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  • 9 - Visual Evidence and Narrative in Botany and War: Two Domains, One Practice

  • from III - Accessing Nature’s Narratives
  • Edited by Mary S. Morgan, London School of Economics and Political Science, Kim M. Hajek, London School of Economics and Political Science, Dominic J. Berry, London School of Economics and Political Science
  • Book:
    Narrative Science
    Published online:
    16 September 2022
    Print publication:
    06 October 2022, pp 185-205
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  • Summary

    This chapter compares work done by Hugh Hamshaw Thomas (1885–1962) in two domains. First, in palaeobotany; second, in military intelligence in the First and Second World Wars. In each, Thomas investigated landscape processes using fragmentary visual evidence: plant evolution from fossils, enemy behaviour from aerial photographs. I propose we understand the connection between those domains by drawing together two, largely separate, scholarly discussions: (i) on the construction and evidential use of photographic archives; (ii) on evidence and causal explanations in the historical sciences. Through analysis of Thomas’s palaeobotanical and military work I situate narrative as the central and unifying principle of a practice in which neither evidence collection nor explanatory accounts were prior. This unifying ‘narrative practice’ was reticulate, multi-scalar and dynamic, as revealed by contemporary figures of speech that sought to describe it (working ‘like Sherlock Holmes’, ‘reading the book of nature’, thinking ‘like a river’).