Darwinian Inheritance: Communication and Empire in the Making of a Scientific Dynasty

Start date: 1 May 2025
End date: 30 April 2028
Funder: The Leverhulme Trust
Primary investigator: 01102853

Value

£174,000

Partners and collaborators

Natural History Museum, London Darwin College, Cambridge Cambridge University Library

Charles darwin

Description

The Darwin dynasty played a central role in the production and communication of natural knowledge from the early eighteenth to mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, there has been no connected study of Britain’s longest surviving scientific family. Concentrating on the Darwin dynasty’s changing approaches to communicating information and interactions with empire, this project explores the evolution of scientific working practices over three centuries. It will be the first study to integrate the successful manipulation of print with the Darwins’ ability to found and dominate new disciplines in the sciences, engaging a global community of readers while securing their own legacy.

Main image caption: A magic lantern slide commissioned by George Howard Darwin (1845–1912) based on a photograph by William Usborne Moore depicting the tidal bore on the Tsien-Tang-Kiang (now Qiantang) river, China, in 1892. Darwin later reproduced this for his book The Tide.

Publications and outputs

https://www.flipsnack.com/leverhulmetrust/2024-annual-review/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00732753231181548
'George Howard Darwin and the "Public" interpretation of The Tides', History of Science, 62:1 (2024), pp. 111–143.
'From the South Seas to Soho Square: Joseph Banks's Library, Collection and Kingdom of Natural History', Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, 73:4 (2019), pp.499-526. (Part of a special issue entitled 'Rethinking Joseph Banks').
'Lives and Afterlives of the Lithophylacii Britannici ichnographia (1699), the First Illustrated Field Guide to English Fossils', Nuncius: Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, 33 (2018), pp. 505-536 (co-authored with Prof. Anna Marie Roos).
'Specimens, Slips and Systems: Daniel Solander and the classification of nature at the world's first public museum, 1753-1768', The British Journal for the History of Science, 52: 2 (2018), pp. 205-237.
'James Delbourgo, Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (London: Allen Lane, 2017)', The British Journal for the History of Science, 50 (2017), pp. 731–732.