Manolis Patiniotis

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE EUROPEAN PERIPHERY: SOME HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REFLECTIONS

In less than twenty years a number of developments have dramatically reshaped much of what was considered as common (historiographical) values among members of the established communities of historians of science and technology. The intense discussions concerning a number of theoretical issues, and the subsequent re-thinking of foundational historiographical problems, took place within a context characterized by the impressive scholarship produced by a continual increase in the number of scholars working in the history of science and technology, and also in the expanded range of themes to be studied. Relevant to this was an increase in funding, the establishment of new research centres, the availability of new academic positions, the consolidation of professional bodies, and the launching of many well-funded programs. Concomitantly, the proliferation of book series together with the access to a variety of new sources, and the implementation of a multitude of projects involving the digitalization of standard archival and bibliographical collections, all played a major role in defining the contours of the professional community of historians of science and the scope of the discipline. During the same period major transformations took place in both the actual study and the institutional contexts of the history of science and technology in a number of countries of the European periphery. On the whole, the developments which took place within the more established communities of historians of science and technology Hist. Sci., xlvi (2008)

Between the Local and the Global: History of Science in the European Periphery Meets Post‐Colonial Studies

The aim of this paper is to discuss two historiographical issues pertaining to the history of science in the European periphery. The first issue concerns the wide use of the centre-periphery dichotomy in historical accounts discussing the diffusion and institutionalization of science across the world. The second issue concerns the use of appropriation (instead of transfer, or adaptation) as a means to overcome the diffusionist model in history of science. Recent work at the intersection of history of science with post-colonial studies will provide the framework for reassessing these matters. As it will be shown, theoretical discussions about the history of science in post-colonial context can help historians overcome the centre-periphery dichotomy and turn European periphery into a privileged standpoint for showing the actual diversity of ‘European science.’ At the same time, the experience of post-colonial studies can also help sharpen the historiographical tool of appropriation. The assumption that will be made is that by focusing on appropriation rather than on discovery and innovation (the favourite categories of much of mainstream historiography), or on transfer and adaptation (the favourite categories of the diffusionist model), historians of science can not only set aside the artificial distinctions of the diffusionist model, but also bring forward the re-inventions, the conceptual shifts and the cultural adjustments, which are responsible for the emergence of science as a global phenomenon in the periphery. Especially concerning European periphery, the use of appropriation may bring forward the particular historical circumstances under which certain knowledge patterns gained universal epistemic authority as constitutive elements of an imagined European intellectual identity.

Moving Localities and Creative Circulation: Travels as Knowledge Production in 18th‐Century Europe

In recent historiography of science, circulation has been widely used to weave global narratives about the history of science. These have tended to focus on flows of people, objects and practices rather than investigating the spread of universal patterns of knowledge. The approach has also, to a great extent, concentrated on colonial contexts and treated ‘European science’ as a more or less homogeneous knowledge realm. Furthermore, these studies of circulation have usually been tied to a contextualist view of knowledge formation in which locality is taken as a set of specificities linked with particular locations. In this article we redirect the focus of the discussion on circulation to Europe, and reference spaces that are often absent from other scholarly accounts. We will ground our discussion on a comparative study of three travelling actors from the European periphery through whom we will introduce the notion of ‘moving locality’ in order to depict circulation as a knowledge production process per se.

Periphery reassessed : Eugenios Voulgaris converses with Isaac Newton

In the last three decades many historians of science have sought to account for the emergence of modern science and technology in sites that did not participate in the shaping of apparently original ideas. They have extensively used a model of the transfer of scientific ideas and practices from centres of scientific activity to a passively receptive periphery. This paper contributes to the discussion of an alternative historiographic approach, one that employs the notion of appropriation to direct attention towards the receptive modes and devices of a local culture. A historiography built around the notion of appropriation deals less with the question of the faithful transfer of scientific ideas than with the particular features of the discourse produced by local scholars as the best way to overcome or conform to the constraints of the receptive culture. The case examined to describe this culturally and intellectually intricate process is the profound transformation undergone by the Newtonian concept of vis inertiae in the work of Eugenios Voulgaris (1716-1806), one of the most important Greek scholars of the eighteenth century.

Scientific Travels of the Greek Scholars in the Eighteenth Century

Unlike many other societies, which during the eighteenth century gradually found their way to a national constitution, the greater part of Greek society remained outside the borders of the Greek national state until well after its establishment in 1832. In fact, Greek society emerged from the setting of the Ottoman Empire as a result of re-stratifications and social changes which took place around various local centres of political and economic power. The eighteenth century was the crucial period during which Greek society refined its shape and produced the political and ideological conditions that, to a certain degree, led to the quest for a separate national identity. Nevertheless, this process was neither uniform nor linear. Different and often competing social groups, various economic interests and diverging political traditions worked out a network of communities which struggled to define a distinctive, though in many instances still vague, position within the context of the Ottoman Empire. It was this geographically scattered network, loosely unified on the basis of common educational and religious traditions — and not a well-defined structure with intrinsic hierarchies and reproductive mechanisms — which comprised Greek society of the period.

