Science and Empire in the Atlantic World / Edition 1

by James Delbourgo, Nicholas Dew

Overview

Science and Empire in the Atlantic World is the first book in the growing field of Atlantic Studies to examine the production of scientific knowledge in the Atlantic world from a comparative and international perspective. Rather than focusing on a specific scientific field or single national context, this collection captures the multiplicity of practices, people, languages, and agendas that characterized the traffic in knowledge around the Atlantic world, linking this knowledge to the social processes fundamental to colonialism, such as travel, trade, ethnography, and slavery.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415961264
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/16/2007
Series:	New Directions in American History
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

James Delbourgo is Assistant Professor of History and Chair of History and Philosophy of Science at McGill University. He is the author of A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America.

Nicholas Dew is Assistant Professor of History at McGill University, where he teaches early modern European history and history of science. He is the author of Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Far Side of the Ocean by James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew Part One: Networks and Circulations 1. Controlling Knowledge: Navigation, Cartography, and Secrecy in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic by Alison Sandman 2. The Geography of Precision in the French Atlantic World by Nicholas Dew 3. Circulations: Benjamin Franklin’s Atlantic as Medium and Message by Joyce E. Chaplin Part Two: Writing the American Book of Nature 4. A New World of Secrets: Occult Philosophy in the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic by Ralph Bauer 5. Tropical Empiricism: Making Medical Knowledge in Colonial Brazil by Júnia Ferreira Furtado 6. American Climate and the Civilization of Nature by Jan Golinski, Part Three: Itineraries of Collection 7. Empiricism and Identities in the Spanish Atlantic World by Antonio Barrera 8. Fruitless Botany: Joseph de Jussieu’s South American Odyssey by Neil Safier 9. Atlantic Competitions: Botany in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire by Daniela Bleichmar Part Four: Contested Powers 10. The Electric Machine in the American Garden by James Delbourgo 11. Diasporic African Sources of Enlightenment Knowledge by Susan Scott Parrish 12. Mesmerism in Saint Domingue: Occult Knowledge and Voodoo on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution by François Regourd Afterword: Science, Capitalism and the State by Margaret C. Jacob