The third quarter of the nineteenth century was a crucial period of transition in Frankfurt's communal identity. In 1850, the townsfolk spoke with the broad Frankfurtisch accent and their families had been there for generations; by 1870, most residents were immigrants. The city-republic, whose citizenry had dominated, ceased to be a social reality. Annexation by Prussia and the subsequent loss of Frankfurt's sovereignty in 1866 practically abolished the socio-economic and political privileges enjoyed by the citizens for generations. With the introduction of freedom of residence, immigration swelled the city's population. Moreover, Frankfurt's degradation to a Kreisstadt under Wiesbaden's jurisdiction, a city regarded by many townsfolk as much inferior, seriously affronted their pride.

Not all changes, however, were brought about under external pressure, or commenced after 1866. The republic had introduced freedom of trade in 1864, albeit decades later than adjoining communities like Bockenheim, in the Electoral Princedom of Hessen-Kassel, which had lifted guild control as early as 1822. By 1860, Frankfurt was no longer contained within the medieval fortifications. Residential suburbs such as Westend, and industrial satellites like Griesheim, Höchst, Fechenheim and Offenbach had emerged, mostly beyond the border of the city-state, diversifying the city's topography long before the government was ready to acknowledge the change. Frankfurt's expansion and topographical reorganization followed a path that most German communities trod in this period, and that numerous historical studies have traced.

Opposition to postpositivist interpretations of the Chemical Revolution emerged in the 1980s and 1990s among historians of science influenced by the burgeoning discipline of the sociology of scientific knowledge. These historians stressed interpretive rather than evidential inadequacies with postpositivist models of the Chemical Revolution; they faulted these models not so much for errors or inaccuracies in their specific accounts of the Chemical Revolution as for their questionable assumptions concerning the nature of science and its historical development. Treating science as a social activity, social historians replaced the postpositivist focus on what scientists believed and thought with a concern for what they did and why they did it. They focused on concrete processes and specific agents rather than on abstract structures and global paradigms; and they replaced idealist notions of the unity and autonomy of scientific thought and theory with an awareness of the particularity and materiality of experimental and discursive practices. Critical of the essentialist tendencies and normative interests of postpositivism, sociologically minded historians of science developed nominalist descriptions and naturalist accounts of the specific historical and social practices that shaped science and its historical development. Unhappy with the inability of relatively ‘static’ structures, like paradigms and research programmes, to do justice to the specificity and diversity of history, they called for ‘temporalized and contextualized’ accounts of the history of science.

The most immediate impact of postmodernist nominalism and sociological finitism on the historiography of eighteenth-century science and natural philosophy took the form of a pervasive interest in the ‘specificity’ of historical practices and a devaluation of the role of global traditions in the development of science. The globalist view of the cognitive priority of research traditions construed eighteenth-century science and philosophy as a group of coherent bodies of theory and practice, composed of a set of discourses formed and unified by their allegiances to one or other of the cognitive traditions associated with the names of Leibniz, Descartes, Locke, Wolff, Kant and, above all, Newton. But sociologically inclined historians of science dismissed the ‘tradition-seeking method’ as ‘profoundly unhistorical’ and portrayed ‘a great deal of diversity and a low degree of consensus’ in the cognitive features of eighteenth-century science. While a number of scholars drew attention to the variety in Newtonian matter theory, the importance of anti-Newtonian beliefs, and the eclectic nature of eighteenth-century scientific thought in general, Schaffer identified ‘natural philosophy’ as a mode of discursive and experimental practice distinct from science and philosophy. In the same vein, Bensaude-Vincent viewed the Chemical Revolution not as a specific instantiation of the platonic form of a scientific revolution, but as a local event, peculiar to late eighteenth-century France and ‘inappropriately universalized’ by its participants, as well as by subsequent historians and philosophers of science.

There has emerged over recent years a significant corpus of literature that has demonstrated the profoundly spatial nature of the scientific enterprise. Opposed to the general perception that science is placeless (a sentiment summarized by Porter, above), this work has sought to expose science as something utterly grounded in its social and spatial, not to mention temporal, political and economic contexts. In doing so, it has also engaged with the elevated epistemological position science has fashioned for itself, by suggesting that it should be treated like any other form of knowledge: that is, as ‘a cultural formation, embedded in wider networks of social relations and political power, and shaped by the local environments in which its practitioners carry out their tasks’. Developing this argument further, Livingstone notes that scientific knowledge is made in many different places and asks:

Livingstone's viewpoint is shared by others. Commentators have pointed out a host of geographies that run through science, including those of site, place, space and region; network, trace, travel and movement; and survey, map, cartography, nation, territory and border.

There have admittedly been some reservations expressed about this approach to the study of science. For instance, Shapin takes issue with the tendency as he sees it to treat geography as a ‘factor’ – in similar manner to cultural values, gender or national identity say – that can come into play to influence the development of science. Rather than something that might influence the progress of scientific knowledge, Shapin asserts that space must always be a ‘necessary condition for there to be such a thing as science’. In other words, geography, ‘like temporality or embodiment’ is a necessary prerequisite for science to even take place at all.

Representations of gorillas have long existed in a tense situation between myth and mimesis. Sharing 97.7 per cent of their genes with Homo sapiens, they are among the closest of humanity's animal relations and have often stimulated uneasy and politically-charged reflections on human origins and identity, particularly along the intersection of issues of species and race. What became known in the 1940s as primatology tells us as much about human ideologies as it does about the animals in question, comprising what Donna Haraway terms simian orientalism: the ‘construction of the self from the raw material of the other’. With the development of animal studies over recent years as a critical practice concerned with rethinking the involvement of animals in human cultures, such anthropomorphic tendencies have received notable attention. Jacques Derrida's late work on animals has proved especially influential. His coinage ‘fabulation’ reads humanizing representations as a discourse of power over animals that constitutes a ‘taming, a moralizing subjection, a domestication’. Consequently, an ethical imperative has emerged, in the words of the conclusion to Erica Fudge's Animal, that ‘We should think about animals as animals’, recognizing in doing so their existence beyond human symbolic economies.

Given their unavoidable relationship with humans, thinking about gorillas as gorillas is a vexed enterprise. These endangered African mammals are as ambiguous as they are charismatic; hard to locate in their forest habitats and for centuries appearing only at the margins of science.