The acquisition of the Rosetta stone illustrates the way British imperial military, especially its navy, often enabled the scientific fieldwork of natural scientists. Thomas Young, for one example, could work with the Rosetta stone because this ancient Egyptian artefact resided in the British Museum after the English defeated the French, who had invaded Egypt. In 1801, the British brought the Stone back to Britain after their successful Egyptian campaign against the emperor Napoleon. The Rosetta stone’s acquisition exemplifies two imperial powers competing not simply for land, trade routes, and strategic outposts of imperial influence but also for scientific knowledge. As this example demonstrates, the acquisition of ancient artefacts and botanical specimens was often closely intermingled with European imperialism.

Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt may have been an act of imperial conquest, but the British acquired Rosetta stone because the French were not in Egypt purely for conquest. The French army took with it 126 scientists with strategic and commercial aims in mind, the first of which was seeking a possible route between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea in order to bypass the Cape of Good Hope where French merchant shipping was vulnerable to British attacks. (Ironically, in view of Napoleon’s defeat in the Egyptian campaign, a French engineer did eventually realise the dream and supervised the construction of the Suez Canal.) The second goal was antiquarian, and when the French capitulated, the British Admiralty insisted that all scientific papers and Egyptian artefacts be surrendered to the British. The French wrung a concession out of their enemies — they themselves could keep papers and artefacts which one man could carry and the British would take everything else. The Rosetta stone was, of course, too heavy for one man to carry, and when their enemies retreated, the British took charge of it, taking it back for display in the British Museum. It would not be the first ancient artefact which they expropriated as a result of imperial expansion and financial exploitation (e.g. the ‘Elgin’ marbles). In fact, Victorian imperial expansion, which made a significant contribution to the import of specimens and artefacts from around the world, went a long way to answering Priestley’s call for the ‘complete discovery of the face of the earth’.

Perhaps one of the most famous, but also notorious, examples of this combination of scientific and military interests is Captain Bligh’s ill-fated expedition on H.M.S. Bounty. Ostensibly, Bligh set sail in 1787 to win a premium offered by the Royal Society to find breadfruit trees with which to feed the slaves on the British plantations in the Caribbean. What purported to be a voyage for scientific and economic purposes was in fact part of Britain’s naval strategy against France. Bligh’s first visited Tahiti, supposedly to obtain the trees, which abundantly grew throughout the region, so he could have visited many other sources. Tahiti, however, was of strategic importance in the continuing imperial rivalry between Great Britain and France.

Captain Bligh’s crew mutineered and gave the voyage of the H.M.S. Bounty lasting notoriety. A later naval voyage is as famous as Bligh’s is notorious. Charles Darwin (1809-1882), perhaps the most important of the Victorian ‘Merchants of Light’ (a term given to very important functionaries in Bacon’s Salomon’s House), set off on his famous voyage in the Beagle in 1831.

During the voyage he collected specimens to send home so that others might catalogue them. Unlike the earlier and very meticulous John Ray (1627-1705) cataloguing was not Darwin’s forte, and we can derive some idea of the volume of collecting in which he and his fellow scientists engaged in by considering the difficulties which he encountered when he discovered that the cataloguers whom he wished to employ suffered from overload! Although he himself did not catalogue the riches he had collected, Darwin did celebrate the rich profusion of the natural world which he was exploring, when he reflected in The Origin of Species (1859) on ‘the vast diversity of the plants and animals’ (p. 71), concluding that the fecundity and the variety of the natural world are unstoppable because ‘each species tends by its geometrical ratio of reproduction to increase inordinately in number’ and ‘each large group tends to become still larger, and at the same time more divergent in character’ (p. 444).

The imperial adventuring, authentically and supposedly scientific expeditions, and extensive commercial initiatives provided the founders of London’s Kew Gardens in 1840 with a cornucopia of botanical specimens and altered the English domestic landscape. ‘The English country garden’ is in reality a multiplicity of shrubs and trees imported mainly from the Americas in very lucrative deals (see Wulf, passim). But it still exists in the popular imagination as a fanciful product of the nostalgia which licensed many in Britain to view the late Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian years as characterized by idylls of pastoral beauty - enjoyed only, it needs to be said, by the privileged few. It helped that the organisers of the Great Exhibition of 1851 took full advantage of the international botanical collecting and commerce and stage-managed a spectacular statement of botanical plenitude - but Crystal Palace was never to be a hardy annual like Kew Gardens.

The expansion in knowledge that Bacon promoted as an essential scientific objective was, to repeat the point, given a significant boost by what he himself called ‘the enlarging of the bounds of human empire’ (Jones, p. 480), a concept that his countrymen transformed from informed control over the physical world into the extension of their control over other peoples. And the expansion of the second British Empire so crucial to the work of the natural scientists and the seemingly exponential expansion in British manufacturing and international trading attendant on the British industrial revolution became a matter of pride for many Victorians. Their pride might well be viewed as the arrogance of men and women who thought that they had an almost divine mission to fulfil. Certainly for many Victorians, Britain was not the first among equals but the imperial state non-pareil. Some of the most energetic commentators on Victorian England’s growing imperial achievements were admirers of Francis Bacon, who was himself at work during the infancy of the first British Empire as the initial work of colonising the Irish was well under way and British mariners began their predatory incursions into the Americas.

