Empire's Nature - (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American Histo) by Amy R W Meyers & Margaret Beck Pritchard (Paperback)

About the Book

Empire's Nature: Mark Catesby's New World Vision

Book Synopsis

Completed in 1747, Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands was the first major illustrated publication on the flora and fauna of Britain's American colonies. Together with his Hortus Britanno-Americanus (1763), which detailed plant species that might be transplanted successfully to British soil, Catesby's Natural History exerted an important, though often overlooked, influence on the development of art, natural history, and scientific observation in the eighteenth century.
Inspired by a major traveling exhibition of Catesby's watercolor drawings from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, this collection of interdisciplinary essays considers Catesby's endeavors as a naturalist-artist, scientific explorer, experimental horticulturist, ornamental gardener, and early environmental thinker in terms of the interests held by the various, overlapping communities in which he functioned -- particularly as those interests related to the British colonial enterprise.
The contributors are David R. Brigham, Joyce E. Chaplin, Mark Laird, Amy R. W. Meyers, Therese O'Malley, and Margaret Beck Pritchard.

Review Quotes

A thoughtful and sometimes provocative reexamination of Mark Catesby s roles in British natural history during the early eighteenth century.

"North Carolina Historical Review"

A wonderful book, a meticulous tracing of Catesby's sumptuous welding of botany and zoology into eighteenth-century natural history.

John R. Stilgoe, Harvard University

"A wonderful book, a meticulous tracing of Catesby's sumptuous welding of botany and zoology into eighteenth-century natural history.

John R. Stilgoe, Harvard University"

A handsomely illustrated collection of essays .

"Virginia Magazine of History and Biography"

A useful addition to libraries of readers with a particular interest in the history of colonial or eighteenth-century British science or art.

"Journal of Southern History"

This book will find an important place in any library.

"William and Mary Quarterly"

About the Author

Amy R. W. Meyers is curator of American art at The Henry E. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. Margaret Beck Pritchard is curator of prints, maps, and wallpaper at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Virginia.