Les savoirs-mondes: Mobilités et circulation des savoirs depuis le Moyen Âge ed. by Pilar González Bernaldo, Liliane Hilaire-Peréz (review)

Les savoirs-mondes is an ambitious attempt to bring a global perspective to the question of knowledge production and circulation. It grew from a colloquium held in 2011 by the Laboratoire Identités Cultures Territoires, a multidisciplinary group at Paris Diderot University that combines historians and area specialists. Founded to promote a comparative approach, here it turns that approach to the question of mobilities (including what Anglophone speakers might call modes of transportation) and the circulation of knowledge. The comparative aspect is impressive: there are thirty-eight essays whose chronology covers the medieval period to the present and whose geographical range spans five continents.

A preface by Daniel Roche places the work in the context of treating the history of knowledge through the lens of exchange. The contributions are divided into six thematic sections, with each section maintaining a high degree of chronological and geographical diversity. The first, “Between Mirrors of Princes and World Vision,” examines several texts from the pre-Islamic and Islamic East that circulated widely. The second, “The Circulation of Bodies and Sexual Knowledge,” follows the itinerant travels of hermaphrodites, anatomy collections, and female military units. Then “The Metropolitan Acclimation of Knowledge of the Far-off” examines the introduction of exotic materials, such as New World medicines in the sixteenth century, into European metropolitan centers. The fourth, “Circulation of Technical Knowledge: Territoriality Put to the Test,” takes up the issue of science and technology. The fifth, “European Cultures of Translation,” follows texts from Adam Smith, Sigmund Freud, and Israel Zangwill, and racial and judicial theories as they move between languages (and cultures). Finally, “Circulation of Knowledge and Power in the Atlantic Space” examines the movement of ideas, disciplines, methods, texts, and human experts between the Americas and Europe.

Historians of technology would be particularly interested in the fourth section, which treats the globalization of technology head-on. The introduction by Irina Gouzévitch places the works within the tradition, dating back thirty years, of applying the study of “circulations” to the history of technology. She categorizes the wide range of approaches that followed into four camps: diffusionist (focused on influence emanating from the center outward), center-periphery (focused on the point of reception), comparative (which examined both in parallel), and spatial (focused on networks and circulation). The spatial approach unites the essays, all of which treat circulation as a practice for constructing and normalizing technical knowledge. The topics range widely, including tanning, sericulture, medical practices, urban transportation, automobiles, telegraphy, telephones, radios, notary practices, and business management. In each case, the author emphasizes that movement was not unidirectional, but took place in the context of connected spaces.

While the volume’s essays are united in their participation in the spatial turn, the comparative approach allows for an in-depth examination of fine-grained detail and a focus on the concrete and material (such as Christelle Rabier’s effort to follow the circulation of medical artifacts by tracing their path from producer to consumer). The articles address both well-known paths of circulation, such as voyages of expertise, missions of promotion, professional correspondence, scientific meetings, etc. and others, such as the organization of surveys or the functioning of public services at the international level. The essays also show the importance of human actors in the movement of knowledge, bringing in not only scientists and engineers, but also less conventional actors such as tourists and missionaries, officers of the merchant marine, alumni organizations, and the representatives of international organizations.

The wide variety of approaches also reveals the fault lines of certain tensions. While many essays show the important role of the movement of people across boundaries, some also show the way certain actors (such as professional groups) refused to share knowledge, while others reveal the constraining intervention of the state, including several dictatorships...