Eclecticism and Appropriation of the New Scientific Methods by the Greek-Speaking Scholars in the Ottoman Empire

Implicitly or explicitly, a great deal of recent historiography of science takes the distinction between scientific centers and scientific peripheries as granted. Historians who inquire into the emergence of modern science primarily focus on areas and events that gave birth to what we now consider “original” science, and confine the rest of the story to a more or less straightforward process of distribution of the sciences to areas which did not participate in the formation of the “original” theories and practices. Due to the lack of local innovation, those areas are described as importers of “new products, new technologies, new ideas” which emanated from the centers and were transferred to the periphery by means of migration.

Origins of the historiography of modern Greek science

The purpose of the paper is to examine how Greek historians account for the presence of modern scientific ideas in the intellectual environment of eighteenth-century Greek-speaking society. It will also discuss the function of the history of modern Greek science in the context of Greek national historiography. As will be shown, the history of modem Greek science spent most of its life under the shadow of the history of ideas. Despite its seemingly secondary role, however, it occupied a distinctive place within national historiography because it formed the ground upon which different perceptions of the countrys European identity converged. In this respect, one of the main goals of this paper is to outline the particular ideological presumptions, which shaped the historiography of modern Greek science under different historical circumstances. At the end an attempt will be made to articulate a viewpoint more in tandem with the recent methodological developments in the history of science.

The Sciences in the Greek Speaking Regions During the 17th and 18th Centuries

What has been known as the Scientific Revolution of the 16th, and especially the 17th century was an exclusively European phenomenon. While the social, ideological, conceptual, theological, economic, and political repercussions of the new ideas developed during the Scientific Revolution have been systematically studied within the setting of the countries where that revolution originated, only few historical works have dealt with the issues related to the introduction of these ideas to the countries in the periphery of Europe (that is, the countries of the Iberian Peninsula, the Balkans, the Eastern European and the Scandinavian countries). How did the ideas of the Scientific Revolution migrate to these countries? What were the particularities of their expression in each country? What were the specific forms of resistance to these new ideas and to what extent did they display national characteristics? What were the legitimising procedures for the acceptance of the new ways of dealing with nature? Did the discourse used by the scholars for writing and discussing scientific issues share the same features as the discourse developed by their colleagues in the countries of Western Europe? Any attempt to understand the assimilation of the ideas of the Scientific Revolution in these regions and to assess the characteristics of the resistance to such an assimilation—especially during the Enlightenment— cannot omit discussion of at least some of these questions.

Patterns of Appropriation in the Greek Intellectual Life of the 18th Century

Reception or transmission studies are not, of course, something new. There have been studies discussing the diffusion of the new ideas about nature in England, Scotland, France, the Low Countries and Germany during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many problems related to the reforms by Peter the Great in Russia have also been analyzed. There have been studies on the introduction of the new scientific ideas in Latin America. So is the case for many aspects of science in the Scandinavian countries. Furthermore, there have been many studies on the question of science, technology and imperialism. There have also been accounts of the establishment of university chairs in many countries. The introduction of modern physics in a number of countries is also well documented. The reactions to the Darwinian theory have been the subject of serious scholarship. Nevertheless, studies in languages other than the local languages for the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire, the Central European countries, the Baltic countries, Portugal, but also Spain have been very few and mostly from a philological point of view. The lack of studies for any subject by itself does not, of course, constitute a legitimate reason for starting to work on it; nevertheless, recent developments in the history of science raised many interesting historical questions to warrant an analytical discussion of these issues (Gavroglu 1999, Abartouy et al. 2001).

Greek Travelers in Eastern Europe at the End of the 18th Century: Shifting Identities and the Production of Knowledge across Borders

L’article suit l’itineraire de deux savants du xviiie siecle, Eugenios Voulgaris (1716-1806) et Marinos Harbouris (1729-1782). Tous deux sont originaires des iles Ioniennes et ont suivi des parcours similaires, dans une recherche de reussite sociale qui les a conduits a la cour de Catherine la Grande. En ce temps de vive activite intellectuelle, la quete de connaissance de ces deux hommes a joue un role significatif dans la nature de leurs mobilites. Le type de connaissance produit dans chaque cas variait et servait differents desseins, mais dans l’un comme dans l’autre, c’etait le resultat de la circulation simultanee de personnes, de traditions intellectuelles locales et, concernant Harbouris, d’ambitieux projets sur des objets materiels et des agricultures exotiques.