Abstract
This volume is the result of a long journey that started in the hills surrounding Florence during the spring of 2006. It arose from discussions, exchanges, debates, and negotiations among a group of scholars belonging to different generations and coming from a wide array of countries and intellectual training, some of us working on European topics, others on trans-Atlantic or trans-Asiatic ones. What we share is a common interest in, and inspiration from, the now sizeable literature on the practices that shaped “science” in the early modern period, with a special emphasis on the ones bred by the emulation, competition, and conflict that encounters across the globe between different cultural and political entities generated. The locations of these encounters tended to be marked out by the shifting boundaries of Europe’s colonial expansion into other continents, beginning in the sixteenth century. This literature has challenged the “diffusionist” model of the rise of modern science, understood until recently as a “European” concept.1 It has invited us to endorse a highly plastic understanding of the dynamics of negotiations between various fields of knowledge, even entire knowledge systems, and their representatives (not all of them necessarily being anointed practitioners of a recognized discipline), as a result of which “Western” science attained its character.
The authors are grateful to Stéphane Van Damme for his thoughtful comments and contributions during the process of composing this introduction.
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Notes
The classic example of such an approach is Georges G. Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science,” Science 156/3775 (1967): 611–622.
Among the seminal references, see Mary-Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992);
Lissa Roberts, ed., “Science and Global History, 1750–1850: Local Encounters and Global Circulation,” special issue of Itinerario 33/1 (2009): 7–95;
see especially Lissa Roberts, “Situating Science in Global History: Local Exchanges and Networks of Circulation,” Itinerario 33/1 (2009): 9–30.
From an extensive literature, see Roy McLeod and Philip F. Rehbock, eds., Nature in Its Greatest Extent: Western Science in the Pacific (Honolulu: U. of Hawaii P., 1988);
Patrick Petitjean, Catherine Jami, and AnneMarie Moulin, eds., Science and Empires: Historical Studies about Scientific Development and European Expansion (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992);
David Philip Miller and Peter Hans Reill, eds., Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and Representations of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1996);
Benedikt Stuchtey, ed., Science Across the European Empires, 1800–1950 (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2005);
Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and Construction of Scientific Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006);
James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, eds., Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2008).
Jack Goody, The East in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1996);
Jack Goody, Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004);
Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2006);
Jack Goody, The Eurasian Miracle (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).
With regard to the Ancients, Sabina McCormack has shown how the Spanish writings on the Inca Empire in the sixteenth century were shaped through the analytical tools offered by Roman history: On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2007). In relation to non-European models, Enlightenment philosophes were particularly interested in the alternative models offered by China or India. See also Rolando Minuti, Oriente barbarico e storiografia settecentesca. Rappresentazioni della storia dei Tartari nella cultura francese del XVIII secolo (Venice: Marsilio, 1994);
David Allen Harvey, The French Enlightenment and Its Others: The Mandarin, the Savage, and the Invention of the Human Sciences (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
See, among others, the interesting contributions by David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2000);
Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2003);
Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperialism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2005).
The best known is certainly the judgment of the empire as monstro simile in Severinus de Monzambano [Samuel von Pufendorf], De statu imperii Germanici (The Hague, 1667), bk. 6:1 and 9; modern German edition: Die Verfassung des deutschen Reiches, ed. Horst Denzer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1976). But one could also refer to Enlightenment classics, like Voltaire or Gibbon.
Maiken Umbach, Federalism and Enlightenment in Germany, 1740–1806 (London: Hambledon Press, 2000), 133–134.
Sallust seems to have spoken first of imperium Romanum referring to the Roman state; the medieval locus classicus of the idea of the “perfect community” is Aquinas’ De regimine principum, on which, see Peter A. Blunt, “Laus imperii,” in Imperialism in the Ancient World, ed. P. A. Garnsey and C. R. Whittaker (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1978), 159–191;
Anthony Pagden, “Fellow Citizens and Imperial Subjects: Conquest and Sovereignty in Europe’s Overseas Empires,” History and Theory 44/4 (2005): 32.
Joseph P. Canning, “Law, Sovereignty and Corporation Theory, 1300–1450,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–c. 1450, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1988), 465–466.
John Guy, “The Henrician Age,” in The Varieties of British Political Thought 1500–1800, ed. J. G. A. Pocock, Gordon Schochet, and Louise G. Schwoerer (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1993), 35ff.;
Graham Nicholson, “The Act of Appeals and the English Reformation,” in Law and Government under the Tudors, ed. Claire Cross, David Loades, and J. J. Scarisbrick (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1988), 19–30;
John Robertson, “Empire and Union: Two Concepts of the Early Modern European Political Order,” in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1995), 8ff.
For the formative literature on the subject, see especially Helmut G. Koenigsberger, Estates and Revolutions: Essays in Early Modern History (Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 1971);
Mark Greengrass, ed., Conquest and Coalescence: The Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe (London: Ashgate, 1991);
John H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past and Present 137/1 (1992): 48–71.
This historiographical debate has constantly been nourished by a dialogue among historians and comparisons with the ancient models of empires, the Roman Empire being the reference. See Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd, The Ambitions of Curiosity. Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2002). A very helpful term to describe the nature of the authority of the rulers of such states is “infrastructural power” (as against “absolute,” “centralized,” etc.), on which, see
Karin J. MacHardy, War, Religion and Court Patronage in Habsburg Austria: The Social and Cultural Dimensions of Political Interaction, 1521–1622 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), chap. 1.
