Botanist, aristocrat, global traveler, and empire builder are all terms associated with Joseph Banks (1746–1820), a naturalist famed for traveling with James Cook to the Pacific before his election as president of the Royal Society in 1778—a position he held for more than forty-one years. Rather than concentrating on Banks's already well-known biography, in Planting the World: Joseph Banks and His Collectors: An Adventurous History of Botany, Jordan Goodman tells the stories of those who participated in Banks's global network.

Goodman's account encompasses five sections covering intrepid explorers, economics and settler colonialism, the integration of botany into imperial diplomatic missions, the exploration of landmasses only just charted by European navigators, and botanical diplomacy in the tropics. Over twenty-two chapters, Goodman presents specific case studies that explore themes, events, and enterprises administered by Banks while concentrating on the individuals he employed and worked with. Examples include the global travels of Archibald Menzies, Francis Masson, and John Duncan; the settlement, circumnavigation, and exploration of the interior of New Holland (Australia) by figures such as Arthur Philip, Robert Brown, and George Caley; collectors who accompanied diplomatic voyages, such as the Macartney Embassy to China; practices of exchanging and transporting plants across continents; and accounts that combine these networks with diplomatic missions and collecting expeditions in Brazil, China, and Congo.

Utilizing diverse sources from the collections Banks assembled at Soho Square and Kew Gardens, Goodman combines broad themes explored in the history of British science and empire with specific case studies surrounding the activities of individuals. Global travel and the transportation of plants and seeds play a central role. This combines maritime and economic history with botanical practice and casts light on the difficulties incurred through shipping plants across the globe and the frequency of these enterprises—the well-known mutiny on HMS Bounty was just one episode in a long series of attempts to transport living plants across vast distances. The diversity of these materials is represented in the sixteen color plates showing previously unknown primary source materials, including the designs for plant transportation cabins on HMS Bounty and HMS Guardian; watercolor illustrations of new species gathered in Canton, Rio de Janeiro, and the South Pacific; portraits; contemporary views of places described; and the Macartney Embassy's visit to the court of Emperor Qianlong.

Intertwining Banks's activities with a series of diverse individual, national, and global stories, Goodman connects broader themes in British imperial, global, political, and scientific history. These range from the effect of the Napoleonic wars on collecting enterprises through to the intrepid expeditions undertaken by Archibald Menzies in the Pacific Northwest and George III's interests in Kew Gardens. Through concentrating on the stories of individuals, Goodman constructs an accessible narrative, linking events that transpired in diverse parts of the globe to the central themes of economic improvement, political gains, diplomacy, and discovery. These case studies cover the activities of figures such as John Duncan, an East India Company surgeon in Canton; Captain Arthur Philip, who collected numerous seeds and plants while serving as the first governor of New South Wales; James Bowie and Allan Cunningham's unplanned journey around Brazil; and David Lochart's collection of numerous species in the Congo.

Many of these global travelers conversed with individuals scholars have tended to refer to as “knowledge brokers” and “go-betweens” who assisted with the process of collecting botanical species in certain regions. Many also supplied information on the medicinal and economic uses of plants from indigenous people. Typical examples include Moowattin, an indigenous man of the Dharug or Eora people of New South Wales who accompanied George Caley on numerous botanical expeditions. Moowattin visited England before his execution by the British authorities on 1 November 1816—the first aboriginal person to be executed under British law in Australia.

Goodman made an in-depth examination of the vast collection of surviving letters Banks sent and received, and many of these are cited and quoted, such as a letter Caley sent to Banks 3 November 1808 in which he described “The native I have been speaking of is the most civilized of anyone that I know who may be called a savage” (276). However, Goodman's reliance on letters results in a tendency to overlook the analytical potential of the other diverse materials in the Banksian collection. In addition to illustrations, specimens, and living plants, natural history collections were compiled from annotated printed books, lists, manuscript slips, and vocabularies, all of which incorporated information supplied by the indigenous people on the economic potential and contemporary uses of plants into broader frameworks of knowledge production. For example, Robert Brown, a main subject of chapter 18, compiled thousands of paper slips as he circumnavigated Australia on HMS Investigator. On each slip, Brown noted the original locality, specific economic uses, and Linnean taxonomic description of every species he encountered, information often sourced from indigenous people. More analysis of these information management practices will uncover the contributions of diverse groups, linking the practice of botany and the purposes of these expeditions with broader concepts of managing and classifying information across the British Empire.

Banks's death on 19 June 1820, just four months after that of his friend and patron George III, represents a turning point in the history of botany and its interactions with British imperial projects. Rather than being channeled through Banks, whose wealth and power ensured his domination of these enterprises from the 1770s, these were redistributed to scientific societies. In Planting the World, Goodman presents a global history of British science. A more general audience will be introduced to travel and the importance of botany in a period that tends to be neglected in the mainstream media. For historians, this book provides a valuable contribution to the understanding of the relationship between British imperial projects and the sciences in an epoch often regarded as the beginning of the modern age.