Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture

This book places the work of Joseph Banks in the context of the Enlightenment. Banks's relation to major scientific and cultural currents in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British society is explored through a number of thematic chapters dealing with the pursuit of natural history and anthropology, the practice of 'improvement' and the forces which contributed to the waning of the Enlightenment in England.John Gascoigne is the author of 'Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture', published 1994 under ISBN 9780521450775 and ISBN 0521450772.