Dan Rood, “Global History of Science/History of Global Capitalism: The State of the
Field and Future Directions.”
Recent historians of science, many of whom will be present at the conference, have
begun to question the “worldwide division of scientific labor” that is said to have
mirrored and reinforced the economic division of labor between metropole and colony.
While “raw data” could be collected outside of Europe, this argument goes, English,
French, and Swedish capitals functioned as “centers of calculation” where the true
scientific thinking was supposedly done. This neat hierarchical arrangement, however,
was always more metropolitan ideal than global reality. Scholars of the past five or ten
years have revealed, 1), how non-western or creole scientific practitioners creatively
reinterpreted authoritative European texts, offering their own divergent opinions; 2), how
anonymous knowers of nature who were often Amerindian, Afro-American, female, or
enslaved contributed to an allegedly European body of knowledge about the colonial
world; and 3), how colonial naturalists in the New World developed their own theory of
scientific practice which prioritized direct observation of natural phenomena over the
decontextualized theorizing of armchair system-builders in the metropole.
While this sort of work by colonial, global, and Atlantic historians of science has
successfully reshaped the field, the separate discipline of world history has also seen
momentous changes – changes that speak directly to the ongoing revisionist project of
many historians of science participating in our conference. Metropole/colony, global
North/global South, and East/West are unavoidable categories. Yet, in strictly economic
terms, recent world historians have emphasized that each of these dichotomous pairs
were undergoing rapid, identifiable transformations between 1750 and 1850. It seems that
the assumed geographical distributions of knowledge and power often implicitly
undergirding transnational histories of science would do well to take this revisionist
global economic history into account. If there is some relationship between empire,
capital accumulation, and scientific practice, then it seems that the latter should look
much different in 1850 than it did in 1750, considering the economic and technological
changes that so profoundly transformed the world economy during that span of time. In
this talk, I will tease out the ways that the other presenters' work speaks to the newest
questions about the relationship between global scientific practice and the “Great
Divergence” between 1750 and 1850, and suggest some ways that their scholarship might
speak to the concerns of world historians, in the hopes of sparking further discussions
that will fortify the common endeavor of our book project.