ABSTRACT
Empires of Knowledge charts the emergence of different kinds of scientific networks – local and long-distance, informal and institutional, religious and secular – as one of the important phenomena of the early modern world. It seeks to answer questions about what role these networks played in making knowledge, how information traveled, how it was transformed by travel, and who the brokers of this world were.
Bringing together an international group of historians of science and medicine, this book looks at the changing relationship between knowledge and community in the early modern period through case studies connecting Europe, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas. It explores a landscape of understanding (and misunderstanding) nature through examinations of well-known intelligencers such as overseas missions, trading companies, and empires while incorporating more recent scholarship on the many less prominent go-betweens, such as translators and local experts, which made these networks of knowledge vibrant and truly global institutions.
Empires of Knowledge is the perfect introduction to the global history of early modern science and medicine.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |22 pages
Introduction – Early modern scientific networks
part I|2 pages
Brokers of knowledge
chapter 2|49 pages
How information travels
chapter 4|33 pages
The early modern information factory
part II|2 pages
Configuring scientific networks
chapter 5|20 pages
Letters and questionnaires
chapter 6|24 pages
Ingenuous investigators
chapter 7|18 pages
Corresponding in war and peace
part III|2 pages
How knowledge travels
chapter 8|21 pages
Giant bones and the Taunton Stone
chapter 9|23 pages
The tarot of Yu the Great
chapter 10|25 pages
Spaces of circulation and empires of knowledge
part IV|2 pages
The local and the global
chapter 11|20 pages
Recentering centers of calculation
chapter 13|22 pages
Semedo’s sixteen secrets
part |2 pages
Epilogue