Includes bibliographical references (pages 274-312) and index.
Contents
Bodies of knowledge -- I: Exploration, science and literature -- Sir Joseph Banks and his networks -- Tahiti in London: London in Tahiti: tools of power -- Indian flowers and Romantic orientalism -- Mental travellers: banks, African exploration and the Romantic imagination -- Banks, Bligh and the breadfruit: slave plantations, tropical islands and the rhetoric of Romanticism -- Exploration, headhunting and race theory: the skull beneath the skin -- Theories of terrestrial magnetism and the search for the poles -- II: British science and literature in the context of empire -- 'Man electrified man': Romantic revolution and the legacy of Benjamin Franklin -- The beast within: vaccination, Romanticism and the Jenneration of disease -- Britain's little black boys and the technologies of benevolence.