1.1 The Concept of Knowledge

Historians of knowledge regard knowledge as a socially and historically determined phenomenon. The focus is on what people in various societies and times have believed they know about themselves and the world. Consequently, anything perceived, dealt with, or acted on as knowledge becomes potentially interesting to study. Whether the knowledge claims of past generations are today considered well-founded or true is, as a general rule, not interesting to a historian of knowledge. What we study instead is how something became knowledge for people and what the consequences of this were for different societies and cultures.

This foundational way of looking at knowledge is something historians of knowledge share with anthropologists and sociologists. We all emphasise that knowledge is always embedded in larger cultural and social contexts. In this context, Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth has spoken about traditions of knowledge as consisting of a collection of statements about the world, conveyed through words and symbols, within some kind of institutionalised social relations. Various aspects are interwoven with one another. Knowledge can thus not be something exclusively individual or particular. Instead, it is generated by people sharing and jointly maintaining it.Footnote ⁹

The philosophical reflections on what knowledge is stretch back to antiquity. Plato defined knowledge as well-justified belief. But how can we know what beliefs are well-justified? For his part, Aristotle underlined that there were different forms of knowledge: episteme is rational or theoretical knowledge, techne is artisanal or artistic knowledge, and phronesis is practical knowledge, sagacity, or wisdom. Many historians of knowledge have favoured these distinctions, not least because they enable a broader historical study of the types of knowledge that exist and operate far beyond the worlds of learning.Footnote ¹⁰

A complicated question is whether the truth of a knowledge claim actually matters to a historian of knowledge. Are astrology, alchemy, and astronomy equally viable objects of study? Yes, on one level they are. If it can be shown that people have treated something as knowledge, then it is fruitful to investigate it as such. Historians of knowledge do not wish to judge past systems of thought and knowledge. The history of knowledge includes various kinds of scholarship – but these are not the only, or even necessarily the primary, objects of study. At the same time, there are divisions within the field. Some researchers and scholars, including Philipp Sarasin, have argued that knowledge historians should concentrate on analysing systematic and rational forms of knowledge. He makes an enquiry into the value of seeing, for example, conspiracy theories as knowledge phenomena. Sarasin is aware, however, of the difficulties of establishing such boundaries in practice. He also maintains that knowledge-historical methods can be used to study phenomena that scholars themselves believe are irrational or superstitious.Footnote ¹¹

Another aspect of this problem is whether our analysis is contingent on historical actors themselves having referred to knowledge using the term knowledge or one of its synonyms. If so, it is only conscious knowledge that is studied. But people can be both unaware of – or stay silent about – that which they employ as knowledge, perhaps because it appears so obviously true for them that it does not need stating aloud or writing down. Or perhaps they lack the necessary analytical concepts or live in a culture where these do not exist. For this reason, Jürgen Renn feels that one should steer a middle course between knowledge as a category used by historical actors (what people have believed to be knowledge) and knowledge as a strictly analytical category (what researchers define as knowledge after the fact). The former may lead to a radically subjectivist or relativist position that makes it impossible to compare phenomena across time and space. The latter risks becoming anachronistic, awkward, and difficult to apply empirically in historical studies. Renn’s way out of this dilemma is to see history of knowledge studies as explorations of both the past and of the question of what knowledge really is.Footnote ¹²

What we see here is tension between the history of knowledge as a science of objects of research (where the main issue is what knowledge is and has been) and the history of knowledge as a cluster of perspectives on the past (where the value of knowledge is as an entry point which helps us investigate other things). Like Jürgen Renn, we feel that the history of knowledge should be both of these things, but we nevertheless see the shift in perspective as paramount. The most important thing about investigations in the history of knowledge is that they provide new understanding of past societies, phenomena, and processes of change. Therefore, we do not find it problematic that the history of knowledge adopts a broad, imprecise concept of knowledge.

