Nature is part of any society, which explores and exploits it to represent its potential and its culture. By concentrating on the topics of natural history, botany, investigations of climate, natural resources, as well as geography of imperial regions, it is possible to gain a view on the aspects of life that usually escape the lens of political and/or national history. 

This course makes a solid contribution to the ongoing debate on the compound relationship between the regional and the national through tackling the problem of (un)equal distribution of knowledge, the problem of transfer of ideas and their cultural (dis)placement in the long 18^th – first third of the 19^th century.

The course builds around the topics of scientific discoveries, voyages, and expeditions in the 18^th – 19^th centuries, known as the 'age of sale and discovery', and conveys a constant tension between a botanist/scientist and their role in the imperial mechanisms of economic and cultural domination. The topics of scientists' gender, practices of collecting and exhibiting, as well as examination of the consequences that imperial politics had for the global ecology provide a consistent line of inquiry into a wobbly balance between the process of exploration and progress.