ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Sovereign Flowers: Flora Danica and the Emergence of the National Flora, 1750–1900

• In Event: ESHS Early Career Lectures

English Abstract

In 1817, the English naturalist and statesman Joseph Banks received a personal letter from the Danish King Frederik VI thanking him for his protection of the Danish right to Iceland during the heated conflicts of the English Wars. As a sign of gratitude, the King included eight folio volumes featuring hundreds of beautifully drawn, etched, printed and hand-coloured Danish flowers. Collected across all the Danish realms, several of these flowers came from Iceland, and thus the volumes also functioned as a subtle way for the King to remind Banks of Denmark’s long-standing presence and sovereign claim to Iceland.

With the first volume appearing in 1761 and the last in 1883, the Flora Danica was an enormous botanical enterprise backed financially by five successive Kings with the aim of collecting and depicting each plant species growing wild within the Danish kingdoms. Yet, the aims and ambitions behind the Flora Danica changed continuously throughout its more than 120 years of publication: Beginning as an economic enterprise supporting the modernisation of agricultural practices, it developed into a vessel for the introduction of Linnaeanism into Denmark, to eventually become an instrument of botanical nation-building in the late 19th century.

In this plenary lecture, I will present a series of episodes from the vast publication history of the Flora Danica to argue for the importance of the national flora for the nation-state, including the utilisation of missionary networks for plant collection, the foundation of an illumination school in Copenhagen, and the bureaucratic paperwork involved in circulating botanical literature across the kingdoms. Introducing the analytical concept ‘epistemic sovereignty’, I show how the genre of the national flora was developed and utilized by political sovereigns to transform natural environments into scalable political spaces through the epistemic practices of collecting, transporting and representing plants.

Author

• Christoffer Basse Eriksen, Aarhus University