One of France's colonial enterprises in the eighteenth century was to acclimatize nutmeg, native to the Maluku islands, in the French colony of Isle de France (today's Mauritius). Exploring the acclimatization of nutmeg as a practice, this paper reveals the practical challenges of transferring knowledge between Indo-Pacific islands in the second half of the eighteenth century. This essay will look at the process through which knowledge was created – including ruptures and fractures – as opposed to looking at the mere (...) circulation of knowledge. I argue that nutmeg cultivation on Isle de France was a complex process of creolizing expertise originating from the local populations of the plants’ native islands with the horticultural knowledge of colonists, settlers, labourers and slaves living on Isle de France. In this respect, creolization describes a process of knowledge production rather than a form of knowledge. Once on Isle de France, nutmeg took root in climate and soil conditions which were different from those of its native South East Asian islands. It was cultivated by slaves and colonists who lacked prior experience with the cultivation of this particular spice. Experienced horticulturalists experimented with their own traditions. While they relied on old assumptions, they also came to question them. By examining cultivation as an applied practice, this paper argues that the creolization of knowledge was a critical aspect in French colonial botany. (shrink)

One of the common characteristics of science, technology, and medicine is their ambition to epistemologically and organizationally move beyond the confines of nation states. In practice, however, they develop differently in countries or regions. Scientists, engineers, and physicians are constrained as well as enabled by national boundaries and specific cultures. The cultural status of such practices in reverse is influenced by a country's history, politics, and the view of the role of science, technology, and medicine in society. It is the (...) relation between a specific region, Scandinavia, and the history of science, technology, and medicine within this region that this issue of Science in Context sets out to explore. But what is this “Scandinavia”? To many, Scandinavia besides being a specific geographical region of three countries (Denmark, Sweden, and Norway) with entwined histories and closely related languages is a way of denoting a specific style or movement. “Scandinavian design” is renowned for three interrelated features; minimalism or simplicity, functionalism, and “design to the people” i.e. functional products for the average citizen (Beer 1975; Glambek 1997; Fallan 2012). -/- . (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

How did one man living on an island come to acquire information about the rest of the vast archipelago? This article traces the inter-island information networks of Georg Everhard Rumphius (1627–1702), an employee of the Dutch East India Company, who was able to explore the natural world of the wider archipelago without ever leaving the Moluccan island of Ambon. This article demonstrates the complexities of Rumphius's inter-island networks, as he collected information about plants and objects from islands near and far. (...) Using his administrative, commercial and household networks, Rumphius was able to interact with local actors from across the social spectrum, whose own active collection, mediation and circulation of objects and information overlapped with imperial activities in the archipelago. This article examines Rumphius as both a collector and a mediator, who negotiated between multiple economies of exchange and translated information from different islands for his distant European readership. Such practices of localized translation demonstrate how knowledge produced on one island was the product of criss-crossing inter-island networks, as the information concerned underwent its own complicated processes of transmission and transformation within the archipelago before reaching its intended audience in Europe. (shrink)

This article brings together insights from efforts to develop a global history of science and recent historical and sociological studies on the relations between science and religion. Using the case of the late Ottoman Empire as an example, it argues that ‘science and religion’ can be seen as a debate that travelled globally in the nineteenth century, generating new conceptualizations of both science and religion in many parts of the world. In their efforts to counter arguments that represented Islam as (...) the enemy of science and progress, young Ottoman intellectuals wrote many texts addressing a specific European author, or an imagined, broad European audience in the mid- to late nineteenth century. These texts described a ‘science-friendly’ Islam of which not only Europeans but also ‘ignorant Muslims’ were unaware. Using examples from the Ottoman press, the article demonstrates how this effort involved separating Islam from the lived reality of Muslims, transforming the religion essentially into a text that referred to scientific facts or that instructed adherents to appreciate science. In their contributions to the debate on science and religion, these young intellectuals thus also defined themselves as the legitimate interpreters of Islam in the ‘age of science’. (shrink)

Between 1820 and 1850, the Dutch government sent several scientists to the Netherlands Indies as part of the Natuurkundige Commissie (Natural History Committee). One of these was naturalist Eltio Alegondus Forsten (1811–1843), who was sent on a collecting mission to Celebes (Sulawesi). This paper explores the ways in which Forsten was in a relationship of mutual interdependence with four spheres of influence, two in the Netherlands (those of the Dutch government and the natural history museum in Leiden) and two in (...) the Dutch East Indies (those of the governor-general and the local population of Forsten's collecting grounds). These four entities served as focal points for Forsten's practice, and tried to use his mission for their own purposes. At the same time, Forsten negotiated their demands deftly and turned them to his own advantage in order to serve his own future career. Throughout, I draw parallels with the experiences of various other members of the Natural History Committee. I ultimately propose that this case study of Forsten provides a glimpse of a possible pattern for the relationship between government-sponsored science and empire in the Dutch East Indies in the first half of the 19th century. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show how the Greek men of science negotiated a role for their enterprise within the Greek public sphere, from the institution of the modern Greek state in the early 1830s to the first decades of the twentieth century. By focusing on instances where they appeared in public in their official capacity as scientific experts, I describe the rhetorical schemata and the narrative strategies with which Greek science experts engaged the discourses prevalent in nineteenth- (...) and early twentieth-century Greece. In the end, my goal is to show how they were neither zealots of modernization nor neutral actors struggling in isolated wastelands. Rather, they appear as energetic agents who used scientific expertise, national ideals and their privileged cultural positions to construct a rhetoric that would further all three. They engaged eagerly and consistently with emerging political views, scientific subjects and cultural and political events, without presenting themselves, or being seen, as doing anything qualitatively different from their peers abroad. Greek scientists cross-contextualized the scientific enterprise, situating it in the space in which they were active. (shrink)

