The British Museum, based in Montague House, Bloomsbury, opened its doors on 15 January 1759, as the world's first state-owned public museum. The Museum's collection mostly originated from Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), whose vast holdings were purchased by Parliament shortly after his death. The largest component of this collection was objects of natural history, including a herbarium made up of 265 bound volumes, many of which were classified according to the late seventeenth-century system of John Ray (1627-1705). The 1750s saw the emergence of Linnaean binomial nomenclature, following the publication of Carl Linnaeus' Species Plantarum (1753) and Systema Naturae (1758). In order to adopt this new system for their collections, the Trustees of the British Museum chose to employ the Swedish naturalist and former student of Linnaeus, Daniel Solander (1733-1782) to reclassify the collection. Solander was ordered to devise a new system for classifying and cataloguing Sloane's natural history collection, which would allow both Linnaeans and those who followed earlier systems to access it. Solander's work was essential for allowing the British Museum to realize its aim of becoming a public centre of learning, adapting the collection to reflect the diversity of classificatory practices which were existent by the 1760s. This task engaged Solander until 1768, when he received an offer from Joseph Banks (1743-1820) to accompany him on HMS Endeavour to the Pacific.

The construction and distribution of books containing large copperplate images was of great importance to practitioners of natural history during the eighteenth century. This article examines the case of the botanist and president of the Royal Society Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820), who attempted to publish a series of images based on the botanical illustrations produced by Georg Forster (1754–94) on Cook's second voyage of exploration (1772–5) during the 1790s. The analysis reveals how the French Revolution influenced approaches to constructing and distributing works of natural history in Britain, moving beyond commercial studies of book production to show how Banks's political agenda shaped the taxonomic content and distribution of this publication. Matters were complicated by Forster's association with radical politics and the revolutionary ideologies attached to materials collected in the Pacific by the 1790s. Banks's response to the Revolution influenced the distribution of this great work, showing how British loyalist agendas interacted with scientific practice and shaped the diffusion of natural knowledge in the revolutionary age.

The library and herbarium of Joseph Banks was one of the most prominent natural history collections of late eighteenth-century Britain. The examination of the working practices used in Banks's library, which was based at 32 Soho Square from 1777, reveals the activities of the numerous individuals who worked for Banks and on his collections from the early 1770s until 1820. Banks's librarians and their assistants used a range of paper technologies to classify and catalogue the vast numbers of new botanical species being discovered at this time. These practices of managing information changed as the decades progressed, reflecting the changes to systems of classification and the different research projects of Banks and his natural history staff. Banks's great wealth and powerful position as President of the Royal Society gave him the means to build and use this rigorously organized collection and library to influence a range of other private and institutional collections for almost 50 years.On 12 July 1771, Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander disembarked from the ship Endeavour in the English port of Deal, having returned from James Cook's first voyage to the South Seas. The specimens and documents they compiled and collected, which related to hundreds of species of plants previously unknown to European natural history, formed the foundation of Banks's herbarium and library, which remained one of the largest and most prominent until Banks's death in 1820. The main aim of this article is to survey the approaches used over a 49-year period to manage this vast quantity of information, which continued to increase in size as Banks received specimens, descriptions and publications from correspondents around the globe. Over this time, the various subsections of the collection developed alongside changes in systems of classification and revisions initiated by Banks and the 11 different librarians and assistants he employed.

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