This daring attempt to juxtapose the histories of Britain, western science, and imperialism shows how colonial expansion, from the age of Alexander the Great to the 20th century, led to complex kinds of knowledge.

Nature's Government is a daring attempt to juxtapose the histories of Britain, western science and imperialism. It shows how colonial expansion led to complex kinds of knowledge and in particular the way in which science and botany was fed by information culled from exploration of the world. Science was useful to imperialism as it guided the exploitation of exotic environments and provided legitimacy to conquest. It is in this respect that botanic gardens as providers of knowledge, aesthetic perfection and agricultural plenty, became instruments of government, by the late eighteenth century in Britain and the British Empire. At the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, 'improving' the world became a potent argument for both the patronage of science at home and Britain's prerogatives abroad. This South Asian edition has a special introduction by Mahesh Rangarajan.

This is the second volume of a trilogy (the first was The Plum Flower Dance) in which Weaver analyzes his life, striving to become the ideal poet. In The Government of Nature, Afaa Michael Weaver explores the trauma of his childhood—including sexual abuse—using a "cartography and thematic structure drawn from Chinese spiritualism." Weaver is a practitioner of Daoism, and this collection deals directly with the abuse in the context of Daoist renderings of nature as metaphor for the human body.

The Nature and Purpose of Government elaborates the Lockean social contract that informed revolutionary thought in the American colonies prior to the War for Independence. It explores in detail the narrative of Locke's Second Treatise of Government and relates it to the American situation in the following century.

The Nature of Party Government examines relationships between governments and supporting parties on a comparative European basis. The book does so at the level of principles: there is a major conflict between governments, which should govern, and parties, which being representative, wish to shape the way governments operate. The book studies relationships empirically as well: it shows that they occur on three planes, appointments, policy-making and patronage and assesses the extent of two-way influence, from parties to governments and from governments to parties.

This widely acclaimed book analyzes the political effects of scientific research as exemplified by one field, economic botany, during one epoch, the nineteenth century, when Great Britain was the world's most powerful nation. Lucile Brockway examines how the British botanic garden network developed and transferred economically important plants to different parts of the world to promote the prosperity of the Empire. In this classic work, available once again after many years out of print, Brockway examines in detail three cases in which British scientists transferred important crop plants--cinchona (a source of quinine), rubber and sisal--to new continents. Weaving together botanical, historical, economic, political, and ethnographic findings, the author illuminates the remarkable social role of botany and the entwined relation between science and politics in an imperial era.