Producing and using the Historical Relation of Ceylon: Robert Knox, the East India Company and the Royal Society

摘要

Robert Knox's An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon was produced, pub-lished and enlarged through the collaboration of the author with scholars including RobertHooke and financial support from members of the East India Company. The Relation shouldbe seen in the context of a number of texts collected, translated or commissioned by the EastIndia Company in cooperation with the Royal Society during the late seventeenth century thatinformed and shaped both European expansion and natural philosophy. As well as circulatingbetween European intellectual centres, often reorientated in the process of translation, thesetexts served as practical guides across settlements and trading posts abroad. Comparingwritten accounts with experience led to annotations and borrowings that served as the basisfor further writings. Company records and Knox's own unpublished works reveal how theRelation was used as the basis for bio-prospecting for naturally occurring drugs and foodsources and in efforts at agricultural transplantation spanning the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.Through the reports of seamen like Knox, such experiments contributed to contemporarytheories concerning the effects of latitude on plant life.