“This exciting interdisciplinary collection of essays in a competitively priced, elegant volume will appeal to academics, students, and general readers. It amply succeeds in exploring the multifarious spatial contexts and demonstrating the geographical mobility of scientific knowledge, strongly re-asserting that geographies of ‘place, space, translation, and circulation’ must be at the forefront of our understanding of nineteenth-century science and scientific culture.”

Paul Elliott, University of Derby | Journal of Historical Geography

“As a whole the volume represents an important contribution to a flourishing field in the history of science that the two editors of this collection over the last two decades have done much to develop and influence.”

Casper Andersen | British Journal for the History of Science

“Livingstone and Withers’s volume showcases the wide and fertile ground being ploughed by historical geographers, science studies scholars, and historians of science. In examining the diffuse spaces and the multiple forms of scientific knowledge, and in attending to the performative and situated character of its production and reception, Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science speaks to recent work on technologies of the self, urban studies, and the history of the book. It deserves to be read widely by scholars of the Victorian period.”

Tamson Pietsch, Brunel University | Victorian Studies

“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.”

Ron Johnston, author of Geography and Geographers

“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.”

James Moore, coauthor of Darwin’s Sacred Cause

“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.”

Felix Driver, author of Geography Militant

“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.”

Steven Shapin, author of The Scientific Life