Description
Book SynopsisCompound Histories: Materials, Governance and Production, 1760-1840 offers a new view of the period during which Europe took on its modern character and globally dominant position. By exploring the intertwined realms of production, governance and materials, it places chemists and chemistry at the center of processes most closely identified with the construction of the modern world. This includes the interactive intensification of material and knowledge production; the growth and management of consumption; environmental changes, regulation of materials, markets, landscapes and societies; and practices embodied in political economy. Rather than emphasize revolutionary breaks and the primacy of innovation-driven change, the volume highlights the continuities and accumulation of incremental changes that framed historical development. Contributors are: Robert G.W. Anderson, Bernadette Bensaude Vincent, José Ramón Bertomeu Sánchez, John R.R. Christie, Joppe van Driel, Frank A.J.L. James, Christine Lehman, Lissa L. Roberts, Thomas le Roux, Elena Serrano, Anna Simmons, Marie Thébaud-Sorger, Sacha Tomic, Andreas Weber, Simon Werrett.
Trade Review"In this collection, Lissa L. Roberts and Simon Werrett propose an ambitious new agenda for examining relations between science and early industrial production, in which the centrality of chemistry is reasserted. [...] With fourteen chapters in total, the editors faced an obvious challenge of organisation, which they have met with a good measure of success. Each chapter has a well-developed introduction and conclusion, engaging with the common agenda for the volume. By articulating this agenda at length, the editors have also given a significant impulse to future research, and their comprehensive bibliography of secondary sources provides a handy resource for those investigations. - Jan Golinski (University of New Hampshire), Ambix|, 2018, 1–2, DOI 10.1080/00026980.2018.1488125. Mobilized by the environmental crisis, these historians of science are tackling a political and economic history of nitrogen, aluminum, cobalt or uranium unveiling the social, economic networks and complex policies in connection with agriculture, industry or even the consumption, and revealing geographies unpublished: in the case of aluminum, Europe in the Antilles in the nineteenth century and then to Postcolonial Ghana.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Introduction: “A More Intimate Acquaintance” Lissa Roberts and Simon Werrett Part 1: Materials and Material Objects 1 Household Oeconomy and Chemical Inquiry Simon Werrett 2 The Case of Coal Lissa Roberts and Joppe van Driel 3 Capturing the Invisible: Heat, Steam and Gases in France and Great Britain, 1750-1800 Marie Thébaud-Sorger 4 Spreading the Revolution: Guyton’s Fumigating Machine in Spain. Politics, Technology, and Material Culture (1796-1808) Elena Serrano 5 Arsenic in France. The Cultures of Poison During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century José Ramón Bertomeu Sánchez Part 2: Chemical Governance and the Governance of Chemistry 6 Relations between the State and the Chemical Industry in France, 1760-1800: The Case of Ceruse Christine Lehman 7 Between Industry and the Environment: Chemical Governance in France, 1770-1830 Thomas Le Roux 8 Renegotiating Debt: Chemical Governance and Money in the Early Nineteenth-Century Dutch Empire Andreas Weber 9 How to Govern Chemical Courses. The Case of the Paris École de pharmacie During Vauquelin’s Direction, 1803-1829 Sacha Tomic Part 3: Revisiting the History of Production 10 Teaching Chemistry in the French Revolution: Pedagogy, Materials and Politics Bernadette Bensaude Vincent 11 The Subversive Humphry Davy: Aristocracy and Establishing Chemical Research Laboratories in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century England Frank A.J.L. James 12 Wholesale Pharmaceutical Manufacturing in London, c.1760 – c.1840: Sites, Production and Networks Anna Simmons 13 Chemical Glasgow and its Entrepreneurs, 1760-1860 John R.R. Christie 14 Relations between Industry and Academe in Scotland, and the Case of Dyeing: 1760 to 1840 Robert G.W. Anderson Bibliography of Secondary Sources
