Scandinavian scientific learning in Eighteenth-Century British Writing: Linnaeus and the European outlook on nature

In the eighteenth century, a widely investigated – and even fashionable – field of knowledge is natural history, a macro-domain including a vast number of disciplines and sub-disciplines. Most of these are emerging disciplines not because they are completely new, but because the research perspective adopted (i.e., the way they are investigated and discussed) is extremely innovative. On the one hand, cognate disciplines such as materia medica, diaetetica, agriculture, gardening, botany, etc. – considered as ‘part of’ and ‘dependent on’ the more prestigious and encompassing domains of medicine and natural history – establish themselves as autonomous disciplines with their own epistemological principles and values. On the other hand, new disciplinary communities originate and consolidate in an ideal ‘commonwealth of learning’. One of the branches which best represents the ‘commonwealth of learning’ and its civil and utilitarian issues is botany. On botanical knowledge are based most of the eighteenth-century commercial interests and principles regulating global and colonial trade; moreover, it is considered the main source of individual wealth, national welfare and cultural renown. As a consequence, botany acts as a bridge towards other disciplines, other settings, other peoples, other countries, other traditions and, ultimately, other knowledge(s). In the present study, the focus is on the contribution made by such Swedish scholars as Carl Linnaeus and Fredrik Hasselquist to the elaboration of modern botany, both at a theoretical and at a practical level.