At the conclusion of the Peace of Paris in 1763, British blue-water policy bore some strange fruit in exchanging the sugar island of Gaudeloupe for “quelques arpents de neige” in the Canadian wilderness – leading to much consternation and bitterness between the elder Pitt and the pliant Scotsman, Lord Bute. This was surely the moment when an expansive British Empire was born and, in response, a new wave of French adventures. Thus, we find the self-effacing Louis de Bougainville soon to make his celebrated four-year circumnavigation (1766–9), a superb account of which was swiftly published – although Bougainville lamented, “Ce n’est ni dans les forêts du Canada, ni sur le sein des mers, que l’on se forme á l’art d’écrire.” Nonetheless, unlike the fashionable experience of European naturalists and systematizers who constrained “dans les ombres de leur cabinet … soumettent impérieusement la nature á leurs imaginations,” here was a self-described “voyageur & marin; c’est á dire, un menteur, & un imbécille.” Bougainville’s brilliant tale is as much a romance of rocky shoals, high seas, men overboard, and inevitable scurvy as much as laying-to in sheltered Pacific coves and shallow bays, behind coral shoals and the welcoming arms of Tahitians.

Older-style histories of science that depicted the growth of science as a gradual accretion of new knowledge, and that devoted much attention to identifying when discoveries were made and by whom, allocated little space to the physics of the eighteenth century. Although some interesting discoveries, especially in relation to electricity, were acknowledged, the period was generally presented as a fallow one compared with the periods of dramatic advance in physical understanding that preceded and followed it. More recently, as historians have adopted a less restricted view of their task, eighteenth-century physics has come to be seen in a more favorable light: as the period when physics became a field recognizably like the one we know today.

Physics as traditionally understood was not an experimental science, and neither was its subject matter the same as it is today. Consistent with the meaning of the Greek word φυσιζ from which it drew its name, physics was taught in universities throughout Europe as “natural philosophy,” that is, as the part of the standard undergraduate course in philosophy dealing with “nature” in general. The primary concern was with broad principles rather than particular natural effects, and above all with the nature of body and the conditions determining natural change. Everywhere for several centuries the Aristotelian treatises Physica, De caelo, De generatione et corruptione, Meteorologica, and De anima were the standard texts, and in many places they were still being used at the start of our period, notwithstanding the dramatic changes in intellectual outlook that had occurred during the preceding century and a half.

As defined in the eighteenth century, “natural history” meant description (then a synonym for “history”) and classification of everything in nature, from the cosmos to the insect. Understandably, then, few naturalists attempted surveys or syntheses of so shapeless a range of subjects. One of the few, Carl Linnaeus, tried to chart the order in all realms of nature in a series of taxonomic works devoted to the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. Another, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, criticized taxonomies as incapable of accurately depicting nature in all its variety; by omitting botany, Buffon’s Histoire naturelle narrowed its focus in one respect while broadening it in others, as the author included the origin of the solar system, the history of the earth, and a treatment of animals that went beyond anatomy into such matters as environments and heredity.

Some naturalists contented themselves with producing compendia of “curiosities,” and others tried to give unity to these collections by indicating their aim of revealing, in John Ray’s famous title, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691). Many sought a degree of completeness by selecting either a geographical or a topical focus. As examples of the former, one can cite the long British tradition of local histories that effectively began with Robert Plot’s Oxfordshire (1677) and eventually included one literary classic, Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789). Although studies of this kind seem to have been less common outside Britain, a striking feature of almost all such works was the attention given to human artifacts, chiefly those of antiquity, and often to such topics as language, customs, and migrations.

