The practice of early modern natural history depended on the collective collecting activities of a great variety of people. Among them, artisans played a major role in acquiring and distributing knowledge about the natural world and they contributed significantly to the scholarly labour in natural history. This distributed labour was both acknowledged by contemporaries as well as hidden from sight, reflecting the period′s dominant norms for class and gender. By combining an interpretation of the visual representation of labour in European (...) insect studies with an examination of written sources about natural history practices from about 1680 to 1810, this article decodes the often‐codified frontispieces and other more symbolic illustrations to offer new insights into the labour of natural history. Those who identified as scholars and artisans (or both) conceptualised their own intellectual and practical engagement with natural history within the semantic field of work. Some seemed to have even envisioned a new social role for academics as well as artisans. This article analyses the diversity of the “productive forces” in insect studies as they changed over time and it reconstructs what I will call the social imaginaries of participation. (shrink)

The insight that scientific theories are “practice-laden” has animated scholarship in the history of science for nearly three decades. This article examines a style of geographical thought that was, I argue, movement-laden. The thought-style in question has been described as a “vertical consciousness that engulfed science in the early nineteenth century,” and is closely associated with the geographical vision of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Humboldt’s science spanned nature’s horizontal and vertical axes, from Saxon mines to Andean summits, and from the (...) currents of the ocean to those of the aerial ocean. In probing the origins of Humboldt’s vertical thinking, this article opens up a broader history about the industrial practices and travel cultures that originally animated it. Humboldt’s “global physics” first emerged within a context of vertical travel, up mountains and into mines and caverns. Rhythms of the body—lethal for some, “sublime” for others—became rhythms of the mind. A view of nature as set of vertically complementary spaces rippled through mining culture, Romantic art, and the geographical sciences. To trace the earliest routes of Humboldt’s science is to acknowledge the many actors—some celebrated, most unsung—who took part in the making of a vertical consciousness. (shrink)

In many eighteenth‐century agricultural texts, peasants were depicted as an impediment to agrarian improvement, superstitious and resistant to novelty. That was the stereotype one often encountered, in any case, in more programmatic writing about agriculture from this period. A closer look at the era's technical literature tells a more complicated story, however. Much as traveling European naturalists relied on local intermediaries in far corners of the globe, elite agricultural improvers back home relied on local rural knowledge as they drafted a (...) new technical literature on farming. This article looks at Jacob Guyer (also known as Kleinjogg), a Swiss farmer who became an enlightened celebrity after the Zurich doctor Hans Caspar Hirzel published a biography of him in 1761. Hirzel called Kleinjogg a “philosophical farmer”; the article explores the implications of this title, and examines the various ways that elite eighteenth‐century authors used contact with rural people and direct experience of farming as a source of authority. (shrink)