Lissa L. Roberts

‘Le centre de toutes choses’: Constructing and managing centralization on the Isle de France

In their recent book The colonial machine, James McClellan III and François Regourd detail how ancien regime France’s government marshalled science in the service of colonial expansion. By focusing on the local and long distance struggles to make the Isle de France (present day Mauritius) a globally significant centre during the long eighteenth century, this essay suggests an alternative to McClellan and Regourd’s geography of metropolitan centre and colonial periphery, as well as their claim that the investigation of nature was tied to colonial expansion by state centralization. Rather than view centralization as a double process whereby a metropolitan state is able to dominate increasingly peripheral territory by concentrating power and the means of its production and management under state authority, this essay argues that centralization occurred in numerous places and involved the organization, pursuit and management of various sorts of accumulation, with geographically extensive consequences. The goal is to present centralization as historically open and multi-centred, inviting examination of both its local dynamics and long-distance entanglements from various perspectives, which in turn reveals the multi-centred dynamics of empire building and governance, including the organization and pursuit of natural inquiry.

Producing (in) Europe and Asia, 1750–1850

This essay argues for understanding and investigating the history of production, not primarily as a quantifiable economic phenomenon, but as a history of practice that involves the human senses, culture, governance, and material engagement. The vehicle it uses to make its case focuses on a brief examination of production cycles involving salts in various parts of Eurasia during the century that runs from approximately 1750 to 1850. The essay’s approach suggests a history of production in Eurasia that was both locally variegated and transregionally networked. It further involved the interaction between people and their sociomaterial environments, the latter understood as the evolving outcome of interplay between material elements and processes; culturally rooted tastes and values; and variously organized efforts to stimulate, manage, and pursue cycles of production and use. This essay further reflects on how contemporary commentators and present-day historians have (re)configured the geography of these practices in a way that emphasizes divergence between Europe and Asia. Part of this reflection involves looking at what can happen when the historical investigation of production is based on economic analysis. So too does it involve thinking about the potential pitfalls of framing comparative histories.

Water, steam and change: the roles of land drainage, water supplies and garden fountains in the early development of the steam engine

The history of the steam engine is generally linked to that of the Industrial Revolution. This article seeks to uncouple this seemingly necessary link by examining other contexts in which the steam engine was introduced and developed.

Introduction: “A More Intimate Acquaintance”

Power, transformation, promise, subjugation: terms that might easily be invoked to describe the decades between 1760 and 1840. Together they point toward the multi-faceted developments through which Europe took on its modern character and dominant position in the world – what this volume refers to as ‘compound histories’. Simultaneously linked to the Baconian dictum that ‘knowledge is power’ and the brute facts of power-driven conquest and exploitation, this period is characterized by the historical tensions through which the promise of progress and subjugation of regions and resources around the world fed off and gave rise to social, political, economic, cultural, scientific, technological and environmental transformations. It was a time marked by the interactive appearance of new, janus-faced forms of political organization, scientific and technological capabilities, social and economic configurations: the growth of democracy coupled with empire; increasing abilities to harness the material world and its forces for productive ends coupled with destructive wars and environmental degradation; opportunities for great wealth creation coupled with new strains of poverty and deprivation. It is this complex weave and the question of what binds its threads together that continue to make the ‘age of revolution’ so intriguing to historians.1 While there is certainly no single answer to this question, which requires insights drawn from multiple subdisciplines of history, the contention undergirding this volume is that one key element has been insufficiently explored and integrated into the larger picture of historical development. Rather than baldly state what that is, let us turn to a voice from the period itself. In 1805 John Playfair, Edinburgh professor of natural philosophy, wrote:

The Case of Coal

Coal plays a key role in current debates regarding both the ‘Anthropocene’ and ‘Great Divergence’. Long identified as having fueled the Industrial Revolution, coal has been celebrated and condemned for spurring material progress and productivity, global inequality and environmental degradation.1 But what is coal? While the answer might seem straightforward, recognizing that coal’s identity as a chemical substance and material resource actually evolved over time, rather than having been a priori essential, can help us better understand the history which has both shaped and been shaped by it. That is to say that the historical identity of coal evolved through a fluid amalgam of material characteristics and applications, knowledge claims, technological capabilities, market transactions and political decisions.2 By uncoupling our understanding of the past from an acceptance that materials have an essential identity, we realize that coal-powered industrialization was not historically inevitable; rather it was a complex matter of choice. This recognition, in turn, accentuates the fact that our collective future is also an open matter of choice. A partial model for considering what this rethinking entails can be found in Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political power in the age of oil.3 In the first chapter, Mitchell contrasts the “socio-technical agencies” of coal and oil, which did so much to shape politics since the nineteenth century. Briefly, coal’s extraction, transport and use depended on the workers who operated coalmines, ran the railroads and stoked coal-fueled fires. With so many workers concentrated together in locations that were crucial to the growth of industrial

Exploring global history through the lens of history of chemistry : Materials, identities and governance

As global history continues to take shape as an important field of research, its interactive relationships with the history of science, technology, and medicine are recognized and being investigated as significant areas of concern. Strangely, despite the fact that it is key to understanding so many of the subjects that are central to global history and would itself benefit from a broader geographical perspective, the history of chemistry has largely been left out of this process – particularly for the modern historical period. This article argues for the value of integrating the history of chemistry with global history, not only for understanding the past, but also for thinking about our shared present and future. Toward this end, it (1) explores the various ways in which ‘chemistry’ has and can be defined, with special attention to discussions of ‘indigenous knowledge systems’; (2) examines the benefits of organizing historical inquiry around the evolving sociomaterial identities of substances; (3) considers ways in which the concepts of ‘chemical governance’ and ‘chemical expertise’ can be expanded to match the complexities of global history, especially in relation to environmental issues, climate change, and pollution; and (4) seeks to sketch the various geographies entailed in bringing the history of chemistry together with global histories.

Accumulation and management in global historical perspective: An introduction

This essay introduces a special issue dedicated to the theme ‘accumulation and management in global historical perspective’. The concepts and practices of accumulation and management are explored in ways that work to de-center the history of science and empire. Particular attention is paid to four intertwined elements: 1) the networked location of centres of accumulation around the world; 2) (natural) knowledge as a tool, object and consequence of accumulation; 3) the complex interactions between management and governance; and 4] the geographically dispersed processes of ascribing value.

Bibliography of secondary sources

Compound Histories: Materials, Governance and Production, 1760-1840 explores the intertwined realms of production, governance and materials, placing chemists and chemistry at the center of processes most closely identified with the construction of the modern world.

The Content of the Form: Sarah Lowengard's The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe

[E]ither numerous sheets of white paper that have been stitched together in such a way that they can be filled with writing; or, a highly useful and convenient instrument constructed of printed sheets variously bound in cardboard, paper, vellum, leather, etc. for presenting the truth to another in such a way that it can be conveniently read and recognized. Many people work on this ware before it is complete and becomes an actual book in this sense. The scholar and the writer, the papermaker, the type founder, the typesetter and the printer, the proofreader, the publisher, the bookbinder, sometimes even the gilder and the brass-worker, etc. Thus many mouths are fed by this branch of manufacture.1