Science and Empire in the Atlantic World

by Delbourgo; James

• ISBN13: 9780415961271
• ISBN10: 0415961270
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2007-10-26
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The history of science beyond Europe has traditionally been understood through heroic narratives of discovery and exploration. But in the early modern Atlantic world, it was commercial travel, back and forth across the ocean to the "New World," that made new knowledge of all kinds.Science and Empire in the Atlantic World is the first book to examine the making of scientific knowledge in the early modern Americas from a comparative and international perspective. Twelve essays from leading scholars range from the science of navigation in Seville to the creation of medical knowledge in Brazil, from experiments with electricity in British America to the practice of Mesmerism in Haiti. Connecting Atlantic history with the history of science, the chapters explore how knowledge and the colonial order were made together, through complex interactions between metropolitan travelers, Creole settlers, Amerindians, and African slaves.Re-orienting our view of knowledge's movement along the networks between center and periphery, Science and Empire in the Atlantic World shows just how challenging it was to make knowledge - and impose control - at a distance.James Delbourgo is Assistant Professor of History and Chair of History and Philosophy of Science at McGill University. He is the author of A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America.Nicholas Dew is Assistant Professor of History at McGill University, where he teaches early modern European history and history of science. He is the author of Orientalism in Louis XIV's France.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Far Side of the Ocean

Networks and Circulations

Controlling Knowledge: Navigation, Cartography, and Secrecy in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic

The Geography of Precision in the French Atlantic World

Circulations: Benjamin Franklin's Atlantic as Medium and Message

Writing the American Book of Nature

A New World of Secrets: Occult Philosophy in the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic

Tropical Empiricism: Making Medical Knowledge in Colonial

American Climate and the Civilization of Nature

Itineraries of Collection

Empiricism and Identities in the Spanish Atlantic World

Fruitless Botany: Joseph de Jussieu's South American

Atlantic Competitions: Botany in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire

Contested Powers

The Electric Machine in the American Garden

Diasporic African Sources of Enlightenment Knowledge

Mesmerism in Saint Domingue: Occult Knowledge and Voodoo on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution

Afterword: Science, Capitalism and the State

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