Delbourgo and Dew, Science and Empire in the Atlantic World

Review - Delbourgo, James and Dew, Nicholas. Science and Empire in the Atlantic World. Routledge: New York, 2008. 365 pp.
Purpose:- “Taken together, these studies work against traditional national narratives of center-periphery relationships, allowing us to grasp the commonalities and contrasts among European projects to turn the Americas into a source of knowledge and power and how Creole populations in the Americas responded to and engaged with such projects....[thereby] showing just how difficult it was to make knowledge - and impose control - at a distance.”(6)
Organization/ Logic:- 12 essays, organized into four different sections spanning the years 1500-1800- Sections serve two purposes:presenting the development of Atlantic knowledge as a trans-national process‘to clarify certain themes that seem particularly fruitful for understanding the challenges inherent in making knowledge across such a vast geographical space.”(15)I: Networks of Circulation - “explores the mechanics of circulating knowledge through a variety of agents in networks spanning the Atlantic.”(15)1. Alison Sandman, “Controlling Knowledge: Navigation, Cartography, and Secrecy in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic” (31)Thesis: “the circulation of knowledge could be regarded as a veritable evil to be guarded agains in early modern competitions for global power.”(15)“struggles over defining useful maritime knowledge were struggles between different knowledge communities.” (16)Cosmographers - diplomatic information (universal)Pilots - secretive information (local)Examining the effects (rather than causes) of the secrecy of maps and geographical knowledge within the Spanish Empire, noting their general futility at efforts to restrict knowledge, due to piracy and the numerous international sailors that traveled and worked on Iberian ships2. Nicholas Dew, “Circulating Measurements around the French Atlantic”“By exploring the contingencies of journeys dependent on the preexisting networks of the triangular trade, Dew shows that Atlantic geography mattered as much at the macro-level of transport and communication as at the micro-level of experimental practice.”(16)3. Joyce E. Chaplin, “Knowing the Ocean: Benjamin Franklin and the Circulation of Atlantic Knowledgediscusses the socially constructed nature of the term “Atlantic” in reference to the body of water in question, and the relative lack of cohesion in nomenclature until the mid-eighteenth centurytracing the conceptions of the “Atlantic Ocean” during the early modern period, arguing that “Anglophone knowledge networks were less oriented towards serving imperial purposes.”(16)
II: Writing the American Book of Nature - “observers in reality wrote meanings into nature, presenting them as revealed rather than made” (17)4. Ralph Bauer, “A New World of Secrets: Occult Philosophy and Local Knowledge in the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic- Proves that “New World” was not always synonymous with “New Science,” arguing that the “New World” existed before New Science, and functioned as a “mystical system of signs and signatures, waiting to be unlocked by occult philosophers.”(17)- Analyzes the relationship between Baroque epistemology and American colonization with Walter Raleigh’s account of El Dorado- The European embrasure of occult practices and alchemy helped to relate more successfully with Amerindian cultural traditions early on in the period5. Júnia Ferreira Furtado, “Tropical Empiricism: Making Medical Knowledge in Colonial Brazil”- Examines interactions between Portuguese surgeon-barbers, Amerindians, and slaves in Brazil, arguing that these encounters created a local “‘tropical’ medicine that found its way into print for a transatlantic Lusophone audience.”(17)- Creolization of medicinal knowledge and the importance of networks and dialogue between native, European, and Creole cultures6. Jan Golinski, “American Climate and the Civilization of Nature”- “examines the connections that 18th-century British Americans... forged between climate and identity.”(17)- Traces the patriotic defenses of British-American creoles, in many ways following in the footsteps of their Spanish-American creole neighbors, rewriting the “book of American nature” by claiming to have improved their environment by new scientific and agricultural advances
III: Itineraries of Collection - “foregrounds the multiple itineraries of Atlantic travel and the unpredictability of the uses to which the collection of knowledge and specimens was put.”(18)7. Antonio Barrera-Osorio, “Empiricism in the Spanish Atlantic World”- Spain was the first to institutionalize the collection and testing of New World artifacts and natural specimens- “Understanding, organizing, and using New World nature in Spain prompted new relationships between artisans, royal officials, and scholars, and fostered a culture of experiment linking private and state interests in the economic service of the metropolis.” (18)8. Neil Safier, “Fruitless Botany: Joseph de Jussieu’s South American Odyssey”- Explores how economic botany could easily result in “thwarted knowledge” and failure.- Uses the efforts of Joseph de Jussieu as an example, in which “the price of intellectual freedom appears to have been metropolitan irrelevance.” (18)9. Daniela Bleichmar, “Atlantic Competitions: Botany in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire”- Economic botany in Spain as part of the “Bourbon reforms”- Counters Barrera-Osorio’s argument by stating that “this centripetal movement of goods and artifacts is only half of the story,” placing further emphasis on the efforts of Creole naturalists rather than purely Spanish efforts
