Joseph Banks: science, culture and the remaking of the Indo-Pacific world

The proposed project brings together two lead partners, University College London (UCL) and the National Maritime Museum (NMM), together with project partners (The Royal Society (RS), the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), the Natural History Museum (NHM), and the British Museum (BM)) to develop a network of scholars and institutions to research Joseph Banks (1743-1820), botanist on the voyage of Captain Cook and president of the Royal Society. We propose four international study events (three workshops and a conference) assessing Banks's career and his significance in the making of the Indo-Pacific world. These four events will bring together international scholars and stakeholders working on different Indo-Pacific regions and in different disciplines: anthropology, history of art, imperial studies, maritime history and the history of science. The four events will be as follows:

1) an invited workshop, at UCL, will concentrate on historiography of Banks and the relationship between science, culture and the Indo-Pacific region in Banks's time.
2) an invited workshop, at NMM, will assess Bank's maritime collecting and networks, his advocacy of oceanic exploration and his role in increasing European trade, missionary endeavours and political activity in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
3) an invited workshop, at the NPG, will consider representations of Banks in portraiture and satirical prints, and the role of imagery and art in the ways the Indo-Pacific World and Europe were represented to one another in Banks's time.
4) a conference, at the Royal Society, will be a much larger gathering open to the public, building on the previous workshops to debate Banks's role and legacies in linking together regions of the Indian and Pacific Oceans to form a new expanse of scientific interest and commercial and colonial exploitation.

Furthermore, to complement two of the workshops, the NHM and BM will host curator-led study visits and viewings of relevant Banks-related collections for the workshop attendees. The network's research outputs will also feed into public-facing activities at NMM, NPG, and other project partner institutions. A Steering Committee, consisting of the lead and project partners cited above, will oversee the four events between May 2016 and Autumn 2017. The goal of the network is to present Banks to both academic and public audiences, so that his role in British exploration, empire, and science is better appreciated, debated, and open to critical inquiry. We anticipate that the network will lead to a bid for a larger grant in 2017.

The network will benefit the non-HEI participating institutions (NMM, NPG, RS, NHM, BM) through enhancing their expertise, providing content for existing and developing galleries, displays, exhibitions and learning programmes, including public talks and events and digital media. Through these programmes the heritage organizations will broaden the impact to a wide range of audiences.

Specifically, the research will complement existing content being developed by NMM for the public programming developed around the recent acquisitions of a set of Banks's 'Florilegium' and the iconic paintings by George Stubbs's of a kangaroo and dingo, commissioned by Banks after the Endeavour voyage. The paintings were purchased with the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund, which also provided significant funding for a nationwide programme of public participation running to 2018.

At NMM, the network will inform a new permanent gallery on Pacific exploration at the NMM (curated by the PI), opening in 2018, together with its associated learning, publication and digital media programmes. (NMM has recently received HLF Round One funding (Development Phase) for the building of four galleries, the 'Endeavour Galleries', one of which is on Pacific exploration). The gallery forms the final part of an 'oceanic' floor' at the Museum, joining Atlantic and Indian Ocean galleries and enabling visitors to experience and engage with the global extent and nature of British maritime activity. The network will enhance the NMM's understanding and cataloguing of its Indo-Pacific collections, which are publicly accessible online; it will also enhance the catalogues of other institutions with Banks collections: for example, the British Library and British Museum. Both the PI and CI are part of the newly formed 'Cook 250' network of academics and museums, led by the NMM and intended to maximise and coordinate a range of public activities around both Cook and Banks for the 2018 and 2020 anniversaries.

At NPG, the network will inform the development of a proposal for an exhibition about Banks, cultural exchange and portraiture. It will also enhance the understanding of aspects of the collection, and artists who are represented within this. Opening up discussion on the representation of Banks and scientists, explorers and other cultures, it will feed into the larger planning of the redisplay of the eighteenth-century collection as part of the Gallery's 'Project 2020', which seeks to increase public access to the collections and associated narratives of British history.

At the RS, the network will reveal new insights into a key figure in the institution's history since Banks was president of the Society for more than forty years. At NHM, the network will enable the museum to bring scientific collections into the sphere of humanities research and public programming and at BM participation in the network will bring new perspectives to understanding their existing Banks collections.

All participating non-HEIs have long-established and productive partnerships with peer institutions in the UK and abroad - for example, the International Congress of Maritime Museums - a number of whose members in the Asian-Pacific region may wish to link to and capitalize on the public outputs, especially, perhaps, digital ones.

UCL has an established programme of public lectures and it is anticipated that these will provide opportunities for the invited speakers to also address interested but not necessarily academic audiences.