Carl Linnaeus's (1707–1778) essay Oeconomia naturae (1749) has long been recognized as a cornerstone of his cameralist ideology of economic improvement. Read in a functionalist manner, the economy of nature draws attention to the usefulness that all natural products possess with respect to each other, and ultimately for humans and their economy. Further underpinned by theological reasoning, the economy of nature thus ultimately seems to legitimize the exploitation of nature by humans. This reading, however, misses the central role that reproductive balances played in Linnaeus's economy of nature: in a fine-tuned meshwork of ecological relationships, organisms guaranteed each other’s faithful and stable reproduction. In my contribution to the panel, I will draw out the tensions that exist between these two aspects of the economy of nature, the functional and the reproductive, and argue that Linnaeus himself failed to address these because of his inability to develop a temporal and quantitative perspectives on the economy of nature. It was only in the latter half of the eighteenth century that such a perspective was developed, most prominently by Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834). As a consequence, naturalists like Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), Charles Lyell (1797–1875) and Charles Darwin (1809–1882) began to thematize the devastating ecological and economic consequences that ‘improvement’ could inflict on local environments and human lifeways. What was a logical tension in Linnaeus was now seen as a real conflict in world.

The Batavian Society was founded in 1778 by a group of merchants from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) with intellectual ambitions in the crucial colonial outpost of Batavia (today’s Jakarta). In a flurry of activities, the Society instituted prize contests in Batavia and the Netherlands, established associated memberships for individuals in other colonial or trading outposts, and developed a network of local informants. Within less than a year, information on various fields of knowledge, especially botany, flowed back to the Society. Botany was seen as a significant marker of progress for both the VOC and humanity in general.

To organize this material, the Society disseminated a basic table of Linnaean taxonomy, encouraging members, collectors, and informants to catalogue plants according to this system. At the same time, the Society envisioned the establishment of a botanical garden (which ultimately became the Bogor Botanical Garden) structured along Linnaean lines. This paper argues that Linnaean taxonomy, along with instructions for collecting, played a significant role in institutionalizing botanical knowledge within learned societies, particularly in extra-European ones. In doing so, it sparked internal debates about improving knowledge collection and, subsequently, advancing the mercantile future of the VOC.

This paper presents the breakthrough, reception, and communication of the Linnaean tradition of natural history in Scotland in the period c. 1760-1800. These were crucial decades in which Scottish universities became intellectual powerhouses of Britain’s rapidly expanding empire. I will discuss how improvement discussions and Linnaean natural history became entangled in a transnational circulation of ideas and people associated with the universities and learned societies in Scotland and Sweden. In my analysis I will present how Scottish trained Linnaean naturalists discussed improvement of both nature (landscapes, resources, forests or pastures) and other peoples’ capacities for improving (as well as improving morals, religion, and health at home) whether in the domestic Highland ‘hinterlands’ or in overseas contexts. I will focus my discussion on the professor of natural history at Edinburgh, the Rev. Dr John Walker (1731-1803) who was involved in domestic ‘improving societies’ and in Highland travel as well as educating a large cohort of students who went to have colonial careers as botanists or physicians in the British Empire. Walker deployed for example improvement to construe the Scots of the Highlands as unimproved; labouring under the “mistaken principles of their ancestors” and exhibiting “all the prejudices of an uncivilized state” as well as teaching his students how to assess the need of improvement during colonial travel and work. By connecting Linnaean improvement discussions in European hinterlands with British overseas colonial ventures my presentation will have a strong multiscalar dimension.

Freetown and Sierra Leone became a hotspot for Atlantic politics and European natural history in the last two decades of the 18th century. Swedenborg radicals envisioned setting up a utopian colony in the area. Black refugees, loyal to the British crown during the American Revolutionary War, negotiated a transfer to Freetown from Nova Scotia where they had fled. Evangelical abolitionist groups in Britain turned to the same area to set up a colony the economy of which they hoped could compete with the slave trade. As part of the latter project Adam Afzelius, a follower of Swedenborg and student of Linnaeus was tasked with doing an inventory of the natural resources in the area. The focus of the paper will be how Afzelius gained information and specimens drawing on the numerous infomers he employed and the by all accounts burgeoning trade with specimens and information, underpinning his scholarly work. Drawing on Afzelius's account books from his years in Sierra Leone I will discuss how we can understand this economy of information, what it tells us about using non-elite actors and how it fed into the project of improvement propagated by the anti-slavery movement in London.