ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |28 pages

Introduction

The Far Side of the Ocean

part Section I|68 pages

Networks of Circulation

chapter Chapter 1|21 pages

Controlling Knowledge

Navigation, Cartography, and Secrecy in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic

chapter Chapter 2|20 pages

Vers la ligne

Circulating Measurements Around the French Atlantic

chapter Chapter 3|24 pages

Knowing the Ocean

Benjamin Franklin and the Circulation of Atlantic Knowledge

part Section II|78 pages

Writing the American Book of Nature

chapter Chapter 4|28 pages

A New World of Secrets

Occult Philosophy and Local Knowledge in the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic

chapter Chapter 5|25 pages

Tropical Empiricism

Making Medical Knowledge in Colonial Brazil

chapter Chapter 6|22 pages

American Climate and the Civilization of Nature

part Section III|78 pages

Itineraries of Collection

chapter Chapter 8|22 pages

Fruitless Botany

Joseph de Jussieu’s South American Odyssey

chapter Chapter 9|28 pages

Atlantic Competitions

Botany in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire

part Section IV|80 pages

Contested Powers

chapter Chapter 10|26 pages

The Electric Machine in the American Garden

chapter Chapter 12|22 pages

Mesmerism in Saint Domingue

Occult Knowledge and Vodou on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution