Colonial Dreams: A French Botanists Encounter with Africa in the 1750s

Posted on Sat., Jan. 28, 2017

Mary Terrall, professor of the history of science at UCLA, discusses French botanist Michel Adanson, who spent almost five years in Senegal in the 1750s. Terrall reconstructs Adanson's sojourn in a French trading post, where he studied African natural history with the help of local residents.