Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires: A Decentered View

The contributions to this volume are united by a common interest in the practices that shaped 'science' in the early modern period, with a special emphasis on the ones bred by the emulation, competition, and conflict that encounters across the globe between different cultural and political entities generated. What it attempts is not simply another contribution to the relatively recent but already respectable tradition of 'science and empire.' Rather than adding further nuance to our understanding of the routes in which the negotiations of knowledge between metropolises and provinces ultimately tended to determine the course of Europe's rise to world hegemony, or of the local dimension of western knowledge production, the volume takes a 'decentered' look at early modern empires. There are various ways in which such a 'decentering' approach is carried out in the individual contributions. All the chapters deal with European empires, but the angle from which this is pursued has been marked out by the lessons drawn from the non-Eurocentric studies referred to below. This focus is the result of both a contingency and of a state of the art: the contingency derives from the fact that most of the contributors are specialists of European empires; but, on the other side, we may acknowledge with regard to the period under consideration that historiography is still highly unbalanced. This is true not only if we compare European and non-European empires, but also if we pay attention to Europe itself, where the divide between the western and the eastern part of the continent has been overstressed by the 'great divergence' between western and eastern historiographies throughout the twentieth century. To some extent, this is one of the novelties of the volume: it builds upon an unconventional geographical set of cases, embracing the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, as well as China.

This volume takes a decentered look at early modern empires and rejects the center/periphery divide. With an unconventional geographical set of cases, including the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburg, Iberian, French and British empires, as well as China, contributors seize the spatial dynamics of the scientific enterprise.

László Kontler is a Professor at the Central European University, Hungary.

Antonella Romano is runs the Centre Koyré for History of Science, at the EHESS, France.

Silvia Sebastiani works on race in the Atlantic Enlightenment at the Centre de Recherche Historique EHESS, France.

Borbála Zsuzsanna Török is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Konstanz, Germany.

Introduction; László Kontler, Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani, and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török
PART I: NEGOTIATION OF (TRANS-)IMPERIAL PATRONAGE1. Was Astronomy the Science of Empires?: An Eighteenth-Century Debate in View of the Cases of Tycho and Galileo; Gábor Almási2. The Jesuits' Negotiation of Science between France and China (1685-1722): Knowledge and Modes of Imperial Expansion; Catherine Jami3. The Uses of Knowledge and the Symbolic Map of the Enlightened Monarcy of the Habsburgs: Maximilian Hell as Imperial and Royal Astronomer (1755-1792); László KontlerPART II: COMPETITION OF EMPIRES: A MOTOR OF CHANGE IN KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION AND AUTHENTICATION4. Capitalizing Manuscripts, Confronting Empires: Anquetil-Duperron and the Economy of Oriental Knowledge in the Context of the Seven Years' War; Stéphane Van Damme5. Contested Locations of Knowledge: The Malaspina Expedition along the Eastern Coast of Patagonia (1789); Marcelo Fabián Figueroa6. "To Round Out this Immense Country": The Circulation of Cartographic and Historiographical Knowledge from Brazil to Angola; Catarina Madeira-SantosPART III: SELF-ASSERTION OF NEW NODES OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION7. Mexico: An American Hub in the Making of European China in the Seventeenth Century; Antonella Romano8. Anthropology beyond Empires: Samuel Stanhope Smith and the Reconfiguration of the Atlantic World; Silvia Sebastiani9. Measuring the Strength of a State: Staatenkunde in Hungary around 1800; Borbála Zsuzsanna Török