Science and Empire in the Atlantic World

by James Delbourgo (Editor), Nicholas Dew (Editor)

Science and Empire in the Atlantic World is the first book in the growing field of Atlantic Studies to examine the production of scientific knowledge in the Atlantic world from a comparative and international perspective. Rather than focusing on a specific scientific field or single national context, this collection captures the multiplicity of practices, people, languages, and agendas that characterized the traffic in knowledge around the Atlantic world, linking this knowledge to the social processes fundamental to colonialism, such as travel, trade, ethnography, and slavery.

Genres: History, History Of Science, Nonfiction

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Timothy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Drawing on the Atlantic World paradigm generated in the 1980s, this early twenty-first-century text loosely draws on the theoretical structure to pull together a series of short articles. This reading is for advanced students only, as the writers are likely to throw out terms like subaltern and to expect readers to be familiar with other such terms. Some of the essays are quite good and there is an attempt to pull things together in an afterword by Jan Golinski but overall, like most collections, the book is uneven.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of essays. Collections are often uneven, but every essay in Science and Empire had something interesting to offer. The premise is that knowledge was made and consumed in New World colonies by a melting pot of people and for New World agendas even as it was also made and consumed in European capitols of power by intellectuals and aristocrats. Topics range from botanical collecting, to medicine, mapmaking, oceanography, climatology and more. Particularly interesting, many of the papers dealt with South and Central America, and the Spanish, Portuguese and French experiences, not just British North America. Anyone interested in vernacular science would find it of interest.