Nicholas Dew is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University, in Montréal, Québec, Canada. He is the author of Orientalism in Louis XIV's France (Oxford University Press, 2009), and the co-editor, with James Delbourgo, of Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (Routledge, 2008). Address: Department of History & Classical Studies McGill University 855 rue Sherbrooke ouest Montréal, Québec H3A 2T7 Canada
This book poses the question: before the Enlightenment, and before the imperialism of the later 1... more This book poses the question: before the Enlightenment, and before the imperialism of the later 18th century, how did European readers find out about the varied cultures of Asia? The book presents a history of Oriental studies in 17th-century France (c.1643–1715), mapping the place within the intellectual culture of the period that was given to studies of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Chinese texts, as well as writings on Mughal India. The Orientalist writers studied here, such as Melchisédech Thévenot, François Bernier, and Barthélemy D'Herbelot, produced books that would become the sources used throughout the 18th century. They are here placed in their own context as members of the ‘republic of letters’ in the age of the scientific revolution and the early Enlightenment."
"Science and Empire in the Atlantic World is the first book in the growing field of Atlantic Stud... more "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."
"It is a pleasure to welcome this collection of new essays on the changing role of science in the Atlantic World...The editors have sought to recover stories of navigation, conquest, and settlement that earlier historians have sought to simplify; and in this, they have admirably succeeded...This book will be a useful addition to the libraries of all who study science and empire." -- Roy McLeod, Isis 100 (2010) 907-8.
"Dew and Delbourgo have managed to square the circle of edited collections: bringing together a diverse set of essays to target an important historiographical issue." -- Michael Robinson, British Journal for the History of Science 42 (2009) 461-2.
"In this impressive and cleverly-organized group of essays, historians of the sciences explore the systems of negotiation, exploration, and circulation that developed in the Americas and Atlantic networks in the three centuries after European invasion and settlement. The result is a startling reorientation of familiar maps of knowledge, technique, and power. The richly documented studies make for indispensable reading." -- Simon Schaffer.
Contents
List of illustrations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: The Far Side of the Ocean
James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew 1-28
Section I Networks of Circulation 29
1 Controlling Knowledge: Navigation, Cartography, and Secrecy in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic
Alison Sandman 31-51
2 Vers la ligne: Circulating Measurements Around the French Atlantic
Nicholas Dew 53-72
3 Knowing the Ocean: Benjamin Franklin and the Circulation of Atlantic Knowledge
Joyce E. Chaplin 73-96
Section II Writing the American Book of Nature 97
4 A New World of Secrets: Occult Philosophy and Local Knowledge in the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic
Ralph Bauer 99-126
5 Tropical Empiricism: Making Medical Knowledge in Colonial Brazil
Júnia Ferreira Furtado 127-151
6 American Climate and the Civilization of Nature
Jan Golinski 153-174
Section III Itineraries of Collection 175
7 Empiricism in the Spanish Atlantic World
Antonio Barrera-Osorio 177-202
8 Fruitless Botany: Joseph de Jussieu’s South American Odyssey
Neil Safier 203-224
9 Atlantic Competitions: Botany in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire
Daniela Bleichmar 225-252
Section IV Contested Powers 253
10 The Electric Machine in the American Garden
James Delbourgo 255-280
11 Diasporic African Sources of Enlightenment Knowledge
Susan Scott Parrish 281-310
12 Mesmerism in Saint Domingue: Occult knowledge and Vodou on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution
François Regourd 311-332
Afterword: Science, Global Capitalism, and the State
Margaret C. Jacob 333-344
In Histoire des sciences et des savoirs, tome 1: De la Renaissance aux Lumières, edited by Stépha... more In Histoire des sciences et des savoirs, tome 1: De la Renaissance aux Lumières, edited by Stéphane Van Damme (Paris: Seuil, 2015), pp. 430-445.
Science in the Age of Baroque, edited by Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris, 2013
Early modern scholars and statesmen were acutely aware of the need for improved standards of meas... more Early modern scholars and statesmen were acutely aware of the need for improved standards of measurement, albeit for differing reasons. The variety of man-made units across territories and histories was, by the seventeenth century, already a sceptical commonplace, and was understood in terms of the mutability of human institutions. The late seventeenth century saw many scholars advance possible candidates for a universal standard. The most promising of these was the use of a seconds pendulum as a standard for length, a project which was actively pursued by the French Académie Royale des Sciences in the 1670s and 1680s, and remained a goal cherished by savants through the eighteenth century. This paper’s first section places the Académie’s early metrological projects in the context of the scholarly community’s ideal of a universal measurement standard, which was often expressed in ways combining political, theological, and humanistic concerns. Melchisédech Thévenot’s ludic proposal that honeycombs might be a length standard is explored as one example. The second section examines the Académie’s attempts to test the seconds pendulum as a universal length standard, by taking the missions to Uraniborg (1671) and to London (1679) as case studies in the practice of metrological work.
