Commercial Visions
Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age
336 pages
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32 color plates, 39 halftones, 3 tables
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6 x 9
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© 2014
Entrepreneurial science is not new; business interests have strongly influenced science since the Scientific Revolution. In Commercial Visions, Dániel Margócsy illustrates that product marketing, patent litigation, and even ghostwriting pervaded natural history and medicine—the “big sciences” of the early modern era—and argues that the growth of global trade during the Dutch Golden Age gave rise to an entrepreneurial network of transnational science.
Margócsy introduces a number of natural historians, physicians, and curiosi in Amsterdam, London, St. Petersburg, and Paris who, in their efforts to boost their trade, developed modern taxonomy, invented color printing and anatomical preparation techniques, and contributed to philosophical debates on topics ranging from human anatomy to Newtonian optics. These scientific practitioners, including Frederik Ruysch and Albertus Seba, were out to do business: they produced and sold exotic curiosities, anatomical prints, preserved specimens, and atlases of natural history to customers all around the world. Margócsy reveals how their entrepreneurial rivalries transformed the scholarly world of the Republic of Letters into a competitive marketplace.
Margócsy’s highly readable and engaging book will be warmly welcomed by anyone interested in early modern science, global trade, art, and culture.
Margócsy introduces a number of natural historians, physicians, and curiosi in Amsterdam, London, St. Petersburg, and Paris who, in their efforts to boost their trade, developed modern taxonomy, invented color printing and anatomical preparation techniques, and contributed to philosophical debates on topics ranging from human anatomy to Newtonian optics. These scientific practitioners, including Frederik Ruysch and Albertus Seba, were out to do business: they produced and sold exotic curiosities, anatomical prints, preserved specimens, and atlases of natural history to customers all around the world. Margócsy reveals how their entrepreneurial rivalries transformed the scholarly world of the Republic of Letters into a competitive marketplace.
Margócsy’s highly readable and engaging book will be warmly welcomed by anyone interested in early modern science, global trade, art, and culture.
Justin Grosslight | Arts Fuse
"Commercial Visions gives us Margócsy at his best: a robust scholar who serves up delightful prose and imaginative arguments as he moves from such mundane topics as seashell taxonomy to the downright bizarre business of wheeling-and-dealing preserved cadavers. . . . By exploring his eccentric cast of characters' financial motivations, Margócsy has assumed a leading place among an upcoming generation of early modern scholars who have begun to examine--seriously and critically--economic motivations in scientific interactions."
Carla Nappi | New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
"Commercial Visions considers scientific knowledge as a commodity, looking carefully at how the growth of global trade in the Dutch Golden Age shaped anatomy and natural history as commercial practices. . . . Readers are guided on a tour through a world of seashells, forgeries, and wax-filled cadavers, evidence of a commercially-driven proliferation of ways to represent living and dead bodies and a series of heated debates about them. Commercial Visions convincingly demonstrates that paying attention to the commercial aspects of early modern science can inform how we think about early modern circulation, the history of 'objectivity,' and the concept of the public sphere."
Harold J. Cook, Brown University
“Money and science have long been connected. Scientific activity needs to be paid for, but at times it can also turn into a nice little earner. As science became more materialistic, one of the most important tools for investigation became the ability to picture phenomena. In excavating how that happened in the early stages of the Scientific Revolution, in one of the most commercialized regions of Europe, Margócsy’s book makes a major contribution to the histories of science and of art.”
Michael Sappol, author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies
“Through the front door, around the parlor, and out through the back, Commercial Visions takes readers on a Netherlandish visit to the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Scientific Revolution. Margócsy paints a richly researched portrait of the business, pleasure, and performance of the new science—and wonderfully complicates the story of the relationship between the production of knowledge and the production of profit and careers. Readers of Shapin and Schaffer and Daston and Galison will enjoy and profit from reading Commercial Visions!”
Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge
“This impressive new account of scientific entrepreneurship in early modern Amsterdam offers fresh and often challenging arguments about relations between knowledge and the global marketplace. Margócsy’s well-informed historical guidebook offers a tour of the headquarters of Dutch trade and commerce; and in so doing, it sheds an original light on how the most dramatic achievements of the period, in the knowledge of animals, plants, and the human body, were linked quite directly with the power of the market. The book subtly demonstrates how the entrepreneurial interests of Amsterdam knowledge-makers led to vicious competition, unstable patterns of publication and exchange, and a relentless struggle for market share. Using brilliantly rendered and remarkably illustrated examples of atlases, handbooks, advertisements, and models, the work represents a rare and successful attempt to link together sophisticated art history, solid economic analysis, and a fine-grained account of the roots of modern dilemmas of science, of credit, and of trust. Margócsy’s book at once establishes itself as a highly significant contribution to the debate on the role of imagery in Dutch art, the social roots of modern sciences, and the tell-tale relation between market forces and intellectual competition.”
Contents
List of Illustrations
Chapter I. Baron von Uffenbach Goes on a Trip: The Infrastructure of International Science
Chapter II. Shipping Costs, the Exchange of Specimens, and the Development of Taxonomy
Chapter III. Image as Capital: Forging Albertus Seba’s Thesaurus
Chapter IV. Anatomical Specimens in the Republic of Letters: Scientific Publications as Marketing Tools
Chapter V. Commercial Epistemologies: The Anatomical Debates of Frederik Ruysch and Govard Bidloo
Chapter VI. Knowledge as Commodity: The Invention of Color Printing
Chapter VII. Peter the Great on a Shopping Spree
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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