History

Banks shoring up the enlightenment

by Glyndwr Williams •

September 1994, no. 164

Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful knowledge and polite culture by John Gascoigne

Cambridge University Press, $49.95 hb

History

Banks shoring up the enlightenment

by Glyndwr Williams •

September 1994, no. 164

In recent years, scholars have attempted to come to grips with the prodigious range of Sir Joseph Banks’s activities during a public career that lasted more than fifty years. Wherever one turned in the establishment circles of George III’s England there stood, it seemed, the massive figure of Joseph Banks: President of the Royal Society, Privy Councillor, adviser to government, patron of the sciences, Cook’s sailing companion and ‘Father of Australia’ for some, the moving force behind the African Association and ‘Father of African Exploration’ for others.

Glyndwr Williams

Glyndwr Williams was Professor of History at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. He specialised in British history and the history of exploration, authoring a number of significant studies in those fields, including The British Search for the Northwest Passage in the Eighteenth Century (1962), The Great South Sea: English voyages and encounters, 1570-1750 (1997), and The Death of Captain Cook: A hero made and unmade (2009).