A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America, and: Doctor Franklin’s Medicine, and: Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (review)

In recent decades, scholarship on the scientific revolution and Enlightenment studies more generally has taken a turn away from intellectual history (largely the story of the training and writings of elite groups) toward cultural studies, social history, and the history of technology and its circulation. Rather than focusing primarily on the findings of the Royal Society, scholars have excavated the stories of numerous lesser-known scientists, engineers, and “quacks” involved in experimental, technological, and human sciences, and they have articulated a range of stories that have usefully called into question the imperial narratives of the Enlightenment. Rather than speaking of one Enlightenment that moved from the center to the peripheries, these scholars have shown the extent to which so-called enlightened sciences were embraced everywhere by everyday people for everyday ends. Examining the interplay between technology and human behavior and between culture and state formation, scholars such as Roy Porter, Margaret Jacob, Stephen Shapin, Simon Schaffer, and Michael Brian Schiffer have shown that while the ideology of enlightenment was in part the province of the well-to-do intellectuals who pontificated on matters of natural philosophy, epistemology, teleology, and ontology, it was also integrally evidenced in the responses of everyday people to the wonders being elucidated by experimental science practiced and reported on in their midst.

The three books under review participate in this newer conversation about the impact of experimental science for the general population, revealing how local forms of scientific knowledge and technological knowhow assisted in creating public cultures of scientific enlightenment that eventually found (or challenged) a marketplace of knowledge-sharing and disciplinary boundary-making among the intelligentsia in England and Europe. In metropolitan centers during the seventeenth century, debates continued between experimental scientists and traditional philosophers like Cambridge divine and philosopher Henry More (1614–1687), who disliked the challenge to then-current epistemes being launched by experimental scientists and their “slibber sauce experiments.” To the charges More laid against experimental science, William Petty (whose tracts garnered him the admiration of young Benjamin Franklin) responded that “the sweetness of experimental knowledge” was far preferable to “Vaporous garlick & onions of phantasmaticall seeming philosophy.”¹

The debates about the importance of the experimental method continued through the seventeenth century, but the empirical method eventually held sway for a large swath of the population interested in improving on existing practices, whether in agriculture, astronomy, navigation, physiology, or iatrochemistry. At the time that Franklin praised Sir Francis Bacon as “a prodigious genius,” one “justly esteem’d the father of modern experimental philosophy” (quoted in Finger, Doctor Franklin’s Medicine, 10), Bacon’s methods had been embraced—and challenged, even as they were embraced—by collectors and natural philosophers in different hemispheres. Indeed, as Neil Safier points out in his essay, “Fruitless Botany: Joseph de Jussieu’s South American Odyssey” (in Delbourgo and Dew’s collection Science and Empire), Bacon’s wellknown maxims were being turned on their head: Whereas Bacon had proposed that “in situ description was to be followed by the metropolitan ordering and interpretation of natural data,” Joseph de Jussieu insisted that only those with lived experience in the field ought to be credited as scientists. “It is only by traveling, by passing through forests and fields, that one can conduct research that is useful to botany,” Jussieu insisted, in effect saying, “Live first, then philosophize” (203).

James Delbourgo, Nicholas Dew, Stanley Finger, and many of the contributors to the collection Science and Empire all point to the importance of radical enlightenment, that is, the enlightenment that took root (i.e...