Formal systems of “non-Western science” created by the Aztec, Maya, and Inca seemed to have evaporated into thin air in the wake of the Spanish conquest. The collapse of large indigenous polities and the disappearance of courts capable of sustaining elite knowledge appear to be the cause. Nancy Farriss has argued that the Maya in Yucatan lost the institutions that had kindled their taste for large cosmic riddles. Although the Maya elites did not disappear – and actually became important brokers in the operation of colonial labor systems – they lost interest in those theological and cosmological questions that had driven the astronomical and calendrical investigations of classic and postclassic Maya civilizations. As the Maya elites were left in charge of ever more simplified polities, their interest became narrowly parochial. Under Spanish colonial rule the former complex social structures of the Inca, Maya, and Aztecs gave way to simplified communities lacking all intermediate social tiers: gone were the indigenous pan-regional polities of the past whose courts had maintained large retinues of priests, scribes, and scholars – producers of elite precolonial non-Western knowledge. The new simplified native elite class embraced Catholic images, shrines, temples, and rituals, and those few religious leaders who kept native religions (and thus non-Western scientific traditions) alive went underground, losing the source of much of their prestige, which lay in maintaining communal cohesion through public sumptuous worship. By the eighteenth century indigenous systems of knowledge had transmuted into hybrid forms of folk Catholicism and had moved to the margins of Latin American societies.

Commentaries on the Enlightenment often propose a highly schematic account of the changing relations between science and religion. Whereas the seventeenth century is credited with a notional “separation” of the sciences from religious control, the eighteenth is characterized by a more devastating form of secularization in which the methods and conclusions of the natural philosophers were turned against the authority of the established Churches. With carefully selected examples, this story can be attractive and plausible. Early in the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) had warned against the mixing of biblical exegesis with natural philosophy, and, in France, René Descartes (1596–1650) had mechanized a universe no longer anthropocentric. Both men had devised stringent criteria that truth claims had to meet and both had rejected final causes from the explanation of natural phenomena. During the second half of the seventeenth century, enduring scientific societies had come into existence in both London and Paris, and within them religious disputation was banned. By the end of the century, Isaac Newton (1642–1727) had articulated his laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation, laws that to later generations would symbolize a universe characterized by order and regularity rather than divine caprice.

Newton is brought within the schema in other ways. If his Principia was a towering monument to the power of mathematical reasoning, his Opticks displayed the power of a rigorous experimental method. Seemingly the stage was set for the displacement of theology, once the queen of the sciences, by more bracing sciences that promised an improvement of the world and a brighter destiny for humankind.

Today, science is something we think we recognize when we see it; it is a part of our cultural landscape. Regarded as easily distinguished from religion, it involves the production of new knowledge rather than the reproduction of faith. Science’s stated mission is to tell truths about the natural world – truths produced by trained scientists working in specific fields. There is much argument about details, but a single method is held to lie at the heart of its production.

The processes by which new scientific knowledge is diffused or reformulated for different audiences are also generally regarded as unproblematic. First elaborated and validated in specialist journals, scientific ideas are usually thought to make their way into undergraduate textbooks and subsequently, or simultaneously, undergo popularization or reframing for a wide audience. Newspapers, magazines, television, and radio help perform the task. Ultimately, a few scientific ideas become so widespread that they can be referred to in the shorthand of jokes or cartoons.

This commonsense model of the production and diffusion of scientific knowledge is something like a fried egg, sunny-side up. At the center, the self-contained yolk represents new knowledge generated by scientists. Surrounding this is a penumbra of ever-thinning white, representing diffusion. Finally, the crackly bits at the outer edge of the white – those jokes and catchphrases – barely resemble the self-contained yolk. As another historian has described it, the transfer of scientific knowledge is often seen simplistically as moving from areas of high truth concentration to those of low truth concentration.

A CENTURY OF CHANGE

Alexander Pope (1688–1744), reputedly the greatest English poet of his age and a man whose satiric lash spared no target and whose panegyric pen captured entire lives in a single couplet, exalted Isaac Newton this way in the widely read Epitaph Intended for Sir Isaac Newton In Westminster Abbey:

These lines were widely quoted, paraphrased, and translated into every European language within a few years of Newton’s death in 1727. Leibniz, Voltaire, and most of the philosophes knew them by memory, as did the French and the Italians. Goethe, that unparalleled Enlightenment man (enlightened in almost all the senses in which this label was used in the eighteenth century), imagined himself in Newton’s place, and Byron composed variations on the Pope couplet for poetic sport. One could fairly predict that the Newton whom Pope epitomized as a mortal man, his couplet art transformed into an immortal – a veritable god. The analogy was this: God–Newton, Newton–light.

