This article explores the networking activities of Count Nikolai Rumiantsev and Adam von Krusenstern, his close collaborator. The visionary Russian statesman and the celebrated navigator were deeply involved in northern exploration. They funded and organized a circumnavigating voyage by the brigRurikin 1815–18, with the explicit goals of searching for a northern passage between Eurasia and North America and conducting a series of scientific investigations in the Bering Strait region. This private exploratory enterprise profoundly influenced the exchange of information and reconfigured (...) both local and global networks of knowledge. Based on an analysis of private correspondence, printed accounts and journal articles related to theRurik's expedition, this study sheds light on how this transnational network of actors emerged and functioned, and how it promoted a lively circulation of information about exploration in the Bering Strait region in the 1810s–1820s. I argue that a complex interplay of geopolitical and intellectual competition, with exchanges, collaborations and coordination among various actors (e.g. patrons, navigators, scholars, entrepreneurs and publishers), stimulated further research on the global ocean's northern spaces and laid the foundations of marine science. (shrink)

A frequently recounted episode in early modern medicine concerns the physician Helvetius's introduction of ipecacuanha to French medical practice after curing Louis XIV's son of dysentery using this medicinal drug. To this day, the Helvetius story remains riven with contradictions, obscurity, and confusion, even down to the nature of the drug involved. This article, challenging histories of “information” as homogeneous and neutral, explores how Helvetius's reputation as a physician and pharmaceutical entrepreneur was crafted through print and correspondence. Rather than seeking (...) to establish a definitive account of “what actually happened,” it addresses the ways in which different media shaped and mediated the politics of knowledge surrounding Helvetius and his drug. Considerations of intellectual and commercial property inflected medical knowledge in different ways, producing distinct strategies of publicity. While Helvetius capitalized on courtly connections to promote himself and his drug, rivals eyed the Republic of Letters as an alternate route for establishing natural knowledge-claims. Yet the arch-newsmonger of the Republic of Letters, Leibniz, elected to preserve the connection between Helvetius and ipecacuanha in print. I argue that Leibniz's actions stemmed from a view of the public domain that downplayed discovery and emphasized disclosure of medical secrets in the public interest. (shrink)

Following the 15th anniversary of the European Society for the History of Science (ESHS), one can definitely say that this relatively young society has come of age. Through regular meetings, a journal, a prize, fellowships and various other activities, the ESHS has been striving to create a space fostering diversity, plurality and internationalization among historians of science, located in Europe and elsewhere. This paper revisits my own research on the past of the sciences in Portugal, examining in particular the role (...) of the 18th century naturalist and diplomat Abbé Correia da Serra. As a member of an extended network of estrangeirados (Europeanized intellectuals), Correia da Serra played a decisive role in the circulation of knowledge in Europe and also in the world, a role forgotten by his peers within the time interval of a generation. This case study acts as a springboard to discuss the importance of geographical and methodological diversity in the past of the sciences in Europe. In the present historiographical predicament in which the international community finds itself, I advocate that one of the main challenges faced by the ESHS is to turn its historical gaze to Europe again, while fiercely repudiating Eurocentrism. This enables to show how much the building of the European spaces of scientific practice were never a prerogative of a few regions or a small set of countries, but, on the very contrary, took shape as the result of complex interactions between diverse spaces and cultures, not only intra-European but also non-European. (shrink)

Anglo-Swedish scholarly correspondence from the mid-eighteenth century contains repeated mentions of two merchants, Abraham Spalding and Gustavus Brander. The letters describe how these men facilitated the exchange of knowledge over the Baltic Sea and the North Sea by shipping letters, books and other scientific objects, as well as by enabling long-distance financial transactions. Through the case of Spalding and Brander, this article examines the material basis for early modern scholarly exchange. Using the concept of logistics to highlight and relate several (...) mercantile practices, it examines ways of making scholarly knowledge move, and analyses merchants’ potential motives for offering their services to scholarly communities. As logisticians in the Republic of Letters, these merchants could turn their commercial infrastructure into a generator of cultural status valid in both London and Stockholm. Using mercantile services, scholarly knowledge could in turn traverse the region in reliable, cost-effective and secure ways. The case of Spalding and Brander thus highlights how contacts between scholarly communities intersected with other contemporary modes of transnational exchange, and it shows how scholarly exchange relied on relationships based on norms different from the communalism often used to characterize the early modern Republic of Letters. Thus the article suggests new ways of studying early modern scholarly exchange in practice. (shrink)

As the royal agent for British West Florida and an avid naturalist, John Ellis, FRS, took a keen interest in both the scientific and the commercial potential of the nascent colony. This article explores how Ellis and his West Floridian correspondent Bernard Romans illuminate the social and material practices of colonial science. In particular, it builds on recent scholarship to argue that new natural knowledge about West Florida did not simply circulate in the Atlantic World, but was in fact engendered (...) by the movement of objects and ideas through the many circuits of transatlantic natural history and imperial administration. Foregrounding the Atlantic nature of such knowledge also raises questions about the limits of the categories of centre and periphery so frequently employed by historians of colonial science. Colonists such as Romans understood London to be just one centre amongst many and asserted their own epistemological claims, despite the asymmetries of power inherent to colonial science. (shrink)

This paper discusses the life and scientific work of José Vicente Barbosa du Bocage, a nineteenth-century Portuguese naturalist who carved a new place for zoological research in Portugal and built up a prestigious scientific career by securing appropriate physical and institutional spaces to the discipline. Although he was appointed professor of zoology at the Lisbon Polytechnic School, an institution mainly devoted to the preparatory training of military officers and engineers, he succeeded in creating the conditions that allowed him to develop (...) consistent research in zoology at this institution. Taking advantage of the reconstruction and further improvement of the building of the Lisbon Polytechnic, following a violent fire in 1843, Bocage transferred a natural history museum formerly located at the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon to his institution, where he conquered a more prestigious place for zoology. Although successive governments were unwilling to meet Bocage’s ambitions for the Zoological Section of the newly created National Museum of Lisbon, the collaborators he found in different parts of the Portuguese continental territory and colonial empire supplied him the specimens he needed to make a career as a naturalist. Bocage ultimately became a renowned specialist in Southwestern African fauna thanks to José de Anchieta, his finest collaborator. Travels to foreign museums, and the establishment of links with the international community of zoologists, proved fundamental to build up Bocage’s national and international scientific reputation, as it will be exemplified by the discussion of his discovery of Hyalonema, a specimen with a controversial identity collected off the Portuguese coast. (shrink)

State patronage and the role of central government in modernization are often cited as the key factors that underpin the development of science in Russia. This paper argues that the development of Russian agricultural science had predominantly local and non-governmental sources of support. Historically Russian agricultural research was funded and promoted through private patronage, but from the middle of the 19th century agricultural societies and community administrations began to sponsor research and promotion of new ideas in the agricultural sector. At (...) the end of the 19th century the majority of initiatives to set up agricultural experiment stations were undertaken on behalf of provincial agricultural societies, supported by local community administrations independent of the state bureaucratic apparatus (zemstvos). During the last two decades of the Russian Empire, agricultural societies and zemstvos became leaders in the modernization of Russian agriculture. Establishing regional experiment stations, and thus promoting development of local knowledge, they provided models for the subsequent governmental activity in this field. In the case of supporting agricultural research and institutionalizing the new discipline of scientific plant breeding, the Russian public led the state, rather than the reverse. (shrink)