“Was ist Aufklärung?” asked Immanuel Kant in 1784, and the issue has remained hotly debated ever since. Not surprisingly, therefore, if we now pose the further question “What was Enlightenment science?” the uncertainties are just as great – but here the controversies assume a different air.

Studies of the Enlightenment proper paint the Age of Reason in dramatic hues and reflect partisan viewpoints: some praise it as the seedbed of modern liberty, others condemn it as the poisoned spring of authoritarianism and alienation. Eighteenth-century science, by contrast, has typically been portrayed in more subdued tones. To most historians it lacks the heroic quality of what came before – the martyrdom of Bruno, Galileo’s titanic clash with the Vatican, the “new astronomy” and “new philosophy” of the “scientific revolution,” the sublime genius of a Descartes, Newton, or Leibniz. After that age of heroes, the eighteenth century has been chid for being dull, a trough between the peaks of the “first” and the “second” scientific revolution, a lull before the storm of the Darwin debate and the astounding breakthroughs of nineteenth-century physics. At best, dwarves were perched on giants’ shoulders. “The first half of the eighteenth century was a singularly bleak period in the history of scientific thought,” judged Stephen Mason; the age was marked, thought H. T. Pledge, by “an element of dullness,” due in part to its “too ambitious schemes” and its “obstructive crust of elaboration and formality.”

Natural history and geographical knowledge were transformed in the eighteenth century by means of the systematic analysis of virtually all the accessible parts of the planet. From the 1760s onward, the nature of voyages with a broadly scientific goal underwent a rapid evolution. Although some degree of international cooperation was necessary to achieve this change, the increasing mastery of the Pacific was overshadowed by vigorous competition in the same area among the major European powers. Recently there has been an explosion of interest in this development, in particular among scholars located on the Pacific Rim, and the great voyages of the late eighteenth century have been linked to a number of political, imperial, and commercial contexts. Ostensibly scientific missions were usually accompanied by a set of instructions regarding the discovery of either the Northwest Passage, which was supposed to offer a northern entrance into the Pacific, or of terra australis incognita, an area that since classical times had been posited as necessary to “balance” the putative excess of land in the Northern hemisphere. In this chapter I survey the major explorations of the century and analyze their broad achievements in a diversity of scientific fields such as ethnography, botany, cartography, and zoology. I argue that the scientific motives behind these forays were usually bound up with, and often inextricably part of, the strategic concerns of governments in Britain, France, Russia, and Spain.

Everyone now seems to agree that eighteenth-century industrialization was strongly associated with qualitative changes in the ways in which such formal productive inputs as fixed capital or skilled labor were combined, organized, and exploited by new agencies operating in novel physical sites. Although the analytical details for any one nation are hotly debated and the histories of different nation-states and regions are varied even within Europe itself, it is now increasingly conceded that the story of industrial modernization is at heart a story of institutions and technologies. Without informed reference to both institutional and technological features, it is no longer feasible to argue that the rise of new industries in the eighteenth century was a clear function of, say, new sources of investment funds or higher levels of demand, even when such conventional “factors” can be shown to have themselves arisen or altered or increased as a consequence of prior, prerequisite institutional and technological changes. This is not to say that anything goes. This chapter will consider the real problems of interpretation regarding the sources of technological change, the relations between scientific and technological changes and institutional innovations, and the interactions among national and even continental systems. For instance, however haphazard may have been the technological interaction between national systems, the fact that it insidiously, uncontrollably, and chaotically occurred means that a story of creativity in one place cannot in itself be the story of technological and industrial change throughout, say, Europe. How and why did novel machines or solutions move from one location to another? Are we content to define “location” only in terms of physical geography, or do we require knowledge of the social or perhaps even cultural siting of new technologies?

Writing in 1855, of the period now known as the Enlightenment, the Scottish Whig Henry Brougham commented that “the science of chemistry [was] almost entirely…the growth of this remarkable era.” One hundred years later, the British historian Herbert Butterfield, renowned for his critique of the Whig interpretation of history, issued a much more negative judgment of the chemistry of the Enlightenment. In his Origins of Modern Science (1949), Butterfield notoriously relegated eighteenth-century chemistry to a kind of limbo, where it was awaiting its “postponed scientific revolution,” which arrived only in the last two decades of the century with the work of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794). Enlightenment chemistry had been “immature,” hindered by philosophical confusions and the absence of an adequate intellectual framework. The difference of opinion between Brougham and Butterfield has an intriguing connection with their divergent political outlooks. Whereas the Whig writer saw a lengthy period of gradual progress, culminating in Lavoisier’s individual accomplishments, the anti-Whig historian saw the French chemist as the first person with true insight into the fundamental ideas of the science, a beacon in an otherwise dark landscape of confusion and error.

