Reviews of Books

The English-born naturalist Mark Catesby (1682–1749) is best known for the magisterial two-volume Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands (London, 1731–1743), the first full-scale illustrated account of the flora and fauna of British North America, to which he devoted twenty years of labor.1 He might more accurately be remembered as an accomplished artist-naturalist in both study and field, scientific explorer, experimental horticulturalist, and ornamental gardener. In his day, Catesby was equally esteemed by learned and by practical men; merchants, tradesmen, and amateur and professional gardeners consulted him as a source of reference and advice. But his reputation went into eclipse as scientific practice became more specialized and unforgiving in the late Enlightenment. Two centuries later, his stock has revived, thanks to the intrinsic interest of his work and the insights it affords historians of art, science, and culture in the first British empire.	1
Catesby's return to prominence is both chronicled and in many respects brought to fruition in Empire's Nature: Mark Catesby's New World Vision. This admirably accessible, beautifully produced, judiciously illustrated collection of five interpretive essays is introduced by a helpful historical and historiographic essay by co-editors Amy R. W. Meyers and Margaret Beck Pritchard. Catesby's career and influence, they maintain, can be properly appreciated only in broad interdisciplinary perspective; their volume consequently situates both the science and the visual rhetoric of his engravings in the transatlantic cultural milieus from which each emerged. Rigorously if not always equally attentive to the written and pictorial records they set out to explicate, the essays collectively succeed not only in shedding light on the "overlapping realms or communities" (p. 1) of socioeconomic, intellectual, and cultural exchange that gave shape to Catesby's work but also in offering a replicable model of uncompromising yet congenial collaborative historical interpretation.	2
Empire's Nature proposes to examine "from a variety of perspectives, the cultural forces that moved Catesby to pursue his work as a naturalist-artist and experimental horticulturist with a special interest in American flora and fauna. It assesses the impact made upon Catesby's own objectives by the desires of the individuals and institutions that backed his expeditions and his collecting activities, the interests of the colonial communities that encouraged his forays into the field, the expectations of the subscribers to his Natural History, and the concerns of fellow nurserymen, gardeners, and estate owners who received plant materials from him both in England and in the colonies" (p. 25).	3
In the lead essay, "Mark Catesby, a Skeptical Newtonian in America," Joyce E. Chaplin makes the case that Catesby, although predisposed to discover order in nature in accordance with those hypothetically uniform laws then thought to govern the universe, found himself, by virtue of his "underlying eclecticism" (p. 59), fascinated nonetheless by such "glimpses of primordial chaos" (p. 68) as those afforded by the coastal hurricanes and inland flooding he experienced firsthand in South Carolina in 1722. Catesby, Chaplin suggests, worked to resolve these contradictory impulses horticulturally. By extracting American plants for "naturalization" in England, in seeking to create an "American garden" in the image of a prelapsarian paradise, he gave literal expression to his underlying belief, perceptible as well in his scientific writing and illustration, that ultimately only human action could be relied on to "create" an order "lacking in unattended wilderness" (p. 38)—what amounted to "an imperial vision of control over nature through ordered representation of its visual phenomena" (p. 77).	. . .