Imperial Nature, by Jim Endersby October 26, 2009
Posted by Christopher Donohue in EWP Book Club.Tags: Dorinda Outram, Jim Endersby, Joseph Hooker
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Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science is a study of late Victorian botany and natural history centered around the career and practices of naturalist Joseph Hooker (1817-1911). Endersby avows to be less interested in the structures or mentalities which informed Hooker’s long career in botany, ending as director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, than in “considering his material practices and the objects they involved” (312.) By analyzing practices, Endersby “sets” Hooker back “on his feet,” while previous accounts, by beginning with ideas, have stood him “on his head.” Much like Marx’s purported inversion of Hegel’s philosophy into the realm of social action and into praxis, the result of Endersby’s book, is, in many ways, as concerned with ideas as those histories he is writing against.
The practices of Victorian botany in Endersby’s narrative helps to narrate the interaction between “apparently esoteric matters, like theories of geographical distribution” and “mundane matters like the practicalities of earning a living” (313.) As importantly, an emphasis on the minutiae of daily practice, for Endersby, helps underscore how Hooker’s botanical work “remade nature in empire’s image.” Hooker, Endersby details, though only briefly visiting colonial spaces- New Zealand, Tasmania, and British India-, was keen to persuade his network of colonial botanists, whose samples his work depended upon, “that he alone knew how many species of plants their land held and what each were called” (314.)
Endersby’s discussions of taxonomy and the species question in Hooker’s writing as well as his account of Hooker’s efforts to render his botany more philosophical in response to the pressures of distinguishing himself in a crowded field depend upon the situation of Hooker in the history of ideas as well as concrete daily practices. (more…)
Chris Renwick on the History of Thinking about Science October 21, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Ashley Montagu, Charles Darwin, Chris Renwick, Patrick Geddes, Peter Dear, Steve Fuller
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Today we have the second guest post by Chris Renwick, who starting in January will be a lecturer in modern British history at the University of York.
In one way or another, most approaches to history of science share a common intellectual assumption: that science can be related to the contexts in which it is produced, even if historians can’t agree about what’s important when talking about those contexts. Indeed, such is the importance of this contextualist point that it is often seen as a crucial moment in moving history of science away from the wholly discredited study of great men and their ideas. When, though, did this shift take place and who was responsible for it?
Ever since I started out as graduate student, I’d assumed, like many others, that the effort to relate science and its contexts was originally the gift of Karl Marx and Marxism. After all, who doesn’t know the story of the letter in which Marx explained how Charles Darwin had transplanted Victorian society onto the natural world (though, for the record, the letter we always attribute to Marx was actually written by Engels) or the legend of Russian physicist Borris Hessen’s presentation on Isaac Newton to the Second International Congress of the History of Science at the Science Museum in London in 1931? However, in considering this issue recently I’ve come to the conclusion that something is missing from our understanding of the history of history of science and that it tells us something important about the intellectual trajectory of the field.
Ashley Montagu (1905-1999)
Part of what sparked my interest in this issue was a 1952 book, entitled Darwinism: Competition and Cooperation, by the British-American anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who played a leading role in the production of the famous 1950 UNESCO statement on race. In that book, Montagu argued that it wasn’t Marx or Marxists who first grasped how to relate science to its socioeconomic contexts but Patrick Geddes—the Scottish biologist, sociologist, and town planner whom I’ve spent a great deal of time studying (see pages 29 to 31 in particular). To illustrate his point, Montagu picked out a passage from Geddes’ late 1880s article on “Biology” for Chamber’s Encyclopaedia:
The substitution of Darwin for Paley as the chief interpreter of the order of nature is currently regarded as the displacement of an anthropomorphic view by a purely scientific one: a little reflection, however, will show that what has actually happened has been merely the replacement of the anthropomorphism of the eighteenth century by that of the nineteenth. For the place vacated by Paley’s theological and metaphysical explanation has simply been occupied by that suggested to Darwin and Wallace by Malthus in terms of the (more…)
Simon Schaffer and Jan Golinski on Eudiometry October 17, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Alessandro Volta, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, Felice Fontana, Jan Golinski, Joseph Priestley, Marsilio Landriani, Simon Schaffer
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Diagram of a eudiometer, from the Museo Galileo in Florence
First off, apologies for slow posting—things have been too bananas recently to indulge blog-related side interests. I’m hoping things clear up soon, but I’m presenting my research on Antarctic research at 4S here in DC at the end of the month, so things may remain at a trickle until November. However, before it got too desolate around here, I did want to parachute in and do a quick write-up on eudiometry. Our article is: Simon Schaffer, “Measuring Virtue: Eudiometry, Enlightenment, and Pneumatic Medicine” in The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, Andrew Cunningham and Roger French, eds., 1990, pp. 281-318. A close companion work is Jan Golinski’s Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820, Cambridge UP, 1992, esp. pp. 117-128. I won’t try and distinguish the two treatments here.
