"Lisbet Koerner tells the story of one of the most famous naturalists in history, the Swedish-born botanist and systematizer Carl Linnaeus. The first scholarly biography of this great Enlightenment scientist in almost one hundred years, Linnaeus also recounts for the first time his grand and bizarre economic projects: to "teach" tea, saffron, and rice to grow on the Arctic tundra and to domesticate buffaloes, guinea pigs, and elks as Swedish farm animals.".

"Linnaeus hoped to reproduce the economy of empire and colony within the borders of his nation by growing colonial cash crops in the North. Koerner shows us the often surprising ways he embarked on this project. Her narrative goes against the grain of Linnaean scholarship old and new by analyzing not how modern Linnaeus was, but how he understood science in his day.

At the same time, his attempts to organize a state economy according to principles of science prefigured an idea that has become one of the defining features of modernity. Linnaeus will be of interest to historians of the Enlightenment, historians of economics, and historians of science."--BOOK JACKET.