Kew Gardens Panel – Papers of natural history: publishing and archiving botany at Kew in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

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• Emily Hughes and Sophia Kamps (Kew Gardens)
• Monday 02 March 2026, 13:00-14:00
• Seminar Room 1, Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact ma2019.

Emily Hughes (UCL & Kew Gardens)

Despite vast research of the connection between Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the British Empire, little attention has been turned towards the records kept of it. This paper links the fields of history of science and archival studies to introduce a new perspective: the necessity of considering organisational administrators such as recordkeepers as agents of power and knowledge production within the field of botanic history (Stoler 2002). Asserting natural knowledge as a tool and instrument of colonial control, the paper considers how the circulation of information and knowledge around the empire was dependent on bureaucratic efficiency and recordkeeping at Kew. It takes a material culture approach, assessing how the physical binding and organisation of records can reveal changing colonial priorities through the 19th century, how administrators viewed and categorised natural resources and the world, and how this impacts how archive-users interact with records at Kew today.

Sophia Kamps (Royal Holloway, University of London & Kew Gardens)

Lovell Reeve was the leading natural history publisher of the mid-Victorian era, responsible for periodicals such as Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, publications for popular audiences, and specialist works of enduring significance. Lovell Reeve’s publications are the result of a complex system of labour and market dynamics, with the publisher working to bring together illustrators, writers, and printers and produce volumes for both specialists and lay audiences. This paper brings together an analysis of the economics of publishing natural history based on the Lovell Reeve papers at RBG , Kew, with a material culture focus on book production, from the creation of elaborate hand-coloured lithographs to the innovative trade cloth bindings used for Reeve’s Popular Natural History series. Through an emphasis on production process and materiality, this paper explores the tension between the book as a commodity, a scientific tool, and a work of art.

This talk is part of the Cabinet of Natural History series.

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