On 9 December 1874, in Sydney, New South Wales, a rare transit of Venus happened to coincide with a round of important local elections. In the Sydney Morning Herald for that day, set among articles about ship arrivals, a smoking volcano in the Torres Strait and commodities quotations from Singapore (nutmeg, mace, pepper, pearl sago, tapioca, rice, coffee, cigars, etc.), there is an article entitled ‘Science and Politics’. The article sets out to contrast these two ‘very different phases of human action’. On that morning, at the observatory on Flagstaff Hill, astronomers were straining to time with the utmost precision the passage of the silhouette of Venus as it crawled across the surface of the sun. Sydney was just one of hundreds of spots on the globe where similar observations were being made on that day.

As the autumn of 1882 slipped into winter and the pressure of events and duties following his father's death slowly eased, Francis was forced to confront his own future. Which way should he turn? There were hints coming out of Oxford University that he would be successful if he applied for the newly vacant Chair of Botany. He confided to Nain Ruck, to whom more than anyone he could tell his innermost thoughts and worries:

His dilemma was that Michael Foster, head of the highly successful Cambridge School of Physiology, had dangled before him the prospect that there might be a Readership suitable for him in Cambridge. Given that neither the Chair nor the Readership were firm offers, and cautious by nature – to his family Frank was always sound and reliable rather than adventurous – he plumped for Cambridge. There he would be close to his mother, who had recently moved to the city, his siblings, and in familiar surroundings. Almost immediately, he felt he had made the wrong decision as Foster's plans were overtaken by changes to the rules for the medical examinations; these made it necessary for the lecture course to become more zoological than it had previously been, so ruling out any significant contribution from Francis. In another letter to Nain, he wrote:

A certain historical irony resides in the fact that the concept of empire is a popular subject of historical, political and philosophical discourse, yet the extensive field of British Empire scholarship has insufficiently investigated its subject's conceptual origins. This book attempted to bring the history of early modern natural philosophy to bear upon the intellectual origins of the British Empire. The Biblical ideal of man's plenary empire over nature, central to the work of seventeenth-century natural philosophers, constitutes an intellectual tradition that has been overlooked by the scholarship. The British Empire has a neglected ideological lineage.

For Francis Bacon, writing during the first two decades of the century, there was no necessary connection between man's empire over nature and colonization. By the time John Locke's Two Treatises of Government was published in 1689, however, the connection existed. A number of intellectual manoeuvres established a nexus between the idea of man's empire over nature and what became the British Empire of colonies. During the course of the seventeenth century, the agrarian aspect of man's plenary empire – the injunction to cultivate the earth –superseded the epistemological ideal of recovering man's perfect knowledge of nature. It was the agrarian idea of restoring man's dominion over a fully cultivated earth which Locke drew upon in his theory of property.

Ideas of man's original dominion can be conceptualized as an intellectual tradition which, through its own vocabulary, stipulated a coherent theory of empire. The vocabulary of Adam's empire over nature broadens our understanding of the linguistic resources available in the seventeenth century. In doing so, it enables us to make that tradition the subject of further exploration. The fact that the idea of Adam's original empire was fundamental to the work of a number of thinkers from the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century – from Bacon to Locke – suggests that we should view ‘empire’ as a major organizing category of seventeenth-century thought. Indeed, as John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) illustrates, natural philosophical writing was not the only context influenced by the idea of man's original dominion over the earth.

The Species of Man: Physiology, Language and Civilization

One expression of colonialism and imperialism was the imposition of a nomenclature and taxonomy on the newly discovered flora and fauna. This new order was no longer depicted by medieval stonemasons, gardeners and scribes, but by cartographers, explorers, travel writers, slavers and those ultimately burdened with the duty to spread enlightenment. The discovery of the New World produced a great rupture in the understanding of nature, and the European expansion brought within its sphere new plants and animals which vastly expanded the known variety of nature. If the world was already too varied for Pliny to catalogue, what was to be done now that an entire New World had to be incorporated into the map of creation? To produce a system whereby different naturalists could refer to individual examples of plant and animal varieties and be mutually understood as referring to the same object became a fundamental scientific quest. With the necessity for a standard system for naming and classification, ‘the systematic classification of the natural world emerged as one of the quintessential achievements of modern science’ and it was of course Linné's great achievement. At the very moment when our domination of nature could be cheered alongside it, ‘the paradox between the discourse of freedom and the practice of slavery marked the ascendency of a succession of Western nations within the early modern global economy’.

