A new book by a Cambridge historian which uses the history of Kew Gardens to trace the relationship between the rise of Western science and the growth of European imperialism has won a prestigious international prize.

The American Historical Association's annual Morris D Forkosch Prize was awarded to Dr Richard Drayton for his book Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the 'Improvement' of the World'. Dr Drayton is University Lecturer in Imperial and extra-European History since 1500 and Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Corpus Christi College. He joined the University in July 2001 from the University of Virginia but completed much of the work on the book when a Research Fellow at St Catharine's College between 1992 and 1994.

Dr Drayton says the award was a surprise:
"I didn't expect this kind of thing. It was a shock, a very pleasant one. Writing a book is a long and solitary business, one takes the risk of calling out to an imagined audience. It is a relief to know that I had not been singing into the void, that there was a community of readers at the other end of the telephone wire."

The judges described Nature’s Government as "a sweeping, imaginative, skillfully crafted, well-written, and beautifully illustrated book [which] uses botany and Kew Gardens as a lens to examine the role of science in empire and the relationship of science to the state. Far more than a history of a garden, Nature’s Government integrates Christianity, political economy, and party politics into a fascinating narrative of the British Empire’s triumphs and failures."

In a work which spans the age of Alexander the Great to the 20th century, Dr Drayton shows how colonial expansion led to more complex kinds of knowledge. Science, and botany in particular, was fed by information culled from the exploration of the globe. At the same time science was useful to imperialism: it provided the know-how for the exploitation of exotic environments and offered an ideological justification for conquest as a necessary, legitimate, and beneficial process.

At a time when specialisation has trapped many historians in narrow timeframes, one of the most striking aspects of the volume is its confident sweep through five centuries of European history. It traces the history of the idea of 'improvement' from 16th century Christian providentialism, its partial secularisation with the emergence of political economy, to its contemporary role in post-colonial development theory.

Dr Drayton illustrates his thesis by analysing the development of botanic gardens, first in continental Europe and then, by the late 18th century, in Britain and the British Empire. It was as providers of legitimacy, as much as of universal knowledge, aesthetic perfection, and agricultural plenty, he argues, that botanic gardens became instruments of government.

The trend was exemplified by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Transformed in the 19th century from spectacular ornamental garden to pioneering scientific institution, Kew was the centre of a scientific and economic network - importing exotic discoveries such as breadfruit, quinine, rubber and cocoa, anlaysing their value and then exporting them to other outposts of the British Empire for exploitation. At Kew,

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