progress in seventeenth-century England (Oxford, 2015)Google Scholar.

26 Carter, Banks, p. 42, says that in 1767 his estates were a ‘yoke’ and a ‘chore’ to him.

27 Discussed by Dawson, Warren R., ed., The Banks letters: a calendar of the manuscript correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, preserved in the British Museum, the British Museum (Natural History) and other collections in Great Britain (London, 1958)Google Scholar.

28 Carter, Banks, pp. 323–4.

29 Nearly a half of Banks's Lincolnshire estates were in and around Revesby, one third were in and around Holbeach, 25 miles south, and the rest to the north-east of the Lincolnshire Wolds. Robinson, Banks, p. 85.

30 Mendyk, Stan A. E., ‘Speculum Britanniae’: regional study, antiquarianism, and science in Britain to 1700 (Toronto, 1989)Google Scholar; Parry, Graham, The trophies of time: English antiquarianism of the seventeenth century (Oxford, 1995)Google Scholar.

31 On Banks's antiquarianism see Gascoigne, Banks and the English Enlightenment, pp. 119–34. His publications are listed in Carter, Harold B., Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820): a guide to biographical and bibliographical sources (Winchester, 1987), pp. 169–74Google Scholar. On one local antiquarian effort by Banks, see Munby, Julian, ‘“Out of his element”: Mr Johnson, Sir Joseph Banks and Tattershall castle’, Antiquaries Journal, 94 (2014), pp. 253–89Google Scholar. For general context, see Sweet, Rosemary, Antiquaries: the discovery of the past in eighteenth-century Britain (London, 2004)Google Scholar.

32 Hunt, ‘Banks navigations’, i, pp. 46–7.

33 Carter, Banks, p. 576.

34 Lincolnshire Archive Office, CO C2/2, minutes of county meetings, 1792–1823. The pamphlet was [Joseph Banks], Outlines of a plan of defence against a French invasion; intended for the county of Lincoln; but applicable to all other counties (1794).

35 Young, Arthur, General view of the agriculture of Lincolnshire (2nd edn, 1813), pp. 22–3Google Scholar: at Revesby, Banks's office ‘has 156 drawers…all numbered. There is a catalogue of names and subjects, and a list of every paper in every drawer; so that whether the inquiry concerned a man, or a drainage, or an enclosure, or a farm, or a wood, the request was scarcely named before a mass of information was in a moment before me.’

36 Eleanor, and Russell, Rex C., Old and new landscapes in the Horncastle area (Lincoln, 1985), pp. 4951Google Scholar, 69, 71–4, 76, 85–6. Parliamentary enclosure began to be common in the 1760s.

37 On Banks's political independence, see Gascoigne, Science in the service of empire, pp. 47–52.

38 Discussed in Gascoigne, Science in the service of empire, pp. 71–81. For the history of the wool export ban see Hoppit, Julian, Britain's political economies, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 2017), ch. 7Google Scholar.

39 Carter, Harold B., ed., The sheep and wool correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1781–1820 (New South Wales and London, 1979), p. 43Google Scholar.

40 Dalrymple, John, The question considered, whether wool should be allowed to be exported, when the price is low at home, on paying a duty to the public? (London, 1781)Google Scholar.

41 Carter, ed., The sheep and wool correspondence, p. 69.

42 Anon., The propriety of allowing a qualified exportation of wool discussed historically (London, 1782)Google Scholar. This is usually credited to Banks, but Carter states that much of it was written by George Chalmers, with Banks providing the statistical material. Carter, Banks, p. 175.

43 Most of the meetings are listed in [Turnor, Edmund], A short view of the proceedings of the several committees and meetings held in consequence of the intended petition to parliament, from the county of Lincoln, for a limited exportation of wool (London, 1782)Google Scholar.

44 The Oakes diaries: business, politics and the family in Bury St Edmunds, 1778–1827, ed. Fiske, Jane, Suffolk Records Society, 32 (2 vols., Woodbridge, 1990)Google Scholar, i, p. 224.

45 Carter, ed., The sheep and wool correspondence, p. 62.

46 Ibid., pp. 102–55.

47 California State Library, Sutro Library, San Francisco, Banks papers (hereafter Sutro, Banks), WL2, 88–90.

48 Carter, Banks, pp. 236–7.

49 Carter, ed., The sheep and wool correspondence, p. 62.

50 Bouyer, R. G., ed., An account of the origin, proceedings, and intentions of the Society for the Promotion of Industry, in the southern district of the parts of Lindsey, in the county of Lincoln (3rd edn, Louth, 1789)Google Scholar, pp. 23 and 35.

51 Carter, Banks, p. 228; Carter, H. C., His Majesty's Spanish flock: Sir Joseph Banks and the Merinos of George III of England (Sydney, 1964)Google Scholar.