There are, however, critics who reason differently. What is not knowledge? they ask. Other researchers have tried to turn this objection into a solution to the problem. Lukas Verburgt and Peter Burke feel that it is especially fruitful to focus on the boundaries of knowledge, on what is considered ignorance or what is even ignored. It is then possible to indirectly make visible and analyse what knowledge has been and how it has functioned.Footnote ¹³ Another alternative is to analyse hierarchies, conflicts, and aspects of power. The analyses will then focus on how different forms of knowledge have been evaluated relative to each other, and which people have had the authority to decide what knowledge is in various historical contexts. Thereby it can be demonstrated how something is elevated to being knowledge – or demoted to being ignorance.Footnote ¹⁴

Our own basic position is that knowledge is a socially anchored form of knowing. Such knowledge can be more or less changeable, dispersed, and used in different places and at different times. But by focusing on the roles, meanings, prerequisites, and consequences of knowledge, a better understanding of past societies is made possible. For us this exploration is a key driving force. What we want to know more about is how human societies have functioned in the past. The history of knowledge provides us with a fruitful approach to this issue.Footnote ¹⁵

1.2 The History of Knowledge – An Integrative Field

In recent decades, historical scholarship has expanded significantly. Far more people are doing historical research today than in the twentieth century. Furthermore, the subject has broadened thematically, geographically, and chronologically. National research communities remain important, but international fora and venues are even more essential for many historical researchers. In addition, the field of history has, like other disciplines, seen increasing specialisation. Many of today’s more innovative studies and dynamic research discussions occur in sub-disciplines or interdisciplinary fields. However, this does not always happen in dialogue with the subject of history itself, and often pioneering and important research has not had a significant impact on broader forms of historical writing. For example, undergraduate students of history are still taught about the scientific revolution, although today’s historians of science have agreed for decades that such a phenomenon never actually occurred.Footnote ¹⁶

Against this background, we have argued for the idea that the history of knowledge should attempt to fill an integrative function.Footnote ¹⁷ This would be valuable not only to the broader field of history but also to its many sub-disciplines. Our ambition is for the history of knowledge to build bridges between various fields and act as a venue for researchers who are interested in knowledge as a social and historical phenomenon.

But what research traditions do historians of knowledge gain inspiration from and interact with? First, we wish to foreground the historical paradigm of cultural history, or The New Cultural History, as it was called in an influential 1989 anthology edited by American historian Lynn Hunt. Cultural history developed from the social history of the 1960s and 1970s with its interest in the history of broad strata of the population. But unlike social history, cultural history was not quantitatively oriented, and cultural historians were primarily interested in the ideas, practices, experiences, and conceptions shared by many people. In the French Annales school, this was spoken of in terms of mentalities. By studying court records, saints’ lives, the weekly press, and folk tales, attempts were made to analyse cultures of the past. The idea was that understanding cultural beliefs was necessary in order to explain people’s actions and historical development. Culture was not only a ‘superstructure’ on a material economic base, as Karl Marx and his social historical interpreters claimed. Rather, the reverse was true.Footnote ¹⁸

Language was central to the new cultural history. In the discipline of history, one therefore sometimes refers synonymously to the linguistic and cultural turns. Inspired by anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, attempts were made to ‘read’ human acts and rituals like texts.Footnote ¹⁹ Through qualitative analysis, it was pointed out how words and language structured human thinking and made possible – or impossible – various collective actions. What stories cause people to start a revolution? What discourses support treating ethnic or religious minorities differently? What concepts govern politics, and how do these change over time?

This type of question proved very productive. Following Michel Foucault, cultural historians have studied discourses, subject positions, and the disciplinary function of knowledge. Others, influenced by conceptual historians such as Reinhart Koselleck, have investigated how key political concepts have become charged with meaning and made actions possible. Historians of early modern culture have shown a great deal of interest in religion and religious worldviews. Historians of the modern age and contemporary history have turned to popular culture and new source material such as film, TV, and radio. Also, collective memories and historical stories that create meaning have attracted much attention.

When the history of knowledge began to expand in the years following the turn of the millennium, cultural history was almost regarded as the mainstream approach. Its leading representatives began to discuss how research could be developed further and renewed. In 1999, the above-mentioned Lynn Hunt and two colleagues edited a new anthology entitled Beyond the Cultural Turn.Footnote ²⁰ Peter Burke – who had been central to the formation of the new cultural history – began to explore new fields, including the history of media and, later, the history of knowledge. The cultural-historical paradigm was and still is very significant. The history of knowledge is an integral part of the same research tradition and also contains visible traces of the social historical impulses that preceded the new cultural history. There is a programmatic interest in studying knowledge as a social phenomenon, and in investigating its importance in and for broader social strata.

