There is broad agreement across a wide array of historical sub-disciplines that the period 1750-1850 was a crucial period of transition on a global scale. Following an age of European expansion and increasing global trade, these decades saw revolutionary developments in the realms of politics (e.g. the American and French Revolutions, as well as the global changes related to the rise and fall of Napoleon), science (the so-called second scientific revolution), technology (often spoken of in terms of the Industrial Revolution) and economics (variously described by authors such as Kenneth Pomeranz in terms of ‘the great divergence’ and Joel Mokyr as the ‘Industrial Enlightenment’). How are we to understand and relate these various events and transitions, which were situated in such diverse geographical and cultural locations and whose examination up until now has been parceled out to a number of relatively autonomous sub-disciplines? 

Older studies, too often based on Euro-centric and progress oriented models of development, had the benefit of claiming a universal system of analysis and measurement; world history on this count was presented as the great historical drama of civilization. Reactions against such grand narratives gave rise to a wealth of counter-tales and micro-studies that stressed indigenous practices and cultures, but rarely pointed the way toward a new synthesis. In the past few years, however, fragmented visions of cultural oppositions have begun to give way to efforts at replacing ‘old big pictures’ with new narratives of world history. But while this is just as true for political, social and cultural history as it is for the history of science, the latter has yet to be well integrated with the others. Somehow, the history of scientific knowledge production continues either to be seen as a field apart, mystified by the sense that scientific development is somehow insulated from the broader context in which it takes place, or identified as a manifestation and tool of western culture. 

Interestingly, the history of science has undergone similar methodological developments to other historical sub-disciplines in the sense that it too saw challenges to a dominant master narrative based on faith in cultural notions of universality and progress by two sorts of work. As stated above, a number of post-colonial historians constructed narratives that opposed western science (generally as a tool of domination) to systems of indigenous knowledge systems, while other historians produced micro studies that revealed much about individual cases of scientific knowledge production but said nothing about how it is that science somehow transcends its local situations in ways that at least aspire to global validity. Only recently have attempts been made to connect the local to the global and to show that, rather than simply being a tool of western domination, science is a dynamically co-evolutionary product of the encounters between representatives of various cultures. 

This workshop will examine two predominant approaches that historians of science are currently developing to bridge the gap between the local production and apparently universal character of science, both of which will not be unfamiliar to other historians: examinations of ‘contact zones’ and the concept of circulation as a vehicle of transformative production and transmission. Discussion will center on what is at stake in each, their points of overlap and whether they assume or point to any differences that need to be considered. 

More generally, this workshop has three closely related goals: 

• To bring historians of science and historians of overseas history together by discussing similar or shared historical episodes and methodological concepts.
• To develop a more nuanced understanding of the co-productive role history of science plays in the broader field of history. o To demonstrate that the history of science is not a ‘discipline apart’ – that it needs to be analyzed as a part of the larger fabric of history. Programme: 
  

Programme

• 10:00-10:30
  Registration, coffee, getting settled
• 10:30-11.15
  Lissa Roberts
  Introduction: Circulating concepts as inter-disciplinary contact zones
• 11:15-12:00
  Kapil Raj, Calcutta
  The historical geography of a contact zone 
• 12:00-12:15
  Discussion 
• Lunch (Snouck Hurgronje Huis) 
• 13:45-14:30
  Juan Pimentel
  Stars & Stones. Astronomy and Archaeology in the works of the Mexican polymath Antonio León y Gama (1735-1802)
• 14:30-14:45
  Discussion 
• 14:45-15:30
  Andreas Weber
  A kingdom and its ‘imagined’ colony? -The Malay Archipelago in the eyes of the naturalist C.G.C. Reinwardt (1773-1854)
• 15:30-15:45
  Discussion 
  
• Tea (Snouck Hurgronje Huis) 
  
• 16:00-16:15
  First commentary: Leonard Blussé, Research Institute for History, Leiden
• 16:15-16:30
  Second commentary: Harm Beukers, Scaliger Institute, Leiden 
• 16:30-17.15
  General discussion with audience 
  
• Borrel (Snouck Hurgronje Huis)
• Dinner (exclusively for speakers and commentators) 

Speakers and abstracts 

Paper I: Circulating concepts as inter-disciplinary contact zones 

Lissa Roberts, Centre for Science, Technology, Health and Policy Studies, Universiteit Twente 

This paper will introduce the workshop “Local exchanges and the global circulation of knowledge, 1750-1850” with an eye toward two goals. The first is to explore the history behind concepts such as ‘contact zones’ and ‘the circulation of knowledge’, to discuss their various meanings and consequences of employing them in historical interpretation. The second goal is to suggest ways in which practitioners of the history of science and overseas history can benefit from closer interaction and collaboration. 

