Linnaeus : : Nature and Nation / / Lisbet Koerner.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Harvard University Press eBook Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Koerner, Lisbet,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2009]; ©2001
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (384 p.)

Drawing on letters, poems, notebooks, and secret diaries, Lisbet Koerner tells the moving story of one of the most famous naturalists who ever lived, the Swedish-born botanist and systematizer, Carl Linnaeus. The first scholarly biography of this great Enlightenment scientist in almost one hundred years, Linnaeus also recounts for the first time Linnaeus' grand and bizarre economic projects: to "teach" tea, saffron, and rice to grow on the Arctic tundra and to domesticate buffaloes, guinea pigs, and elks as Swedish farm animals. Linnaeus hoped to reproduce the economy of empire and colony within the borders of his family home by growing cash crops in Northern Europe. Koerner shows us the often surprising ways he embarked on this project. Her narrative goes against the grain of Linnaean scholarship old and new by analyzing not how modern Linnaeus was, but how he understood science in his time. At the same time, his attempts to organize a state economy according to principles of science prefigured an idea that has become one of the defining features of modernity. Meticulously researched, and based on archival data, Linnaeus will be of compelling interest to historians of the Enlightenment, historians of economics, and historians of science. But this engaging, often funny, and sometimes tragic portrait of a great man will be valued by general readers as well.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction. “To Apply Nature to Economics and Vice Versa” -- “A Geography of Nature”: Natural Philosophy -- “A Clapper intoa Bell”: Floral Names -- “The Lapp Is Our Teacher”: Medicine and Ethnography -- “God’s Endless Larder”: Theology -- “A NewWorld—Pepper, Ginger, Cardamon”: Economic Theory -- “Should Coconuts Chance to Come into My Hands”: Acclimatization Experiments -- “The Lord of All of Sweden’s Clams”: A Local Life -- “His Farmers Dressed in Mourning”: The Fate of Linnaeus’ Ideas in Sweden -- “Without Science Our Herrings Would Still Be Caught by Foreigners”: A Local Modernity -- Appendix A: Chronology of Linnaeus and Linnaeana -- Appendix B: Biographical References -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Acknowledgments -- Index