Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750–1850 ed. by Patrick Manning and Daniel Rood (review)

Global history is a heavy industry nowadays. Historians have caught pace with the seemingly unstoppable late modern border-free movements of commodities, capital, and, increasingly, people, turning to the study of past exchanges and circulations on a world scale. Expanding on the hitherto predominant “local” focus, encompassing region and nation, it is becoming increasingly clear that these localities are really the nexus points of a global scope.

That the history of science has been a little slow to join the flow is not surprising. Science, the quintessential modernist global project, is often conceived as a predominantly Western or “Eurocentric” affair—its origins located in European (subsequently Anglo-American) Scientific and Industrial Revolutions and its supposed “universalism” and “objectivity” in lockstep with exploration/conquest and colonialism/imperialism, replacing peripheral indigenous cultures with techno-rationalism. Surprisingly, however, critics and celebrants of the process told the same stories. Within the historiography of science, however, this hegemonic center–periphery model is fast being replaced by one much more multidirectional, in which the accumulation of knowledge occurs through multi-dimensional circulations in the world, resulting in a “renegotiation” of the center and a challenge to its universalism. The negotiation sites are always “encounters,” involving a compromising, sharing, and reworking of knowledge and practices.

Global Scientific Practices in the Age of Revolutions focuses on a crucial period, 1750–1850, when the very parameters and objects of late-enlightenment, early-Victorian science were becoming established. It highlights the spread of the Linnaean system of ordering, classifying, and naming the natural world, and how, at its periphery, it reinterprets and often resists the center. Microscopic local case studies are the sine que non of professional historiography of science, often suffering a showy virtuosity of detail. The contributors and editors of this volume are aware of this problem. Even though the contributions are centered on such case studies—from the transport of tarantulas, hummingbirds, plant specimens, and tropical sugar to various parts of the world to such matters as Linnaean evangelicals, lost go-betweens, and even postal maps in India—each of the chapters moves perceptively from the particular to the general, offering profitable insights into how a new global history of science can be written.

Manning’s introductory methodological survey is surely one of the best overviews of developments in the field, describing the current methodological conversations between economic historians, historians of labor, environmental historians, and even philosophers of science. Jessica Ratcliff’s penultimate chapter, which integrates these strands into a genuinely global phenomenon, asks the question that haunts these and other discussions in global history of science: What caused the “great divergence” between the development of science in the so-called West and the apparent absence of it in other places? In one sense, the volume already supplies an answer in its refusal to reify the “West” and its emphasis on local events and conditions. Follow the movements closely and a global vision naturally arises.

Ratcliff, however, wants to go further by looking at the period through the concept of “big data,” with all of its uneven development and complicated managerial revolutions. This is a promising move, but does it depend too much on our received contemporary notions of “big data” and “the market,” which, in some ways, are relatively new on the ground? The British Museum, the main imperial hub of natural history in the post-Napoleonic world, made a concerted move from an acquisition policy based on aristocratic donation and patronage to a radical-infused turn to the market as source of the circulations in natural history. Moving from gift to commodity exchange had a remarkable effect on the notion of a natural object, the idea of type-specimen, and the philosophically uncertain notion of “duplicates.” The move represented a conscious effort to depart from centralized expeditions, expropriations, and collections in favor of regional, ideological, and national sources of material. But Rood, in...