Celebrating the Imperial Dimension of British Science

Whewell’s celebrations of the successes of British inductive science are as triumphal as Thomas Babington Macaulay’s celebration in his essay on Sir James McKintosh (1835) of Britain’s growing dominance on the international scene. Macaulay not only celebrates the triumphal progress of the British towards, as he and many of his contemporaries saw it, global supremacy as a civilisation and an imperial power sustained inevitably by the Royal Navy. The British imperial expansion had provided them not only with a vast data base about the natural world. It had also created a thriving import trade in tea, sugar, coffee, and cotton, among other produce. Macaulay now celebrates Britain’s export of civilised benefits to the rest of the world.

During the course of seven centuries the wretched and degraded race have become the greatest and most highly civilised people that ever the world saw, have spread their dominion over every quarter of the globe, have scattered the seeds of mighty empires and republics over vast continents of which no dim intimation had ever reached Ptolemy or Strabo, have created a maritime power which would annihilate in a quarter of an hour the navies of Tyre, Athens, Carthage, Venice, and Genoa together, have carried the science of healing, the means of locomotion and correspondence, every mechanical art, every manufacture, everything that promotes the convenience of life, to a perfection which our ancestors would have thought magical (my emphases) (Grieve, p. 292).

Macaulay’s view is extreme but was perhaps surpassed by Charles Kingsley who shared with William Whewell and Macaulay a conviction of how important Bacon was in the history of inductive science. In a lecture on the study of natural history delivered at Reading in 1846 he celebrated England as the nation to be rightly credited with the conquest and control of the natural world.

Bear in mind both these last great proverbs; and combine them in your mind. Remember that while England is, and ever will be, behindhand in metaphysical and scholastic science, she is the nation which above all others has conquered nature by obeying her; that as it pleased God that the author of that proverb, the father of inductive science, Bacon Lord Verulam, should have been an Englishman , so it has pleased Him that we, Lord Bacon’s countrymen, should improve that precious heirloom of science, inventing, producing, exporting, importing, till it seems as if the whole human race, and every land from the equator to the pole must henceforth bear the indelible impress and sign manual of English science.(my emphases).

Kingsley’s vision extends to the destiny of the English in the ‘after life’ (i.e. later in life, not in the later life, in reviving and ruling the world

And bear in mind, as I said just now, that this study of natural history is the grammar of that very physical science which has enabled England thus to replenish the earth and subdue it. Do you not see, then, that by following these studies you are walking in the very path to which England owes her wealth; that you are training in yourselves that habit of mind which God has approved as the one which He has ordained for Englishmen, and are doing what in you lies toward carrying out, in after life, the glorious work which God seems to have laid on the English race, to replenish the earth and subdue it?

Other parts of “Francis Bacon, Inductive Science, Empire, & the Great Exhibition”

Select bibliography: Primary sources

Bacon, Francis: ʻEssays, Advancement of Learning, New Atlantis and Other Piecesʼ: ed. R. F. Jones. New York: Odyssey Press, Inc: 1937.

Bacon, Francis: ‘Distributio Operis’ (1620) in ʻSelections from the Works of Lord Bacon: e. Thomas W. Moffettʼ. Dublin University Press: 1847.

Baines, Edward: ʻHistory of the Cotton Manufactureʼ. London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, P. Jackson: 1835.

Carlyle, Thomas: ʻPast and Presentʼ London: Oxford University Press: 1960.

Darwin, Charles: ʻThe Origin of Speciesʼ. London: Harmondsworth: 1968.

Darwin, Charles: ʻNaturalists’s Voyage Round The Worldʼ. London: John Murray: 1890.

Faraday, Michael: ’The Chemical History of a Candle.’ Printed in Great Britain by Amazon.

Kingsley, Charles: ʻHistorical Lectures and Essaysʼ. London: MacMillan: 1902.

ʻThe London Illustrated Newsʼ.

Macaulay: ‘Sir James Mckintosh’ in ʻCritical and Historical Essays: volume 1’: London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.1907.

Macaulay: ‘Essay on Bacon’ edited by H. Whyte. Clarendon Press: Oxford: 1915.

Ray, John: ʻHistoria Plantarum Historia Plantarum.ʼ (1686-1704).

Ruskin, John: ʻModern Painters I.ʼ: Cook and Weddeburn: Volume 8: Library edition: London: George Allen: 1903-12.

Whewell, William: ʻHistory of the inductive sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Times.ʼ (/span>) London 2nd, edition: 1847. https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.1863.

ʻTHE WORLD’S FAIR: OR, CHILDREN’S PRIZE GIFT BOOK OF THE GREAT EXHIBITION.ʼ Gutenberg: Release Date: November 19, 2004 [eBook #14092].

Select bibliography: Secondary sources

Ferguson, Niall: ʻEmpire: How Britain Made the Modern World.ʼ London: Allen Lane an imprint for the Penguin Press: 2003.

Wyhe,John van:‘Wiliam Whewell (1794-1866) gentleman of science’The Victorian Web.

Gere, Charlotte: ʻThe Exhibition Years.ʼ The Victorian Web.

Gillispie, Charles: ʻThe Edge of Objectivity.ʼ Princeton: The Princeton University Press: 1960.

Gillispie, Charles: ʻGenesis and Geology.ʼ Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 1969.

Landow, George P: ʻThe Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin.ʼ Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press: 1971.

Houghton, Walter E: ʻThe Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870.ʼ New Haven and London: Yale University Press: 1963.

Richards, Thomas: ʻThe Commodity Culture of Victorian England.ʼ Stanford: Stanford University Press: Verso edition 1991.

Wulf, Andrea: ‘A Generation of Gentlemen Naturalists and the Birth of an Obsession.ʼ London: Vintage Books: 2008.


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Last modified 7 January 2018