Paper II: Calcutta: the historical geography of a contact zone 

Kapil Raj, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris 

While much use has been made of anthropologically-based concepts such as Mary Louise Pratt’s ‘contact zones’, most studies tend to focus on the encounters and exchanges situated in these ‘locations’. This paper takes the geographical character of the ‘zone’ seriously and explores the evolution of a specific place in terms of how its identity as a contact zone of global importance took shape. Calcutta, the subject of this paper, was created almost ex nihilo as a trading port in Bengal by the English East India Company in 1690. It soon expanded from a group of straggling mud huts to become one of the largest cities of the British Empire, the place from where British expansion into India, the Far East and the Pacific was organised. During the same period, the city also emerged as one of the world capitals of science, host to the Survey of India (1764), the first cartographic institution of the Empire, the Asiatic Society of Bengal, founded in 1784, the botanic gardens (1787) and, in 1800, the first British higher educational institution in Asia — the College of Fort William — with a budget that rivalled that of contemporary Oxford and Cambridge. As the historical geography of Calcutta unfolds, we find the notion of a contact zone transformed into that of a node in the transformative circulation of knowledge, which in turn problematizes the history of ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ as it integrates the history of science into the history of empire-building. 

Paper III: Stars & Stones. Astronomy and Archaeology in the works of the Mexican polymath Antonio León y Gama (1735-1802) 

Juan Pimentel, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Madrid 

In 1790, while remodelling the Major Square in Mexico City, workers unearthed two large monuments: the Coatlicue and the Sun Stone, two of the best Aztec archaeological pieces. Soon they become the centre of polemics in different fields, including scientific practices and history. The question of how to fit these local remains into the context of an emerging global history reflected a deeper question, that of how to match the indigenous cultures which produced them with a newly unified and increasingly western dominated world. This paper will focus on the work of Antonio León y Gama, a renowned local astronomer who was the first European to devote a serious study to these monuments and their meaning. The circulation of knowledge and contact zones will appear in various incarnations through the course of this essay. 

Paper IV: A kingdom and its ‘imagined’ colony? -The Malay Archipelago in the eyes of the naturalist C.G.C. Reinwardt (1773-1854) 

Andreas Weber, Research Institute for History, Universiteit Leiden 

In Malay Archipelago’s history, the gradual integration of European coastal settlements and local hinterland kingdoms under a new colonial state in the years 1750-1850 marks a crucial 

period of transition. This transition was paralleled by a growing awareness and subsequent exploration of the region’s inland nature and societies by European travelers and naturalists. The paper examines in detail the first exploratory project launched by the Dutch authorities in 1815, after having regained their former overseas possessions in Southeast Asia from the British. The Dutch king William I appointed the German naturalist Caspar Georg Carl Reinwardt (1773-1854), by then professor for Natural History at the University of Amsterdam, to survey the colony’s geography, nature and peoples. Besides a careful analysis of Reinwardt’s perception of the ‘contact zone’, Netherlands Indies, the paper will trace the different kinds of knowledge Reinwardt transmitted to various recipients in the colony as well as in Europe during his seven-year stay there. Whether this knowledge in circulation entirely superseded local epistemologies and whether it lead to a distorted notion of the Malay Archipelago, both is assumed by Pratt, will be discussed in the concluding remarks of the paper. 

Registration details: 

Because space is limited to 50 participants, registration is required. Workshop fee: 20 Euros (includes lunch and drink) For registration, please contact: Andreas Weber (a.weber@let.leidenuniv.nl). 

Sponsors: STeHPS (Universiteit Twente), Research Institute for History (Leiden University) Workshop 

The subscription fee can be transferred to: 44.22.87.348 (ABN Amro), c/o Universiteit Leiden, Faculteit Letteren, stating the SAP-number: 1595011120 

Deadline for registration: 

31 May 2008 

Venue: 

Snouck Hurgronje Huis

Rapenburg 61

Leiden

The Netherlands