The eighteenth century was one of Western recognition of Japan against the Chinese background. During that period, Japanese thinkers became critical of the Chinese scholarship with which they had struggled to keep pace in the previous century; for the first time, Japanese intellectuals from the extreme eastern regions of Asia began to compare Chinese scholarship with the infiltrating Western science. It is extremely interesting to see what happens to a paradigm from one culture – and the scholarly traditions that have evolved around it – when it is introduced into another. In the following pages we shall examine the impact of this transplantation, mainly on three disciplines: mathematics, astronomy, and medicine.

The Jesuits had been evangelizing in Japan since the mid-sixteenth century. Eventually, the Japanese government, considering Christianity a threat to the cohesiveness and integrity of Japanese culture, successfully banned all Westerners from the country with the exception of Protestant Dutch traders, who were restricted to the port of Nagasaki. This ban, which remained in effect until the mid-nineteenth century, was reinforced with bans on Jesuit writings in Chinese in the 1630s and further intensified in the 1680s.

The eighteenth century was a period characterized by confrontations, exchanges, and misunderstandings between Europe and Islam. The European commercial and military expansion that began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continued throughout the eighteenth century, and in its wake some early modern European technologies and scientific ideas were introduced into the Middle East. These concepts and technologies coexisted, sometimes uneasily, with medieval Islamic practices. It was a period of ambivalence among Islamic rulers as well as scholars as to the relevance or acceptability of Western science and technology.

The Napoleonic Expedition of 1798 symbolizes the organized introduction of European science, medicine, and technology into the Near East, for engineers and scientists accompanying the expedition to Egypt methodically introduced the latest European ideas while at the same time recording the indigenous technologies they encountered. Prior to that, the introduction of European scientific ideas was sporadic, and occasionally there was a lengthy time lag before their introduction into the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal worlds. After its introduction, the integration of a new technology into the culture occurred (if at all) only after a considerable interval of time during which there were social and sometimes ideological adaptations.

Historians have given relatively little attention to scientific, medical, and technological activities in the eighteenth century in the Islamic world. The sources for this period are fragmentary and difficult to interpret. Relatively few treatises written in Arabic, Persian, or Turkish during this period have been studied by scholars, and historians are largely dependent on records of European travelers, diplomats, and missionaries – accounts that are often superficial or prejudiced.

The eighteenth century inherited a long tradition deriving from Greek antiquity that maintained that Nature could be understood by the exercise of reason. This belief underlay centuries of university practice in which natural phenomena had been explained by the use of logical deduction from first principles largely, although not exclusively, derived from the philosophy of Aristotle. The long shadow cast by such an entrenched intellectual position was still evident for much of the eighteenth century in the links that remained between natural philosophy and the larger philosophical enterprise of explaining the fundamental purposes that underlay the works of God and humankind. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, natural philosophy remained a branch of philosophy along with metaphysics, logic, and moral philosophy.

But it was to be one of the striking features of the century that, as it progressed, natural philosophy more and more was loosened from such traditional moorings and began to assume an independent stance. Indeed, whereas once natural philosophy had deferred to metaphysics, natural philosophy increasingly assumed the status of the defining form of philosophy, which moral philosophy attempted to emulate and which called into question the worth of metaphysical inquiry. By 1771, for example, the Encyclopaedia Britannica could justify the study of moral philosophy on the grounds that it resembled natural philosophy in that it, too, “appealed to nature or fact; depended on observation; and built its reasonings on plain uncontroverted experiments.”

“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.