Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (review)

The twelve essays in this volume are grouped into 4 sections, treating various aspects of the making of scientific knowledge in the Atlantic world in the early modern era, from around 1500 to 1800. The collection is eclectic in both approaches assumed and subjects covered, from navigation, cartography, and metrology to medicine and botany, and from discussions of occult knowledge and “Atlantic competitions” to empiricism, mesmerism, and global capitalism. Like the early modern Atlantic world, the geographic and cultural span covered by the studies is vast, including the Americas, Western Europe—especially France, England, and Spain—and their respective Caribbean colonies.

The first section, entitled “Networks of Circulation,” explores how information and knowledge circulated through various networks spanning the Atlantic, challenging the common view of knowledge flow from secrecy to dissemination and from center to periphery. Nicholas Dew offers a sophisticated treatment of metrology—a central notion in the works of actor-network theorists like Bruno Latour—as a “model for understanding the establishment of ‘universal’ (i.e. portable, durable, translatable) science out of local, particular knowledges.” (56) Focusing on Jean Richer’s seconds pendulum measurements, performed in French Guyana in the early 1670s on behalf of the French Academy of Sciences, Dew demonstrates the contingencies and difficulties involved in the transmission and validation of knowledge which originated in such a distinctly ‘foreign’ physical climate as the tropics; hence “the credibility of observations was profoundly shaped by their geography, both at the micro level of rulers and pendulum cords and at the macro level of shipping routes and destinations.” (65) Alison Sandman examines the interplay between conflicting needs to disseminate cartographic knowledge while keeping it under a veil of secrecy, as seen through a sixteenth-century Spanish controversy between cosmographers and maritime pilots over what counted as instrumental geographic knowledge of the Atlantic. Benjamin Franklin’s 3 charts of the Gulf Stream, published between 1768 and 1786, are deftly contextualized by Joyce Chaplin to show how knowledge of the Atlantic Ocean was negotiated at the crossroad of political, cultural, and practical needs and motivations.

The contributions in the second section, “Writing the American Book of Nature,” explore the production of natural knowledge by variously mobilizing the analogy between the New Science and the New World. While Ralph Bauer points to links between European occult perceptions and Amerindian native philosophies of nature, Júnia Ferreira Furtado shows how “tropical medicine” and natural history in the Portuguese-speaking world were shaped by exchanges between Portuguese medical practitioners, Native Americans, and Creolized Africans in Brazil. Jan Golinski convincingly demonstrates how American colonizers, influenced by European Enlightenment ideals of progress and social reform through environmental control, drew parallels between their attempts to ‘improve’ local weather (by clearing, draining, and planting) and the way Americans increasingly saw their weather as “the attribute of a nation that was hewing its habitat from the wilderness, slowly bringing the virgin continent under the sway of civilization.” (156)

As the editors note, the third section, “Itineraries of Collection,” emphasizes the “multiple itineraries of Atlantic travel and the unpredictability of the uses to which the collection of knowledge and specimens was put.” (18) Antonio Barrera-Osorio traces the early modern emergence of empirical practices in the Spanish-Atlantic world to the relations between artisans, merchants, and scholars in royal courts. Neil Safier’s and Daniela Bleichmar’s chapters follow the itineraries of botanical specimens and knowledge between Europe and the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The studies gathered under “Contested Powers,” the last section of the book, address attempts to control natural powers—electricity, magnetism, and the medical virtues of plants—within the context of contemporary political struggles and tensions. James Delbourgo provides an insightful analysis of Enlightenment experimental philosophy by linking it to the changing political backdrop of eighteenth-century British America, with particular focus on “electrical machines as engines both of unity and disunity around the Atlantic world, as imagined agents of imperial integration, racial differentiation, and political separation.” (258) The last 2 chapters deal with...