The perspectives of Whiggism and anti-Whiggism have continued to dominate much of the historical writing on the sciences of the eighteenth century, not least chemistry. Whiggish historians have looked to catalog specific and permanent factual discoveries – steadily accumulating positive knowledge – such as findings of new gases, mineral species, and salts. Butterfield’s anti-Whiggism reflected the approach of Alexandre Koyré and, before him, the tradition of philosophical history derived from Immanuel Kant, which searched for organizing intellectual schemes, worldviews, Weltanschauungen, or paradigms.

Illustration emerges from complex and diverse motives. The portrayal of an objective reality may seem to lie at its heart, but there may be other, subtle factors at work. Preconception, for example, guides many an illustrator’s hand. A wish to project known realities onto nascent concepts distorts reality in its own ways, and the process of transmuting the subtle realism of Nature into an engraver’s line imposes constraints and conventions of its own.

There is a general principle in artwork, often unrecognized: the culture of each era dictates its own arbitrary realities. Our experience of this is largely intuitive, but it explains why we can relate a specific image (a saint from a thirteenth-century psalter or the countenance of the Statue of Liberty) more easily to the time it was produced than to the identity of the artist or the name of the subject. In just this way, a scientific illustration is a mirror of contemporaneous preoccupations and a clue to current prejudice. It is more than a didactic symbol. Some illustrations create, and then perpetuate, icons that transcend reality and provide a synthesized convention that passes from one generation of books to the next. These icons are created for textbooks, and they populate their pages as decorative features that do little to reveal reality.

Early in the century, François Legaut’s Voyages et Aventures (1708) featured a rhinoceros with a second horn projecting forward from its brow. This structure is never found in life. Why should it be featured in an eighteenth-century illustrated textbook? The first published study of a rhinoceros (made by Albrecht Dürer in 1515), although powerful and otherwise realistic, boasts a small secondary horn on the shoulders, which projects forward. The image was repeatedly plagiarized and – with each generation of copying – this imaginary forward-projecting second horn increased in size. By the time it was included in Legaut’s book, the imaginary horn was equal in size to the real one.

Kant’s sentiments reiterated those of the great Carl Linnaeus, who taught in his lectures given at the University of Uppsala in the 1740s that “God gave men beards for ornaments and to distinguish them from women.” In the eighteenth century the presence or absence of a beard not only drew a sharp line between men and women but also served to differentiate the varieties of men. Women, black men (to a certain extent), and especially men of the Americas simply lacked that masculine “badge of honor” – the philosopher’s beard. As Europe shifted from an estates society to a presumed democratic order, sexual characteristics took on new meaning in determining who would and who would not do science.

INSTITUTIONAL LANDSCAPES

The new sciences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were fostered in a landscape – including universities, academies, princely courts, noble networks, and artisanal workshops – that was expansive enough to include a number of women. In the sustained negotiations over gender boundaries in early modern Europe, it was not at all obvious that women would be excluded from science.

During the eighteenth century, men and women of letters throughout the Atlantic world repeatedly celebrated the revolution they had witnessed in all the many branches of philosophy. Drawing on the rhetoric and historical vision of those who had championed the achievements of the “new science” of the seventeenth century, apologists for the Enlightenment claimed that humankind had finally been able to progress far beyond the narrow intellectual horizons of antiquity and the “dark ages” thanks to the new methods of inquiry forged by Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), René Descartes (1596–1650), John Locke (1632–1704), and Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727). In this heroic reading of the genesis of modernity, Bacon was cast as the father of the experimental method, and Descartes played the tragic role of the flawed genius who used reason to liberate humankind from the shackles of scholasticism only to foist yet another false system of philosophy on the learned world. Locke was assigned the part of the humble reformer of metaphysics, who replaced meaningless verbal disputes with the patient empirical investigation of the mechanisms of mind and language and who carefully mapped the limits of human knowledge. But to the siècle des lumières it was Newton – apostrophized in Alexander Pope’s (1688–1744) couplet, “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night./GOD said, Let Newton be! and all was Light.” – who towered above the other founders of the Enlightenment. Not only had Newton divined the secrets of Nature by demonstrating that his theory of universal gravitation explained the motions of both celestial and terrestrial bodies, but he had also taught the salutary lesson that philosophers could discover the truth only by eschewing arbitrary hypotheses in order to focus their attention on what could be proved using the combined tools of geometry and experiment.

