Outstanding Plants That Changed Our Lives
19.99 €
In stock
Outstanding Plants That Changed Our Lives
19.99 €
Plants are essential to human development: for millennia, they have provided us with food, shelter, clothing, transportation, and medicine. In this book, Helen and William Bynum, historians of science and medicine as well as passionate gardeners, trace the history of human interactions with 80 key plants over the past 12,000 years. They begin with the first domesticated grains that laid the foundations of civilization (wheat, rice, maize), devote the next section to the plants that made our material world—ships, houses, clothing, furniture (oak, flax, cotton), and then move on to the commodity crops that have radically shaped the global economy, colonialism, and postcolonialism, as well as our consumption patterns (tea, coffee, sugarcane). From pumpkins and beans from the Americas to African sorghum and yams, from Brazilian rubber to Chinese bamboo, the book’s geographic reach is enormous. This stunning publication, illustrated with unique antique drawings, engravings, lithographs and paintings from the collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London, will become a source of new knowledge and inspiration for everyone interested in history, anthropology and cultural studies, as well as botany, and for everyone who is not indifferent to the beauty and diversity of the flora.
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