52 The best study remains Darby, H. C., The draining of the fens (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1956)Google Scholar. See also Wheeler, W. H., A history of fens of south Lincolnshire (2nd edn, London, 1897)Google Scholar.

53 Holmes, C., ‘Drainers and fenmen: the problem of popular political consciousness in the seventeenth century’, in Fletcher, Anthony and Stevenson, John, eds., Order and disorder in early modern England (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 166–95Google Scholar; Lindley, Keith, Fenland riots and the English revolution (London, 1982)Google Scholar.

54 Fen legislation is considered in Hoppit, Britain's political economies, ch. 6.

55 Banks, Carter, pp. 392–4.

56 Robinson, David N., ‘Sir Joseph Banks and the East Fen’, in Sturman, Christopher, ed., Lincolnshire people and places: essays in memory of Terence R. Leach (1937–1994) (Lincoln, 1996), p. 99Google Scholar.

57 The acreages are taken from [George Maxwell], A statement of facts relating to the drainage of South Holland in Lincolnshire (Spalding, 1811), p. 5; and Skempton, A. W., et al. , eds., A biographical dictionary of civil engineers in Great Britain and Ireland, i: 1500–1830 (London, 2002), p. 558Google Scholar.

58 The key records are Sutro, Banks, F1–10.

59 Robinson, Banks, pp. 89, 127.

60 Skempton et al., eds., Civil engineers, pp. 437–8.

61 Sutro, Banks, F2:73–4.

62 Ibid., F3:70, 76.

63 Ibid., F8:19; F4:39.

64 [Maxwell], A statement of facts. Banks described the pamphlet as ‘little more than a gross attack on me’. Sutro, Banks, F5:74. The controversy had a structural as well as a personal element to it, surviving Maxwell's death in 1815: ibid., F2:18. Maxwell was separately attacked by the Reverend James Ashley who published seven ‘letters’ against him from 1797 to 1802. Maxwell replied anonymously to the first in The law-priest; or, quibus dissected. In a series of letters to a friend (Spalding, 1797).

65 H. B. Carter and Christopher Sturman, ‘Sir Joseph Banks as a writer of topical verse’, in Sturman, ed., Lincolnshire people, pp. 108–9.

66 Gascoigne, Banks and the English Enlightenment, pp. 41–55.

67 Young, Lincolnshire, pp. 264–5.

68 Carter, Banks sources, p. 306.

69 Carter, Banks, pp. viii, 177; Farnsworth, ‘Revesby Abbey’, p. 290.

70 Discussed by Farnsworth, ‘Revesby Abbey’, ch. 6.

71 Young, Arthur, General view of the agriculture of the county of Lincoln (London, 1799), p. 234Google Scholar. This description of Banks was dropped from the second edition published in 1808. Banks was anxious not to give cause for the resurrection of anti-improvement rioting: Sutro, Banks, F9:32.

72 Farnsworth, ‘Revesby Abbey’, ch. 2, and for the quote p. 190.

73 Grigg, David, The agricultural revolution in South Lincolnshire (Cambridge, 1966)Google Scholar; Thirsk, Joan, English peasant farming: the agrarian history of Lincolnshire from Tudor to recent times (London, 1957)Google Scholar.

74 Banks is portrayed with most of these and others in the painting by Thomas Weaver, ‘Thomas Morris's sheep show at Barton-on-Humber, Lincolnshire’, 1810.

75 Bank's contributions to the Annals are listed in Carter, Banks sources, pp. 170–2.

76 In the West Riding of Yorkshire, the volume of broad and narrow cloth milled fell by 27 per cent between 1778 and 1781: Mitchell, B. R., British historical statistics (Cambridge, 1988), p. 351Google Scholar. Exports of woollen goods from England fell 39 per cent between 1775 and 1780: Schumpeter, Elizabeth Boody, English trade statistics, 1697–1808 (Oxford, 1960), pp. 3940Google Scholar. The price of Lincolnshire wool fell 58 per cent from 1774 to 1782: John, A. H., ‘Statistical appendix’, in Mingay, G. E., ed., The agrarian history of England and Wales, vi: 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 990Google Scholar.

77 According to Mann, J. de L., The cloth industry in the west of England from 1640 to 1880 (London, 1971), p. 259Google Scholar, ‘nearly all English wool grew somewhat longer and coarser between 1600 and 1800’.

78 Wrigley, E. A., ‘Rickman revisited: the population growth rates of English counties in the early modern period’, Economic History Review, 62 (2009), p. 721Google Scholar.

79 Sutro, Banks, F4:14; Gascoigne, Banks and the English Enlightenment, p. 200.

80 Sutro, Banks, F10:12. CO6:14 is a printed sheet of price data since 1050.

81 Young, Lincolnshire, p. 280.

82 Cookson, J. E., The British armed nation, 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997)Google Scholar; Gee, Austin, The British volunteer movement, 1794–1814 (Oxford, 2003)Google Scholar.