Although historians have long recognized the importance of long-range scientific expeditions in bo... more Although historians have long recognized the importance of long-range scientific expeditions in both the practice and culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science, it is less well understood how this form of scientific organization emerged and became established in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the late seventeenth century new European scientific institutions tried to make use of globalized trade networks for their own ends, but to do so proved difficult. This paper offers a case history of one such expedition, the voyage sponsored by the French Acade´mie royale des sciences to Gorée (in modern Senegal) and the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1681–3. The voyage of Varin, Deshayes and de Glos reveals how the process of travel itself caused problems for instruments and observers alike.
This article explores the circulation and use of travel writings within the seventeenth-century "... more This article explores the circulation and use of travel writings within the seventeenth-century "culture of curiosity", focusing on a figure at the heart of this milieu, Melchisédech Thévenot (? 1622–1692), and his edited Relations de divers voyages curieux (1663–1672). The Thévenot case reveals the importance of travel writing for the scholarly community in a period when the modern boundaries between disciplines were not yet formed, and when the nature of geographical knowledge was undergoing radical change. The collection, discussion and publication of the travel collection are shown to be part of the program of Thévenot's experimental "assembly" to investigate the "arts".
This book poses the question: before the Enlightenment, and before the imperialism of the later 1... more This book poses the question: before the Enlightenment, and before the imperialism of the later 18th century, how did European readers find out about the varied cultures of Asia? The book presents a history of Oriental studies in 17th-century France (c.1643–1715), mapping the place within the intellectual culture of the period that was given to studies of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Chinese texts, as well as writings on Mughal India. The Orientalist writers studied here, such as Melchisédech Thévenot, François Bernier, and Barthélemy D'Herbelot, produced books that would become the sources used throughout the 18th century. They are here placed in their own context as members of the ‘republic of letters’ in the age of the scientific revolution and the early Enlightenment."
"Science and Empire in the Atlantic World is the first book in the growing field of Atlantic Stud... more "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."
"It is a pleasure to welcome this collection of new essays on the changing role of science in the Atlantic World...The editors have sought to recover stories of navigation, conquest, and settlement that earlier historians have sought to simplify; and in this, they have admirably succeeded...This book will be a useful addition to the libraries of all who study science and empire." -- Roy McLeod, Isis 100 (2010) 907-8.
"Dew and Delbourgo have managed to square the circle of edited collections: bringing together a diverse set of essays to target an important historiographical issue." -- Michael Robinson, British Journal for the History of Science 42 (2009) 461-2.
"In this impressive and cleverly-organized group of essays, historians of the sciences explore the systems of negotiation, exploration, and circulation that developed in the Americas and Atlantic networks in the three centuries after European invasion and settlement. The result is a startling reorientation of familiar maps of knowledge, technique, and power. The richly documented studies make for indispensable reading." -- Simon Schaffer.
Contents
List of illustrations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: The Far Side of the Ocean
James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew 1-28
Section I Networks of Circulation 29
1 Controlling Knowledge: Navigation, Cartography, and Secrecy in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic
Alison Sandman 31-51
2 Vers la ligne: Circulating Measurements Around the French Atlantic
Nicholas Dew 53-72
3 Knowing the Ocean: Benjamin Franklin and the Circulation of Atlantic Knowledge
Joyce E. Chaplin 73-96
Section II Writing the American Book of Nature 97
4 A New World of Secrets: Occult Philosophy and Local Knowledge in the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic
Ralph Bauer 99-126
5 Tropical Empiricism: Making Medical Knowledge in Colonial Brazil
Júnia Ferreira Furtado 127-151
6 American Climate and the Civilization of Nature
Jan Golinski 153-174
Section III Itineraries of Collection 175
7 Empiricism in the Spanish Atlantic World
Antonio Barrera-Osorio 177-202
8 Fruitless Botany: Joseph de Jussieu’s South American Odyssey
Neil Safier 203-224
9 Atlantic Competitions: Botany in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire
Daniela Bleichmar 225-252
Section IV Contested Powers 253
10 The Electric Machine in the American Garden
James Delbourgo 255-280
11 Diasporic African Sources of Enlightenment Knowledge
Susan Scott Parrish 281-310
12 Mesmerism in Saint Domingue: Occult knowledge and Vodou on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution
François Regourd 311-332
Afterword: Science, Global Capitalism, and the State
Margaret C. Jacob 333-344
In Histoire des sciences et des savoirs, tome 1: De la Renaissance aux Lumières, edited by Stépha... more In Histoire des sciences et des savoirs, tome 1: De la Renaissance aux Lumières, edited by Stéphane Van Damme (Paris: Seuil, 2015), pp. 430-445.