Alongside the new cultural history, we will highlight three other sources of inspiration for the history of knowledge. The first is a cluster of fields consisting of the history of science, intellectual history, science and technology studies, and the specifically Nordic disciplinary construct known as the history of ideas (idé- och lärdomshistoria).Footnote ²¹ These are dynamic fields that have long had knowledge and the production of knowledge among their primary objects of study. Since the 1970s and 1980s, they have been strongly influenced by sociological and cultural-historical perspectives. Scholars have studied extensively how scientific experiments were conducted, analysed how reputations were established, and followed laboratory personnel in real-time. In parallel, the geographical focus has also broadened to include the entire world, and the chronology has been expanded to include many other forms of knowledge than modern natural science and medicine. The history of science as a concept has been problematised, and is in certain camps considered Eurocentric and teleological.

Against this background, the history of knowledge has been launched as an alternative to the history of science. Influential researchers such as Lorraine Daston have suggested that this is a more accurate term for what contemporary historians of science actually do. From this perspective, the history of knowledge is a new name for an already existing research practice. If so, it is not substantially new. This has been a common objection to the history of knowledge from our Nordic colleagues in the history of ideas. ‘What is actually new?’ has been their question.Footnote ²²

We have asserted that the history of knowledge represents an expansion and a shift in emphasis. Among other things, we have highlighted an ambition to write more comprehensive histories of society. We have also pointed out that the history of knowledge encompasses additional forms of knowledge – for example, financial, religious, and practical everyday knowledge. We have argued programmatically that a shift in perspective occurs when we move the focus from the production to the circulation of knowledge in society. During the 2020s, several studies have been published that attempt to demonstrate what this means in practice.Footnote ²³

The other group of research specialisations that have influenced the history of knowledge are the histories of media, books, and information. These fields characteristically have a deep interest in media, its functions and materiality. Media can refer to traditional mass media, such as the press, radio, and TV, but also to anything that has a mediating function: maps, terrestrial globes, matchboxes, and statistical investigations. Special interest has been paid to the invention and breakthroughs of new media. During such periods, there are often open negotiations about what the medium is and what it does. Over time, media tend to become normalised and culturally invisible. What is important at a particular time is thus not necessarily that which provokes great discussion. TV and newspapers did not disappear because the Internet and social media disrupted the playing field.Footnote ²⁴

The history of books focuses on a specific medium rather than an entire media system. However, the book as a medium has always been – and still is today – entirely central to the production and circulation of knowledge. The point of departure for historians of books is that books are not empty containers of text. Analysing their appearance, design, and pricing is important for understanding their wider significance. Put differently, it is not enough to read what is printed in them. Consequently, historians of books take an interest in the conditions of production, forms of distribution, edition statistics, and market conditions. When the book becomes the centre of attention, much else becomes visible. This is an approach knowledge historians have found fruitful.Footnote ²⁵

The third specialisation we wish to highlight as a source of inspiration is the history of education. This field has grown rapidly in recent decades, not least in connection with the education of teachers.Footnote ²⁶ Today’s historians of education are interested in the school system and higher education, their configuration and governance, but also in the training that occurs in other fields, for instance through campaigns or in non-profit organisations and companies. A good deal of research within the history of education typically foregrounds learning processes and their prerequisites. The emphasis here is on the education of children and young people. In contradistinction, the other specialisations we have highlighted tend to have adults as a central focus, albeit rarely older adults. The history of knowledge finds the education of young people interesting for several reasons, one being that it presents opportunities for analysing how knowledge circulates over time and among generations.Footnote ²⁷

A minor specialisation that is closely connected to the history of education is the history of professions. Researchers within this field are interested in how professions are established, and how their members – lawyers, doctors, nurses, social workers, etc. – are trained and collectively maintain their positions in society. These professional groups are in close contact with specific scientific fields and institutions of higher education. Through their professional activities, they are bearers of knowledge which they put into circulation in society. Like the history of education, the history of professions also provides opportunities for the analysis of circulation over time.Footnote ²⁸

Taken together, the cultural history paradigm and the three major specialisations we have highlighted provide both a foundation and a set of interfaces for the history of knowledge. So far, it has primarily been with and among these fields that discussions have been held, exchanges made, and new research questions formulated. The function filled by the history of knowledge varies. In relation to cultural history, it is a narrowing and a focusing of the object of study – but in relation to other fields it is rather a way to pose broader questions: What is its significance beyond the academy? How does it relate to the major social changes of the time? What happens if we combine x with the contemporary phenomena of y and z?

