A Cultural History of Plants

Winner of the 2022 Society of Economic Botany’s Daniel F. Austin Award A Cultural History of Plants presents a global exploration of how plants have shaped human culture. Covering the last 12,000 years, it is the definitive history of how we have cultivated, traded, classified, and altered plants and how, in turn, plants have influenced our ideas of luxury and wealth, health and well-being, art and architecture. Chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six. The themes (and chapter titles) are: Plants as Staple Foods; Plants as Luxury Foods; Trade and Exploration; Plant Technology and Science; Plants and Medicine; Plants in Culture; Plants as Natural Ornaments; The Representation of Plants. The six volumes cover: 1 – Antiquity (10,000 BCE to 500 CE); 2 – Post-Classical Era (500 to 1400); 3 – Early Modern Era (1400 to 1650); 4 – the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1650 to 1800); 5 – the Nineteenth Century(1800 to 1920); 6 – Modern Era (1920 to the present). The page extent for the pack is 1744pp. Each volume opens with Notes on Contributors and an Introduction and concludes with Notes, Bibliography, and an Index. The Cultural Histories Series A Cultural History of Plants is part of The Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available both as printed hardcover sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a one-off purchase and tangible reference for their shelves, or as part of a fully-searchable digital library available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access (see www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com).