CFP - Cultivating Empire

Cultivating Empire: Exploration, Science and Literature: An Interdisciplinary Conference, featuring the work and influence of Sir Joseph Banks

Lincoln, UK, 18 April 2009

This multidisciplinary conference will examine the intersections between the local and the global--the English shire and the colonial shore--in the years 1750-1850. Focusing on the relationship between Britain and the countries over which it extended its power, the conference has as its centre Sir Joseph Banks but also aims more broadly to present critical work in the following areas: the history of exploration and of colonial settlement (e.g. in Australasia, the South Pacific, Africa, India, the NW coast of America, the Poles, and in Britain itself); the development of colonialism as a system (for instance, the application to a global network of forms of administration and control pioneered on the English country estate); the cultural impact of the exploration and settlement of previously-unknown regions (e.g. in verbal and visual representations: art, theatre, poetry and fiction, journalism, travel writing, and vis-a-vis Orientalism, Omai, Tahiti,and India); natural philosophy in Britain and abroad (e.g. plant exchange, imperial botany, geological mapping, imperial medicine, the Royal Society, Kew Gardens, Hooker); agricultural improvement at home and in the colonies (e.g. Captain Bligh and the breadfruit scheme, the import and export of crops and livestock, the Royal Society of Arts); local history: the relationship of antiquarian study to the practice of natural philosophy in the empire; Sir Joseph Banks: any aspect of his life and work; archives and correspondence: the role of collections, letters and information stores, then and now, in knowledge-production and staging empire; the late eighteenth-century gentry as a class; the exchange and cultural meanings of technologies and objects

Submissions for 20 minute papers are invited from historians of science, literary critics, geographers, students of local history, garden historians, colonial critics and all others interested in the cultures of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain. Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be sent by email to tim.fulford@ntu.ac.uk by 1 January 2009.Venue: University of Lincoln/The Collection (Usher Gallery, Lincoln) where delegates will have a chance to inspect Benjamin West's great portrait of Joseph Banks before it leaves the UK.

Organisers: Neil Chambers, Sir Joseph Banks Archive, Nottingham Trent University, Tim Fulford, Dept ELH, Nottingham Trent University, Ian Packer, School of Humanities and Performing Arts, University of Lincoln, The Sir Joseph Banks Society.