Nineteenth-Century Museums and the Shaping of Disciplines: Potentialities and Limitations at Kew’s Museum of Economic Botany

Abstract

Nineteenth-century museums have long been recognized as sites for the formation of a range of disciplines from archaeology to art history. This formation process occurred, more often than not, in advance of attempts by universities to establish disciplinary boundaries and conventions. Taking the example of the Museum of Economic Botany at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, this article examines the process by which the field of knowledge known as economic botany was rendered as a discipline at Kew from the mid-nineteenth century. But as well as demonstrating the potential of museums to undertake such epistemological acts, by following the life of a particular object — the Tasmanian Timber Trophy — what also become clear are the limits of museums’ disciplinary authority.