Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science
- Contents
- Review Quotes
1. Thinking Geographically About Nineteenth-Century Science
CHARLES W. J. WITHERS AND DAVID N. LIVINGSTONE
Part One: Sites and Scales
2. Refashioning the Spaces of London Science: Elite Epistemes in the Nineteenth Century
BERNARD LIGHTMAN
3. The Status of Museums: Authority, Identity, and Material Culture
SAMUEL J. M. M. ALBERTI
4. Cultivating Genetics in the Country: Whittingehame Lodge, Cambridge
DONALD L. OPITZ
5. Scale and the Geographies of Civic Science: Practice and Experience in the Meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Britain and in Ireland, c. 1845–1900
CHARLES W. J. WITHERS
6. Islanded: Natural History in the British Colonization of Ceylon
SUJIT SIVASUNDARAM
Part Two: Practices and Performances
7. Placing Science in an Age of Oratory: Spaces of Scientific Speech in Mid-Victorian Edinburgh
DIARMID A. FINNEGAN
8. Politics, Culture, and Human Origins: Geographies of Reading and Reputation in Nineteenth-Century Science
DAVID N. LIVINGSTONE
9. Electricity and the Sociable Circulation of Fear and Fearlessness
GRAEME GOODAY
10. “The ‘Crinoline’ of Our Steam Engineers”: Reinventing the Marine Compound Engine, 1850–1885
CROSBIE SMITH
11. Expeditionary Science: Conflicts of Method in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Geographical Discovery
LAWRENCE DRITSAS
Part Three: Guides and Audiences
12. Pressed into Service: Specimens, Space, and Seeing in Botanical Practice
ANNE SECORD
13. Science, Print, and Crossing Borders: Importing French Science Books into Britain, 1789–1815
JONATHAN R. TOPHAM
14. Geological Mapping and the Geographies of Proprietorship in Nineteenth-Century Cornwall
SIMON NAYLOR
15. Natural History and the Victorian Tourist: From Landscapes to Rock-Pools
AILEEN FYFE
16. Place and Museum Space: The Smithsonian Institution, National Identity, and the American West, 1846–1896
SALLY GREGORY KOHLSTEDT
Afterword: Putting the Geography of Science in Its Place
NICOLAAS RUPKE
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
“Scientific practices are developed in particular places and diffused to others, which their interpretation reflects in the local context. This excellent volume of essays illustrates that argument with a fascinating range of nineteenth-century examples that more than sustain the argument that science is a form of ‘situated knowledge.’ These essays are essential reading for all interested in the when, what, and why of scientific practices; they will be left in no doubt that ‘where’ is just as important.”
“Science with a capital S barged into the nineteenth century, elbowing aside competing knowledge-claims and laying siege to the heights of Western intellectual culture. Such a transformation had not been seen for 1,500 years, since the Roman emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, and Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science is its ground-breaking gazetteer. More encyclopedia than directory, this richly detailed work, brimful of the latest scholarship, is a cornucopia of fresh insights into where today’s mighty ‘Science’ came from in the age of its first ascendancy. Chapter by chapter, abstract ‘Science’ is disaggregated into local knowledges; spaces within places and places within spaces fall into focus like the fragments of a kaleidoscope: islands and continents, cities and farms, theaters and museums, laboratories and lecture halls, tourist guides, and textbooks, even maps. Nineteenth-century scientific knowledge came into existence to be mobilized at countless such loci, then to be amended and refined elsewhere and finally forged into ‘the view from nowhere,’ the objectivity of modern ‘Science.’ As a resource for studying this manifold process, Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science has no peer.”
“A rich collection of essays by some of the leading historians and historical geographers in the field, Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science explores the diverse spatial contexts and geographical mobility of scientific knowledge during the nineteenth century. This book confirms that questions of geography—of place, space, translation, and circulation—belong at the heart of the history of science in this period.”
“The first hesitant efforts to write the geography of science addressed a point of principle: could one intelligibly say that apparently universal knowledge bore the marks of the particular places in which it was made and justified? About a quarter of a century later, the field has matured, and this more confident collection largely sets aside matters of philosophical principle in favor of a series of rich and resonant empirical inquiries about how nineteenth-century scientific knowledge traveled and how, in traveling, it was made, made authoritative, maintained, and modified. In the geography of science, these essays are state-of-the-art.”
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