83 Chambers, Neil, ed., The letters of Sir Joseph Banks: a selection, 1768–1820 (London, 2000), pp. 177–80Google Scholar.

84 British Library (BL), Add. MSS 52,281, fo. 14.

85 Lysaght, A. M., ed., Joseph Banks in Newfoundland and Labrador, 1766: his diary, manuscripts and collections (London, 1971), p. 72Google Scholar; Cartwright, F. D., ed., The life and correspondence of Major Cartwright (2 vols., London, 1826)Google Scholar, i, pp. 194, 241; Carter, Banks, pp. 36, 229, 350. The only modern study of Cartwright rests almost entirely on his political writings: Osborne, John W., John Cartwright (Cambridge, 1972)Google Scholar.

86 R. G. Thorne, ‘Boston’, at www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1790-1820/constituencies/boston, 1986, accessed 16 Feb. 2017.

87 BL, Add. MSS 52,281, fo. 27. This is a letter from Cartwright to Banks about breaking off relations.

88 Sutro, Banks, F8:27, F7:18.

89 Ibid., F3:43.

90 Ibid., F5:32, F7:44.

91 Dawson, ed., Banks letters, p. xiv.

92 It is also the case, as Freud noted, that the idea that there is a biographical truth to be had is fanciful. Ellmann, Richard, ‘Freud and literary biography’, American Scholar, 53 (1984), p. 469Google Scholar.

93 David Philip Miller, ‘Joseph Banks, empire, and “centers of calculation” in late Hanoverian London’, in Miller and Reill, eds., Visions of empire, p. 33.

94 David Philip Miller, ‘Introduction’, in Miller and Reill, eds., Visions of empire, p. 5.

95 As Drayton recognized: Nature's government, p. 97.

96 For example, Hopkins, A. G., ed., Global history: interactions between the universal and the local (Basingstoke, 2006)Google Scholar.

97 There were thirteen convicts from Lincolnshire on the ‘first fleet’ to Australia that arrived in 1788, and around 1,800 in total were sent by 1840. Anderson, C. L., Lincolnshire convicts to Australia, Bermuda and Gibraltar (Lincoln, 1993)Google Scholar, pp. 6, 14.

98 Vernon, James, ‘The history of Britain is dead: long live a global history of Britain’, History Australia, 13 (2016), p. 28Google Scholar.

99 Mitchell, British historical statistics, pp. 579–81; Stephen Broadberry et al., ‘British economic growth, 1270–1870: database’ at www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Broadberry/Nov2011FinalData1270-1870.xlsx, accessed 28 Feb. 2017; Eltis, David and Engerman, Stanley L., ‘The importance of slavery and the slave trade to industrialising Britain’, Journal of Economic History, 60 (2000), p. 129Google Scholar. On the general difficulties of assessing the impact of Britain's empire on its domestic fortunes, see O'Brien, Patrick Karl and de la Escosura, Leandro Prados, ‘The costs and benefits for Europeans from their empires overseas’, Revista de Historia Económica, 16 (1998), p. 31Google Scholar.

100 Wrigley, E. A., The path to sustained growth: England's transition from an organic economy to an industrial revolution (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 201–3Google Scholar, the quote is at p. 202.

101 Driver, Felix and Samuel, Raphael, ‘Rethinking the idea of place’, History Workshop Journal, 39 (1995)Google Scholar, p. vi.

102 Langton, John, ‘The industrial revolution and the regional geography of England’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 9 (1984), pp. 145–67Google Scholar.

103 Bell, Duncan S. A., ‘Dissolving distance: technology, space and empire in British political thought, 1770–1900’, Journal of Modern History, 77 (2005), p. 524Google Scholar.

104 Holmes, Clive, Seventeenth-century Lincolnshire (Lincoln, 1980)Google Scholar.

105 Driver and Samuel, ‘Rethinking the idea of place’, p. vi.

106 Hoppit, Britain's political economies, p. 24.

107 Hoppit, Julian, ‘The nation, the state, and the first industrial revolution’, Journal of British Studies, 50 (2011), pp. 307–31Google Scholar; Langford, Paul, Public life and the propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar.

108 Hoppit, Britain's political economies, ch. 3.

109 The parish: a satire, ed. Robinson, Eric (Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 63Google Scholar.

110 Eastwood, David, Government and community in the English provinces, 1700–1870 (Basingstoke, 1997)Google Scholar.

111 Bell, ‘Questioning the global turn’, p. 24.

112 What is global history?, p. 13.

113 Massey, Doreen, ‘Places and their pasts’, History Workshop Journal, 39 (1995), p. 183Google Scholar.