Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires: A Decentered View (Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History)

The Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History series has three primary aims: to close divides between intellectual and cultural approaches, thus bringing them into mutually enriching interactions; to encourage interdisciplinarity in intellectual and cultural history; and to globalize the field, both in geographical scope and in subjects and methods. This series is open to work on a range of modes of intellectual inquiry, including social theory and the social sciences; the natural sciences; economic thought; literature; religion; gender and sexuality; philosophy; political and legal thought; psychology; and music and the arts. It encompasses not just North America but also Africa, Asia, Eurasia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. It includes both nationally focused studies and studies of intellectual and cultural exchanges between different nations and regions of the world, and encompasses research monographs, synthetic studies, edited collections, and broad works of reinterpretation. Regardless of methodology or geography, all books in the series are historical in the fundamental sense of undertaking rigorous contextual analysis. "The contributions to this volume are united by a common interest in the practices that shaped 'science' in the early modern period, with a special emphasis on the ones bred by the emulation, competition, and conflict that encounters across the globe between different cultural and political entities generated. What it attempts is not simply another contribution to the relatively recent but already respectable tradition of 'science and empire.' Rather than adding further nuance to our understanding of the routes in which the negotiations of knowledge between metropolises and provinces ultimately tended to determine the course of Europe's rise to world hegemony, or of the local dimension of Western knowledge production, the volume takes a 'decentered' look at early modern empires. There are various ways in which such a 'decentering' approach is carried out in the individual contributions. All the chapters deal with European empires, but the angle from which this is pursued has been marked out by the lessons drawn from the non-Eurocentric studies referred to below. This focus is the result of both a contingency and of a state of the art: the contingency derives from the fact that most of the contributors are specialists of European empires; but, on the other side, we may acknowledge with regard to the period under consideration that historiography is still highly unbalanced. This is true not only if we compare European and non-European empires, but also if we pay attention to Europe itself, where the divide between the western and the eastern part of the continent has been overstressed by the 'great divergence' between western and eastern historiographies throughout the twentieth century. To some extent, this is one of the novelties of the volume: it builds upon an unconventional geographical set of cases, embracing the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, as well as China"-- "The contributions to this volume are united by a common interest in the practices that shaped 'science' in the early modern period, with a special emphasis on the ones bred by the emulation, competition, and conflict that encounters across the globe between different cultural and political entities generated. What it attempts is not simply another contribution to the relatively recent but already respectable tradition of 'science and empire.' Rather than adding further nuance to our understanding of the routes in which the negotiations of knowledge between metropolises and provinces ultimately tended to determine the course of Europe's rise to world hegemony, or of the local dimension of western knowledge production, the volume takes a 'decentered' look at early modern empires. There are various ways in which such a 'decentering' approach is carried out in the individual contributions. All the chapters deal with European empires, but the angle from which this is pursued has been marked out by the lessons drawn from the non-Eurocentric studies referred to below. This focus is the result of both a contingency and of a state of the art: the contingency derives from the fact that most of the contributors are specialists of European empires; but, on the other side, we may acknowledge with regard to the period under consideration that historiography is still highly unbalanced. This is true not only if we compare European and non-European empires, but also if we pay attention to Europe itself, where the divide between the western and the eastern part of the continent has been overstressed by the 'great divergence' between western and eastern historiographies throughout the twentieth century"-- This volume takes a decentered look at early modern empires and rejects the center/periphery divide. With an unconventional geographical set of cases, including the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburg, Iberian, French and British empires, as well as China, contributors seize the spatial dynamics of the scientific enterprise. The contributions to this volume are united by a common interest in the practices that shaped 'science' in the early modern period, with a special emphasis on the ones bred by the emulation, competition, and conflict that encounters across the globe between different cultural and political entities generated. What it attempts is not simply another contribution to the relatively recent but already respectable tradition of 'science and empire.' Rather than adding further nuance to our understanding of the routes in which the negotiations of knowledge between metropolises and provinces ultimately tended to determine the course of Europe's rise to world hegemony, or of the local dimension of western knowledge production, the volume takes a 'decentered' look at early modern empires. There are various ways in which such a 'decentering' approach is carried out in the individual contributions. All the chapters deal with European empires, but the angle from which this is pursued has been marked out by the lessons drawn from the non-Eurocentric studies referred to below. This focus is the result of both a contingency and of a state of the art: the contingency derives from the fact that most of the contributors are specialists of European empires; but, on the other side, we may acknowledge with regard to the period under consideration that historiography is still highly unbalanced. This is true not only if we compare European and non-European empires, but also if we pay attention to Europe itself, where the divide between the western and the eastern part of the continent has been overstressed by the 'great divergence' between western and eastern historiographies throughout the twentieth century. To some extent, this is one of the novelties of the volume: it builds upon an unconventional geographical set of cases, embracing the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, as well as China Front Matter....Pages i-xiv Introduction....Pages 1-22 Front Matter....Pages 23-23 Was Astronomy the Science of Empires? An Eighteenth-Century Debate in View of the Cases of Tycho and Galileo....Pages 25-51 The Jesuits’ Negotiation of Science between France and China (1685–1722): Knowledge and Modes of Imperial Expansion....Pages 53-77 The Uses of Knowledge and the Symbolic Map of the Enlightened Monarchy of the Habsburgs: Maximilian Hell as Imperial and Royal Astronomer (1755–1792)....Pages 79-105 Front Matter....Pages 107-107 Capitalizing Manuscripts, Confronting Empires: Anquetil-Duperron and the Economy of Oriental Knowledge in the Context of the Seven Years’ War....Pages 109-128 Contested Locations of Knowledge: The Malaspina Expedition along the Eastern Coast of Patagonia (1789)....Pages 129-151 “To Round Out this Immense Country”: The Circulation of Cartographic and Historiographical Knowledge between Brazil and Angola in the Eighteenth Century....Pages 153-177 Front Matter....Pages 179-179 Mexico, an American Hub in the Making of European China in the Seventeenth Century....Pages 181-206 Anthropology beyond Empires: Samuel Stanhope Smith and the Reconfiguration of the Atlantic World....Pages 207-233 Measuring the Strength of a State: Staatenkunde in Hungary around 1800....Pages 235-261 Back Matter....Pages 263-273 Cover 1 Title 0 Copyright 7 Contents 0 List of Contributors 0 Acknowledgments 0 Introduction* 0 Part I Negotiation of (Trans-)Imperial Patronage 0 1 Was Astronomy the Science of Empires? An Eighteenth-Century Debate in View of the Cases of Tycho and Galileo 0 2 The Jesuits’ Negotiation of Science between France and China (1685–1722): Knowledge and Modes of Imperial Expansion 0 3 The Uses of Knowledge and the Symbolic Map of the Enlightened Monarchy of the Habsburgs: Maximilian Hell as Imperial and Roya 0 Part II Competition of Empires: A Motor of Change in Knowledge Acquisition and Authentication 0 4 Capitalizing Manuscripts, Confronting Empires: Anquetil-Duperron and the Economy of Oriental Knowledge in the Context of the 0 5 Contested Locations of Knowledge: The Malaspina Expedition along the Eastern Coast of Patagonia (1789)* 0 6 “To Round Out this Immense Country”: The Circulation of Cartographic and Historiographical Knowledge between Brazil and Angol 0 Part III Self-assertion of New Nodes of Knowledge Production 0 7 Mexico, an American Hub in the Making of European China in the Seventeenth Century 0 8 Anthropology beyond Empires: Samuel Stanhope Smith and the Reconfiguration of the Atlantic World 0 9 Measuring the Strength of a State: Staatenkunde in Hungary around 1800 0 Index 270