This paper explores the process from museumization to decolonization through an examination of a Haida eagle mask currently on display in the Exploring Medicine gallery at the Science Museum in London. While elements of this discussion are well developed in some disciplines, such as Indigenous studies, anthropology and museum and heritage studies, this paper approaches the topic through the history of science, where decolonization and global perspectives are still gaining momentum. The aim therefore is to offer some opening perspectives and (...) methods on how historians of science can use the ideas and approaches relating to decolonization in other fields, and apply them constructively to the history of science, particularly in museum settings. Decolonization is a complicated process and the focus of this paper is squarely on the preliminary steps of its implementation. To understand this process fully, the paper will recontextualize the Indigenous history of the Haida eagle mask at the Science Museum through a careful reconstruction of its provenance record. Through this process it will expose the politics of erasure and hidden voices in museum collections. (shrink)

It is a cliché of self-help advice that there are no problems, only opportunities. The rationale and actions of the BSHS in creating its Global Digital History of Science Festival may be a rare genuine confirmation of this mantra. The global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 meant that the society's usual annual conference – like everyone else's – had to be cancelled. Once the society decided to go digital, we had a hundred days to organize and deliver our first online festival. (...) In the hope that this will help, inspire and warn colleagues around the world who are also trying to move online, we here detail the considerations, conversations and thinking behind the organizing team's decisions. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

It is a commonplace in the history of science that reputations of scientists play important roles in the stories of scientific knowledge. I argue that to fully understand these roles we should see reputations as produced by communicative acts, consider how reputations become known about, and study the factors influencing such processes. I reapply James Secord's ‘knowledge-in-transit’ approach; in addition to scientific knowledge, I also examine how ‘biographical knowledge’ of individuals is constructed through communications and shaped by communicative contexts. My (...) case study is Carl Sagan, widely discussed – amongst scientists, media professionals and publics – for his skill as a charismatic popularizer, his perceived arrogance, his political activism, and his debated merit as a researcher. By examining how aspects of Sagan's reputation circulated alongside his scientific work – rather than existing as a static context for his scientific work – I show how different forms of knowledge influence each other as they circulate. (shrink)

This Introduction offers a conceptualization of the Indo-Pacific, its islands and their place within the history of science. We argue that Indo-Pacific islands present a remarkable combination of social, political and spatial circumstances, which speak to themes that are central to the history of science. Having driven movements of people and represented staging grounds for explorations, expansions and cross-cultural exchanges, these spaces have been at the forefront of historical change. The historiographies of the two oceans have traditionally emphasized indigenous agency (...) while downplaying European historical trajectories, and therefore they provide historians of science with materials and methodologies that promise nuanced portrayals of knowledge production in cross-cultural settings. Rather than unifying the oceans into a cohesive narrative, we seek to uncover the many horizons of Indo-Pacific worlds and pluralize the spaces within which knowledge travelled at specific times, but not at others. Offering a middle plane between the globe and the region, islands are particularly productive sites for such analyses, as they bring to attention both localized kinds of agency and the impacts of colonialism and globalization. This special issue investigates what happens to knowledge within island spaces and demonstrates that even as small strips of land, islands can significantly enhance our understanding of the practices of knowledge making within the broader contours of world history. In bringing to the fore the contributions of actors from across the wider social spectrum and, especially, the interacting roles of indigenous agents and their traditions, Indo-Pacific worlds thus offer exciting new directions for a field which has often been dominated by a focus on European institutions. (shrink)

This essay explores the journeys of Andean pre-Columbian antiquities across the Americas and the Atlantic during the late nineteenth century along the veins of intellectual networks, between Andean communities and European, North American and Creole collectors and museums. Centred on the studies and collection of José Lucas Caparó Muñíz, the essay focuses on the Creole and European practice of lifting pre-Columbian objects preserved or “still” in use in Andean communities out of their context and taking them to European and Creole (...) private and public collections. Intellectual history has long paid scant attention to the many voices that its authors silenced, disfigured and suppressed. By looking at the journeys of Andean artefacts—at their owners, their brokers and their losers—this erssay traces the systemic hierarchies and the chasms of an expanding modern intellectual culture. (shrink)

The life of Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) provides an invaluable lens through which to view mid-Victorian science. A biographical approach makes it clear that some well-established narratives about this period need revising. For example, Hooker's career cannot be considered an example of the professionalisation of the sciences, given the doubtful respectability of being paid to do science and his reliance on unpaid collectors with pretensions to equal scientific and/or social status. Nor was Hooker's response to Darwin's theories either straightforward or (...) contradictory; it only makes sense as carefully crafted equivocation when seen in the context of his life and career. However, the importance of Hooker's life is ultimately its typicality; what was true of Hooker was true of many other Victorian men of science. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article adopts a historical perspective to examine the development of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine, an auxiliary field which formed to facilitate the work of the biomedical sciences by systematically improving laboratory animal production, provision, and maintenance in the post Second World War period. We investigate how Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine co-developed at the local level (responding to national needs and concerns) yet was simultaneously transnational in orientation (responding to the scientific need that knowledge, practices, objects and animals (...) circulate freely). Adapting the work of Tsing (2004), we argue that national differences provided the creative “friction” that helped drive the formation of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine as a transnational endeavor. Our analysis engages with the themes of this special issue by focusing on the development of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine in Norway, which both informed wider transnational developments and was formed by them. We show that Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine can only be properly understood from a spatial perspective; whilst it developed and was structured through national “centers,” its orientation was transnational necessitating international networks through which knowledge, practice, technologies, and animals circulated. (shrink)