Franz Bosbach, Monarchia Universalis. Ein politischer Leitbegriff der Frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988);
Alfred Kohler, Das Reich im Kampf um die Hegemonie in Europa 1521–1648 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1990).
Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1995).
The recent works on the nomadic states of Asia have proved to be highly stimulating in this regard, see Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2002).
Denys Lombard, Le Carrefour Javanais. Essai d’histoire globale, 3 vols. (Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1990);
Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (New York: Columbia U. P., 2012).
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Gli imperi. Dall’antichità all’età contemporanea (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009), develops the reflection into a long chronological focus on world imperial encounters and sheds light on different historical contexts, not necessarily “Eurocentered.” See, among the different contributions, the one about ancient China by Nicola Di Cosmo, “Ancient China and Its Enemies,” 93–119.
Another illuminating approach is offered by Pierre Briant, whose recent Alexandre des Lumières. Fragments d’histoire européenne (Paris: Gallimard, 2012) investigates the refashioning of Alexander the Great by the eighteenth-century European historians in close relation with their understanding of Asia.
On situatedness, see Raj, Relocating Modern Science; Kapil Raj and Mary Terrall, eds., “Circulation and Locality in Early Modern Science,” special issue of The British Journal for the History of Science, 43/4 (2010): 513–606. On connections, see Sanjay Subramanhyam, Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges (New Delhi: Oxford U. P., 2004);
Sanjay Subramanhyam, Explorations in Connected History: Mughals and Franks (New Delhi: Oxford U. P., 2004);
Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo, eds., The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Uppsala Studies in the History of Science, vol. 35) (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009). On spaces and knowledge production, see Sabina Brevaglieri and Antonella Romano, eds., “Produzione di saperi. Costruzione di spazi,” special issue, Quaderni storici 48/1 (April 2013).
To limit the references to the field of the history of science, some attempts are available in Sujit Sivasundaram, ed., “Focus: Global Histories of Science,” Isis 101/1 (2010): 95–158; Carla Nappi, “The Global and Beyond: Adventures in the Local Historiographies of Science,” Isis 104 (2013): 102–110.
Titles of travelogues including this phrase were highly rhetorical: the holistic claim implied by them was in tension with the thinness of the line of itinerary represented on the maps; Harry Liebersohn, The Traveler’s World: Europe to the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 2006).
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2000).
Goody, The Theft of History. About an Islamic perspective on history and historiography, see Aziz Al-Azmeh, The Times of History: Universal Topics in Islamic Historiography (Budapest: Central European U. P., 2007).
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2010), xi–xii.
This is why the contribution by John H. Elliot is methodologically so relevant when it comes to comparing empires, in spite of its restricted geographical coverage and Eurocentric perspective: see Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale U. P., 2006).
Christian Jacob, ed., Lieuxde, vol. 1: Espaces et communautés; vol. 2: Les mains de l’intellect (Paris: Albin Michel, 2007–2011). About the Chinese case, see Catherine Jami, The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority during the Kangxi Reign (1662–1722) (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2012).
For instance, with his claim for an “Iberian science,” Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra tends to naturalize the imperial framework, leaving outside the picture the negotiated dimensions of imperial encounters; see especially Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2006);
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2006).
For the French context, see James E. McClellan III and François Regourd, The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011).
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (first ed. 1860 in German; English trans. 1878); Jules Michelet, Histoire de la France au XVIe siècle. La Renaissance (Paris: Chamerot, 1855).
Serge Gruzinski, Les Quatre parties du monde. Histoire d’une mondialisation (Paris: Éditions de la Martinière, 2004);
Christopher A. Bayley, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
Frank Lestringant, L’Atelier du cosmographe, ou l’image du monde à la Renaissance (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991);
Jean-Marc Besse, Les grandeurs de la Terre. Aspects du savoir géographique à la Rennaissance (Paris: Ecole Normale Supérieure, 2003).
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century,” Representations 91 (2005): 26–57.
“AHR Roundtable: Historians and the Question of ‘Modernity,’” American Historical Review 116/3 (2011): 631–751; see especially Richard Wolin, “‘Modernity’: The Peregrinations of a Contested Historiographical Concept,” AHR 116/3 (2011): 741–751.
According to the sociologist Bruno Latour, “we could of course talk of ‘capital’ that is something (money, knowledge, credit, power) that has no other function but to be instantly reinvested into another cycle of accumulation…However, using this expression would be begging the question: what is capitalized is necessarily turned into capital, it does not tell us what it is—besides, the word ‘capitalism’ has had too confusing a career.” Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 1987), 223.
See also Antonella Romano and Stéphane Van Damme, “Science and World Cities: Thinking Urban Knowledge and Science at Large (16th–18th century),” Itinerario 33/1 (2009): 79–95.
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© 2014 László Kontler, Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani, and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török
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Kontler, L., Romano, A., Sebastiani, S., Török, B.Z. (2014). Introduction. In: Kontler, L., Romano, A., Sebastiani, S., Török, B.Z. (eds) Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137484017_1
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