Science in the Age of Baroque, edited by Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris, 2013
Early modern scholars and statesmen were acutely aware of the need for improved standards of meas... more Early modern scholars and statesmen were acutely aware of the need for improved standards of measurement, albeit for differing reasons. The variety of man-made units across territories and histories was, by the seventeenth century, already a sceptical commonplace, and was understood in terms of the mutability of human institutions. The late seventeenth century saw many scholars advance possible candidates for a universal standard. The most promising of these was the use of a seconds pendulum as a standard for length, a project which was actively pursued by the French Académie Royale des Sciences in the 1670s and 1680s, and remained a goal cherished by savants through the eighteenth century. This paper’s first section places the Académie’s early metrological projects in the context of the scholarly community’s ideal of a universal measurement standard, which was often expressed in ways combining political, theological, and humanistic concerns. Melchisédech Thévenot’s ludic proposal that honeycombs might be a length standard is explored as one example. The second section examines the Académie’s attempts to test the seconds pendulum as a universal length standard, by taking the missions to Uraniborg (1671) and to London (1679) as case studies in the practice of metrological work.
Although historians have long recognized the importance of long-range scientific expeditions in bo... more Although historians have long recognized the importance of long-range scientific expeditions in both the practice and culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science, it is less well understood how this form of scientific organization emerged and became established in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the late seventeenth century new European scientific institutions tried to make use of globalized trade networks for their own ends, but to do so proved difficult. This paper offers a case history of one such expedition, the voyage sponsored by the French Acade´mie royale des sciences to Gorée (in modern Senegal) and the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1681–3. The voyage of Varin, Deshayes and de Glos reveals how the process of travel itself caused problems for instruments and observers alike.
This article explores the circulation and use of travel writings within the seventeenth-century "... more This article explores the circulation and use of travel writings within the seventeenth-century "culture of curiosity", focusing on a figure at the heart of this milieu, Melchisédech Thévenot (? 1622–1692), and his edited Relations de divers voyages curieux (1663–1672). The Thévenot case reveals the importance of travel writing for the scholarly community in a period when the modern boundaries between disciplines were not yet formed, and when the nature of geographical knowledge was undergoing radical change. The collection, discussion and publication of the travel collection are shown to be part of the program of Thévenot's experimental "assembly" to investigate the "arts".
Uploads
Books by Nicholas Dew
Free Sample Chapter (Introduction): http://fds.oup.com/www.oup.com/pdf/13/9780199234844.pdf
Oxford Scholarship Online:
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/history/9780199234844/toc.html
OUP catalogue: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199234844.do
Google books: http://books.google.com/books?id=U4G7y6S-E1cC&dq
Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/Orientalism-France-Oxford-Historical-Monographs/dp/0199234841/
Contents
Introduction: Baroque Orientalism
1 Barthélemy d'Herbelot and the Place of Oriental Learning
2 "Toutes les Curiosités du Monde": The Geographic Projects of Melchisédech Thévenot
3 The Double Eclipse: François Bernier's Geography of Knowledge
4 The Making of d'Herbelot's Bibliothèque orientale
5 Printing Confucius in Paris
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
"It is a pleasure to welcome this collection of new essays on the changing role of science in the Atlantic World...The editors have sought to recover stories of navigation, conquest, and settlement that earlier historians have sought to simplify; and in this, they have admirably succeeded...This book will be a useful addition to the libraries of all who study science and empire." -- Roy McLeod, Isis 100 (2010) 907-8.
"Dew and Delbourgo have managed to square the circle of edited collections: bringing together a diverse set of essays to target an important historiographical issue." -- Michael Robinson, British Journal for the History of Science 42 (2009) 461-2.
"In this impressive and cleverly-organized group of essays, historians of the sciences explore the systems of negotiation, exploration, and circulation that developed in the Americas and Atlantic networks in the three centuries after European invasion and settlement. The result is a startling reorientation of familiar maps of knowledge, technique, and power. The richly documented studies make for indispensable reading." -- Simon Schaffer.