IV: Contested Powers - “explores the pursuit of natural powers as a series of struggles for political power around the Atlantic,”(19) thereby rejecting the traditional model of “center-to-periphery” projections of power10. James Delbourgo, “The Electric Machine in the American Garden”- Explores the changing meanings of electrical machines in 18th century British America- Identifies two distinct phases: the colonial and Revolutionary11. Susan Scott Parrish, “Diasporic African Sources of Enlightenment Knowledge”- Explores “the social power at stake in botanical knowledges controlled by African slaves” (19)- The power of slaves over colonizers who feared poison by native flora - “technology of resistance”- "Europeans aimed to mobilize the physical resources and vernacular knowledge of slaves who labored in more intensive proximity to colonial landscapes than they did.”(20)12. François Regourd, “Mesmerism in Saint Domingue: Occult Knowledge and Vodou on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution”- Explores the controversies surrounding Mesmerism on Saint Domingue- “As in the British colonies described by Parrish, the inscrutability of slaves’ religious practices and natural knowledge made figures...into powerful touchstones for fears of catastrophic civil insurrection.”(20)
Themes:Importance of “Creolization”:- “the history of science in the Atlantic world cannot be understood simply as a history of scientific travel from center to periphery and back again, because many who made knowledge in this world never made any such journey.” (5)- “Making scientific knowledge in the Atlantic world was not simply a question of metropolitan travel, therefore, or even purely of commercial networks but, increasingly as time passed, one that involved the politics of empire in communications with settler populations.”(5)- Arguing agains Braudel: “The Atlantic was not the autonomous creation of heroic European men but a transformative mixing of men and women from Africa, the Americas, and Europe, the results of whose coming together no one group could predict or fashion.”(8)- “Though modern notions of race as an explanatory force in history would not be articulated before the nineteenth century, it is nonetheless significant that the practice and achievements of science were increasingly invoked to distinguish the capacities of the world’s different peoples - a globalizing perspective opened up precisely by the colonization of theaters such as the Atlantic.”(14)Importance of networks/ dialogue:- Developments such as Newtonian natural philosophy and the Linnaean classification system “were responses to global commercial networks in two important ways: they used local knowledge, such as astronomical observations, to build universal understanding of such phenomena as gravitation, and they aimed to come to terms with the variety of the world’s natural productions by constructing for them a single coherent catalogue.”(7)- Utilizing networks as categories of analysis: “Understanding the production of knowledge thus requires, above all, understanding movement: of people, things, “languages,” and above all, techniques.”(11)Globalization of knowledge:- “Natural philosphy had always made universal claims, but by the eighteenth century, the practical basis for these claims was increasingly global, fostering new confidence in the universal validity of such knowledge.”(7)Connection between science and empire:- “The question of who could speak publicly about nature in an expansionist early modern world was, moreover, one of geopolitics, not just the domestic politics of European society.” (13)- Argument mirrors in some ways Mary Louis Pratt’s analysis of empirical analysis for the sake of expansion of empire- “In the Enlightenment, science increasingly became a ceremony of benign imperial possession, enacted in Europe and abroad.”(15)- Importance of commercialization as a driving factor for the proliferation of scientific exploration rather than sheer empire aloneReconstructing the relationship between center and periphery, placing more emphasis/ agency upon the periphery- “What needs exploring, therefore, is not so much how European centers managed peripheral accumulation, as how the production of knowledge resulted from specific and sometimes quite temporary intersections with the quotidian and autonomous networks of commerce.” (11)- “Conflicts and controversies over establishing ‘true’ value across cultures can help to display the dynamics of colonial contests, expose European knowledge’s dependencies and limits, and situate it as part of a larger world-historical interaction of competing local knowledge systems.”(12)- “The American correspondents of Europeans were not servile drones but shrewd self-fashioners who sought to turn European recognition to local advantage in cultivating their status as cosmopolitan knowledge makers in the provinces and serving provincial agendas as well as metropolitan ones.”(15)
Methodology:- Avoiding the traditional “heroic narrative” that often accompanies the scientific exploits of this era- Invites her readers to examine these essays comparatively, but in the end as part of an interlocking system of dialogue between the European metropole and the American (or African) Creole periphery- Postcolonial in that the agency of the creolized populations are put on par with that of the metropolitan power
Category:Scientific Revolution