The technology of the eudiometer is based on Joseph Priestley’s “nitrous air test”, devised in 1772. A good explanation of the nitrous air test as well as a computer animation of how eudiometers worked are available from the Museo Galileo in Florence (for modern scientific explanation, see the animation here). The basic idea is that manufactured nitrous air (nitrogen oxide) is mixed with a sample of ambient air. Part of the mixture dissolves into water leading to a decreased volume of now-unrespirable air in the chamber, which can be measured. Priestley (1733-1804), understanding the respirability of air to be reflective of its virtue, and understanding respiration to transfer phlogiston from the body to the air, understood the remaining air to be phlogisticated by the test, and the test to be a measure of the “goodness” of the common air used.
Italian experimenters, beginning with Felice Fontana and Marsilio Landriani replicated the test, embodying it in an instrument that Landriani called a eudiometer, which taken from Greek literally means a measuring instrument of the goodness of the air. Through the (more…)
Schaffer on the Priestley Lit October 5, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, Jan Golinski, John Christie, John McEvoy, Joseph Priestley, Simon Schaffer
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Getting back to the series on Simon Schaffer, we’re going to be looking at a series of articles on Enlightenment chemistry, which will hopefully give us the opportunity to discuss Jan Golinski’s book Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820, which expressly owes a lot to Schaffer’s work, and covers a lot of the same ground. First, though, I want to backtrack to jot down a few notes about the 1984 piece, “Priestley’s Questions: An Historiographic Survey,” History of Science 22: 151-183.
Joseph Priestley
At the end of last year, we discussed Schaffer’s 1987 piece, “Priestley and the Politics of Spirit”. To recap, Schaffer was calling attention to the connections some 18th-century natural philosophers made between pneumatic and electrical phenomena and the actions of spirit, and Priestley’s desire to dissociate theological from natural philosophy. In the earlier piece, Schaffer was reviewing problems identified in the analysis of Priestley’s life and identifying historiographical strategies used to address those problems—a service that should be a much more common feature of our journals (and one also at work in his criticism of the Newton literature).
Priestley (1733-1804) was a dynamic figure of particular historiographical interest for a couple of reasons: first, he was an innovative chemical experimenter, making significant contributions to the chemistry of air that began to develop in the latter half of the 18th century, but also remaining a staunch proponent of the phlogiston theory even after most chemists accepted Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier’s chemistry of oxygen. Second, Priestley was a proponent of the Enlightenment project linking political authority to reasoned assent—a radical position at that time. Schaffer pointed out that the historiography of (more…)
Blog Watch: STS Observatory October 1, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.2 comments
A quick note to direct attention to Jon Agar’s rapid-fire series on science in 2008-2009 over at UCL’s STS Observatory. The blog was extremely quiet over the summer, so if you’re not a regular visitor, it’s worth checking back in. Essentially, Agar (who just took over editing the British Journal for the History of Science, by the way) is testing out material for the end of his new book on Science in the Twentieth Century (see his intro post here). It’s a useful exercise to see what one might imagine constitutes a snapshot of “science” at a point in time at this point in history. Early posts focused on headline-grabbers, but the last couple of posts are taking a bit more of a systematic or nuts-and-bolts approach to the subject matter.
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