Contents
List of illustrations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: The Far Side of the Ocean
James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew 1-28
Section I Networks of Circulation 29
1 Controlling Knowledge: Navigation, Cartography, and Secrecy in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic
Alison Sandman 31-51
2 Vers la ligne: Circulating Measurements Around the French Atlantic
Nicholas Dew 53-72
3 Knowing the Ocean: Benjamin Franklin and the Circulation of Atlantic Knowledge
Joyce E. Chaplin 73-96
Section II Writing the American Book of Nature 97
4 A New World of Secrets: Occult Philosophy and Local Knowledge in the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic
Ralph Bauer 99-126
5 Tropical Empiricism: Making Medical Knowledge in Colonial Brazil
Júnia Ferreira Furtado 127-151
6 American Climate and the Civilization of Nature
Jan Golinski 153-174
Section III Itineraries of Collection 175
7 Empiricism in the Spanish Atlantic World
Antonio Barrera-Osorio 177-202
8 Fruitless Botany: Joseph de Jussieu’s South American Odyssey
Neil Safier 203-224
9 Atlantic Competitions: Botany in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire
Daniela Bleichmar 225-252
Section IV Contested Powers 253
10 The Electric Machine in the American Garden
James Delbourgo 255-280
11 Diasporic African Sources of Enlightenment Knowledge
Susan Scott Parrish 281-310
12 Mesmerism in Saint Domingue: Occult knowledge and Vodou on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution
François Regourd 311-332
Afterword: Science, Global Capitalism, and the State
Margaret C. Jacob 333-344
Contributors 345-348
Index 349-365
"
Articles by Nicholas Dew
Teaching Documents by Nicholas Dew
Free Sample Chapter (Introduction): http://fds.oup.com/www.oup.com/pdf/13/9780199234844.pdf
Oxford Scholarship Online:
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/history/9780199234844/toc.html
OUP catalogue: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199234844.do
Google books: http://books.google.com/books?id=U4G7y6S-E1cC&dq
Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/Orientalism-France-Oxford-Historical-Monographs/dp/0199234841/
Contents
Introduction: Baroque Orientalism
1 Barthélemy d'Herbelot and the Place of Oriental Learning
2 "Toutes les Curiosités du Monde": The Geographic Projects of Melchisédech Thévenot
3 The Double Eclipse: François Bernier's Geography of Knowledge
4 The Making of d'Herbelot's Bibliothèque orientale
5 Printing Confucius in Paris
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
"It is a pleasure to welcome this collection of new essays on the changing role of science in the Atlantic World...The editors have sought to recover stories of navigation, conquest, and settlement that earlier historians have sought to simplify; and in this, they have admirably succeeded...This book will be a useful addition to the libraries of all who study science and empire." -- Roy McLeod, Isis 100 (2010) 907-8.
"Dew and Delbourgo have managed to square the circle of edited collections: bringing together a diverse set of essays to target an important historiographical issue." -- Michael Robinson, British Journal for the History of Science 42 (2009) 461-2.
"In this impressive and cleverly-organized group of essays, historians of the sciences explore the systems of negotiation, exploration, and circulation that developed in the Americas and Atlantic networks in the three centuries after European invasion and settlement. The result is a startling reorientation of familiar maps of knowledge, technique, and power. The richly documented studies make for indispensable reading." -- Simon Schaffer.
Contents
List of illustrations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: The Far Side of the Ocean
James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew 1-28
Section I Networks of Circulation 29
1 Controlling Knowledge: Navigation, Cartography, and Secrecy in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic
Alison Sandman 31-51
2 Vers la ligne: Circulating Measurements Around the French Atlantic
Nicholas Dew 53-72
3 Knowing the Ocean: Benjamin Franklin and the Circulation of Atlantic Knowledge
Joyce E. Chaplin 73-96
Section II Writing the American Book of Nature 97
4 A New World of Secrets: Occult Philosophy and Local Knowledge in the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic
Ralph Bauer 99-126
5 Tropical Empiricism: Making Medical Knowledge in Colonial Brazil
Júnia Ferreira Furtado 127-151
6 American Climate and the Civilization of Nature
Jan Golinski 153-174
Section III Itineraries of Collection 175
7 Empiricism in the Spanish Atlantic World
Antonio Barrera-Osorio 177-202
8 Fruitless Botany: Joseph de Jussieu’s South American Odyssey
Neil Safier 203-224
9 Atlantic Competitions: Botany in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire
Daniela Bleichmar 225-252
Section IV Contested Powers 253
10 The Electric Machine in the American Garden
James Delbourgo 255-280
11 Diasporic African Sources of Enlightenment Knowledge
Susan Scott Parrish 281-310
12 Mesmerism in Saint Domingue: Occult knowledge and Vodou on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution
François Regourd 311-332
Afterword: Science, Global Capitalism, and the State
Margaret C. Jacob 333-344
Contributors 345-348
Index 349-365
"