Introduction

The nature of the nebulae was one of the most pressing questions for astronomers throughout the nineteenth century. It was also a central concern for others, including many popularizers of science, one of whom was the anonymous author of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). By 1864, matters had reached such a pass that Edward Sabine, the President of the Royal Society, reckoned that nebular astronomy had reached a ‘crisis’. The resolution of this crisis was widely seen as a great, if not the greatest, achievement of William Huggins.

Writing for the Nineteenth Century in 1897, Huggins revisited his original observations of nebulae three decades earlier. Huggins invited readers to join him in his observatory at Tulse Hill near London on 29 August 1864 (see Figure 6.1 for a depiction of Huggins in his observatory).

On that night, Huggins recalled, he had turned his telescope and attached spectroscope to the heavens to investigate the light of a nebula, the first time he had done so:

There are two ways in which the centrality of the chemistry of heat, water and steam to Watt's steam engine improvements can be discerned. One, which will be pursued later in this chapter, is to reconstruct in a technical sense – building on what we now know about Watt's chemistry – the conceptual world in which, and through which, Watt's thinking about the steam engine took place. A second is to gain an appreciation of what we might call the ‘ecology of steam’. By this I mean the broader chemical cosmology, embracing meteorology and geology, of which steam and the steam engine were a part, for Watt and his contemporaries. I start with the wider chemical picture.

The Ecology of Steam: Meteorology, Geology and The Botanic Garden

Newcomen engines are known as ‘atmospheric’ engines. This is because the drive on the piston is provided by the atmosphere working against the partial vacuum created in the cylinder by the condensation of the steam. But there was, and is, a deeper sense in which steam engines were atmospheric engines even when Watt put the steam itself to work in driving the piston. The engines were seen as trading on processes that were ubiquitous in the natural world and responsible for other atmospheric and geological phenomena. Meteorological and geological understandings were thus important to the science of heat and steam that underpinned the steam engine. Those who thought about steam and the steam engine sought, and found, coherences between phenomena in the realm of engines, meteorology and geology. Indeed, I suggest that a steam engine was sometimes thought of as a kind of local corralling of the wild forces of nature. In the twentieth century nuclear physicists sometimes spoke about the act of deploying nuclear forces to provide energy via nuclear reactors as ‘twisting the tail of the dragon’. I believe that the same sense of domesticating a wild phenomenon attended eighteenth-century steam engine technology. The steam engine in the eighteenth-century landscape was, not just aesthetically, but also ecologically, part of what went on around it.

Sociologists of scientific knowledge responded to the naturalist call of the Strong Programme with arguments and considerations that straddled the traditional boundaries and ‘levels’ between philosophy and sociology. Their concerns and interests were as much philosophical, and especially epistemological, as they were sociological. By showing how the social dimension of knowledge shaped or determined what count as facts, discoveries, inferences, objectivity and credibility in science, finitism upheld the claim that ‘social factors’ constitute, rather than merely influence, the content and development of scientific knowledge. Squarely opposed to epistemological individualism, which grounded knowledge in individual experience or cognition, finitism maintained that the ‘fundamental and irreducible point’ of ‘the sociological study of scientific knowledge’ is to show ‘in what ways that knowledge has to be understood as a collective good and its application as a collective process’. This chapter traces the development of the discipline of the sociology of scientific knowledge in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, showing how the cultural transition from modernism to postmodernism shaped its evolving conception of the social constitution of science. It also relates these broad philosophical and disciplinary developments to the historiography of science promulgated by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in Leviathan and the Air-Pump and other essays, which were important points of mediation between sociologists and historians of science.

Introduction

Botany became one of the most fashionable and popular British Georgian pursuits, particularly after the translation and publication of the works of Carl Linnaeus. The Linnaean system helped to make botany accessible for men, women and children alike by providing a key through which plants in flower could be identified easily without requiring a profound knowledge of botanical characteristics. There were, however, other important aspects to British botany inspired by the economic, patriotic, cultural and fashionable emphasis upon horticultural and agricultural improvement. During the later Georgian period, and inspired by French botany and British arboriculture, increasing importance was attached to the interconnectedness of taxonomy, vegetable physiology and anatomy. The popularity of botany is exemplified by the number of natural historical works that were published and disseminated, the development of private gardens and commercial nurseries, creation of herbariums, practice of flower painting and formation of botanical societies. Introductions to the Linnaean system, intended for both sexes, sold widely and there were various attempts to translate key Linnaean works into English, whilst Erasmus Darwin's Loves of the Plants (1789), a poetical representation of the Linnaean world personified, proved especially popular during the 1790s. Although various botanical systems competed internationally in the period between 1760 and 1820, Linnaean taxonomy was dominant, particularly in Britain. The greatest challenge came from those who proffered what they claimed to be more ‘natural’ systems, especially French botanists such as Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, although their work was partly inspired by suggestions offered by Linnaeus.