Historians of science and technology have not identified the eighteenth century as one of the most significant periods in Chinese history. The ambitious examination of the world of science and civilization in China by Joseph Needham is explicitly confined to the period up to the end of the sixteenth century, and other works, examining the contributions of the Jesuits, stress the importance of the seventeenth century. The more conservative atmosphere of the mid-Qing (c. 1720–1820), marked by the orthodox neo-Confucianism promoted by the Manchu rulers, stands in contrast to the more open intellectual climate of the late Ming (c. 1550–1644) and early Qing (c.1644–1720). By the early eighteenth century, Jesuits were limited both by the relatively obsolete nature of their knowledge and by their closer integration at court level. Outside the imperial capital at Beijing, the most important trends in eighteenth-century scholarship were marked by a shift away from an interest in Jesuit science toward a rediscovery of ancient knowledge. In the Yangzi Delta, followers of evidential scholarship (kaozhengxue), or philological “search for evidence, ” were concerned with precise scholarship and practical matters, but they generally appropriated Jesuit science in efforts to “rediscover” their own presumed scientific tradition rather than attempting to contribute new knowledge to mathematics and astronomy.

JESUIT SCIENCE

If the seventeenth century was a significant period of cultural interaction between Jesuit missionaries and Confucian scholars, little further scientific knowledge was transmitted during the eighteenth century. Not only were the Jesuits mainly interested in using science as a way of achieving religious aims, but also the Church’s injunction in 1616 against the teaching of heliocentric astronomy, as well as other aspects of science, severely limited the nature of their knowledge.

Since Plato and Aristotle, philosophers of the Western tradition have placed a premium on the organization of knowledge. When knowledge is ordered, subdivided, and controlled we speak of trees, fields, maps, and bodies – metaphors suggesting definite structures and relationships. When knowledge is regarded as chaotic, overwhelming, or undifferentiated, we speak of labyrinths, mazes, or oceans – still perhaps implying that an order exists but acknowledging that it is not yet visible. The ancient philosophers endorsed the first, and positive, side of this dichotomy in two related ways: first, by privileging logically demonstrable, or at least systematically organized, bodies of knowledge as scientia or science, distinguishing them from other forms of knowledge, such as opinion, craft, or technical skills (techne); second, by seeking to demonstrate how the various sciences are related, in some rational manner, to one another in an overarching classification of knowledge. These maps or charts indicated appropriate paths of education and learning. Schemes of this kind were produced by the scholastic thinkers of the Middle Ages and they informed, and were themselves reinforced by, the pedagogy and curricula of the universities through to the Renaissance and beyond. To travel one of these paths was to master the “encyclopedy,” the circle of sciences.

CULTURES OF PRINT AT THE ONSET OF ENLIGHTENMENT

During the eighteenth century, natural knowledge became the focus, the vehicle, and the archetype of public enlightenment. This chapter describes some of the most important conditions underpinning that development. Its central subject is a distinctive realm of print that matured toward the end of the seventeenth century and lasted until the first quarter of the nineteenth – a realm differing in important respects from anything that had existed before. The chapter explains its principal characteristics, showing how they came about and why in the end they proved unstable. It outlines how printed materials were made, circulated, and put to use. From there it proceeds to explain how the features of this realm affected the creation and distribution of knowledge. The materials created by printers and booksellers – not only books themselves but also new objects such as periodicals – substantially changed the construction and representation of knowledge. The chapter’s major claims in this regard are of a general character. They are certainly applicable to what we would now call science; but they also extend far beyond that, and encompass knowledge of many other kinds.

The world of the book in the eighteenth century was simultaneously uniform and various. On the one hand, the régimes of custom and regulation guiding the conduct of printing and publishing in most countries rested, to a greater or lesser extent, on similar mechanisms of guilds, licensing, patronage, and privileges. In France, for example, Louis XIV’s reign saw the establishment of a comprehensive system of press regulation based on these foundations that would last until the revolution a century later.

The eighteenth century represents a distinct era in the organizational and institutional history of European science. Growing out of an “organizational revolution” that accompanied the intellectual transformations of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the scientific enterprise became newly solidified in the eighteenth century. Indicative of this solidification, European governments increasingly supported and structured novel social and institutional forms for eighteenth-century science. Governments moved to support science for the perceived usefulness of expert knowledge of nature.

Science reorganized in the eighteenth century centered on national academies of science modeled after the Royal Society of London (1662) and the French Académie Royale des Sciences (1666). It also involved observatories, botanical gardens, and new forms of publication and scientific communication. This characteristic Old-Regime style of organized and institutionalized science matured over the course of the eighteenth century and was replaced in the nineteenth century by an equally distinct form for organized science that came to involve specialized societies, disciplinary journals, and a revived university system.