A wealthy landowner in Lincolnshire, Banks spent much of the year in London. There, his house in Soho Square was both the home and the workplace of a man described by one of his contemporaries as the ‘Ministre des Affaires Philosophiques’, and by his recent biographer, Harold Carter, as a ‘sort of Permanent Secretary to a Minister of Science and Technology’.

John Gascoigne’s book is not an attempt to rival Carter’s monumental biography; rather it looks to relate Banks to the ‘broader currents of his age’. These are seen here as part of ‘The English Enlightenment’, an expression that comes as a mild shock to those who think of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in terms of intellectual ferment in France or perhaps in Scotland. But for the author the Enlightenment in mid-Hanoverian England emerges not as a driving force for change but as a respectful acceptance of the virtues of a balanced constitution, a deferential society, and a moderate anti-clericalism.

England, at least from the viewpoint of the élite, was a comfortably enlightened and rational nation. For Gascoigne it is the English Enlightenment which gives ‘shape and direction to Banks’s bewildering range of activities’, a selection of which is examined in the book’s central three chapters. Though full of recondite information and subtle argument, they do not make an easy read. The temptation to include more and more instances of Banks’s influence and interests, his acquaintances and correspondents, has not always been resisted. As the examples tumble out, so the daunting list of things done and people seen grows until in places each paragraph seems to produce a new subject.

‘From Virtuoso to Botanist’ sketches Banks’s progression from a fashionable young botanist to a man whose approach became more rigorously professional. With the acceptance of Linnaean principles of classification, natural history began to regain lost ground from the prestigious physical sciences. The new specimens came flooding in, many from the iconic voyages of discovery, to illustrate one of the leading aspects of the Enlightenment – the extension of knowledge away from the confines of the ancient and biblical worlds.

‘From Antiquarian to Anthropologist’ traces a similar process, from that collecting and studying of antiquities much beloved by the leisured members of the landed class to the more urgent impact brought about by the revelation of societies distant in place rather than in time. The classification systems of the botanists were extended, not without dispute, to humankind, and research began which marked the first glimmerings of the disciplines of anthropology and ethnology. Everything was grist to the mill: collecting Polynesian vocabularies one day, human skulls the next; heated debates on monogenesis versus polygenesis; attempts to elevate climatic determinism into a branch of science.

In general, this consideration of non-Christian societies reflected that secularising impulse of the Enlightenment which saw the ‘science of man’ as a key area of study.

‘The Principles and Practice of Improvement’ reveals a thread running through Banks’s activities from his early days. For Banks, scientific knowledge was applied knowledge. He was a relentless seeker after improvement and betterment, from his own estates to the encouragement on a national basis of new crops and techniques, and outside Britain to the transfer of plants on a global scale. It was no accident that the first of his many societies and clubs (joined when he was a student at Oxford) was the Society of Arts. Its full title better reveals its scope and aims: The Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce.

The world of Joseph Banks changed out of recognition when the revolutionary movements of late century threatened the stability and confidence of earlier decades. For Gascoigne, the new era of domestic and international turmoil signifies ‘The Waning of the English Enlightenment’. Like many of his kind, Banks reacted in predictable fashion to events in France. To him the Revolution was a denial rather than a vindication of the principles of the Enlightenment, and his response was to put greater weight on the importance of tradition. His continuing links with his correspondents in France showed an acceptance that not all Frenchmen were tainted with revolutionary madness, and in 1802 he was ready to accept election to the National Institute of France. But in most respects his attitudes were indistinguishable from those of the ruling class in general, and within his own fiefdom of the Royal Society change and reform were resisted as fiercely as the government opposed reform of the constitution.

As Banks boasted in 1804, ‘we have not one attending member who is at all addicted to Politicks’. By ‘Politicks’, Gascoigne points out, Banks meant radical politics – a sign that to Banks and his colleagues maintenance of the accepted order of things was apolitical.

His last years were spent resisting innovations which he regarded as dangerous, whether they were the establishment of new, specialist societies which might threaten the supremacy of the Royal Society, or challenges to the political dominance of the landed interest. When he died in 1820 much of his world was under siege by new men and new forces. Less was heard of ‘improvements’ and more of ‘progress’; and Banks himself was regarded by many as an impediment rather than an aid to the course of learning and scholarship.