From a broader scholarly perspective, it is not wrong to claim that the history of knowledge has so far mainly fulfilled an intradisciplinary rather than an interdisciplinary function. In other words, historians of knowledge have above all bridged gaps between various sub-disciplines of historical scholarship and, to a lesser degree, established new collaborations with other scholars in the humanities and social sciences who deal with ‘knowledge studies’ in, for instance, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, psychology, law, political science, and comparative literature. We feel that in future it would be desirable to have more genuinely interdisciplinary exchanges, and that there is a great unexploited potential here.

1.3 The Main Specialisations of the History of Knowledge

The recent strong development of the history of knowledge nevertheless risks overshadowing the fact that there are several competing ideas about what the field is or should be. After all, the history of knowledge appears today in a number of different guises. When we examine the current landscape of the field, we can distinguish at least five main, sometimes overlapping, specialisations.Footnote ²⁹

First, there is an encyclopaedic variant of the history of knowledge. It is characterised by an all-encompassing ambition rather than by new perspectives or theoretical reasoning. The best examples of this are Peter Burke’s general books on the history of knowledge. In A Social History of Knowledge (two volumes, Reference Burke2000 and Reference Burke2012) he demonstrates being widely read in the history of ideas, culture, and science of the last five hundred years, from Gutenberg to Wikipedia.Footnote ³⁰

In the first chapter of his introductory book What Is the History of Knowledge? (Reference Burke2016), Burke presents basic concepts, processes, and problems of the history of knowledge. Building on the two earlier volumes, he also formulates some general reflections on the subject. His starting point is that knowledge exists in various forms in any given culture: pure and applied, explicit and implicit, learned and popular, male and female, local and universal. Against this background, Burke argues that there ‘are only histories, in the plural, of knowledges, also in the plural’.Footnote ³¹

Historians of science suggest a different understanding of the history of knowledge. As previously mentioned, to them it offers a reformulation of the traditional objects of study in their field, thereby challenging established concepts and patterns of interpretation. For example, in several articles Lorraine Daston has described the transformation of the history of science in recent decades. As a result of global and practical developments in the discipline, its methodological repertoire has broadened considerably, and its objects of study have become more diverse. Consequently, many historians of science have distanced themselves from an older, teleological foundational narrative about the evolution of Western science to the degree that a more adequate designation for today’s specialisation would, according to Daston, be the history of knowledge. One advantage of this designation is that it is not linked to a particular modern understanding of science, but is capable of encompassing the study of Hellenistic alchemy, pre-Columbian botany in South America, and social science of the post-war era. At the same time, Daston points out, the nebulous character of the history of knowledge is problematic: what does not fit into the field?Footnote ³²

The field’s vagueness has not prevented historians of science from associating themselves with it in recent studies. For instance, Elaine Leong has adopted the history of knowledge as a framework for analysing medicine and science in early modern English households, while Jürgen Renn has used it as a general point of departure in his book The Evolution of Knowledge (Reference Renn2020).Footnote ³³ Another group of historians of science have been inspired by the history of knowledge in applying new perspectives to the history of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.Footnote ³⁴

In a third interpretation, the history of knowledge becomes a field that encompasses the study of all academic forms of knowledge, not only those that have traditionally been a central focus for historians of science, technology, or medicine. The best example here is the renewed interest in the history of the humanities. A key figure is Rens Bod, who has spearheaded writing a more integrative history that extends beyond the study of single humanistic disciplines. In the first issue of the journal History of Humanities (Reference Bod2016), he and his colleagues encouraged researchers in the history of the humanities to take an active interest in the history of the natural sciences, and vice versa. ‘Eventually’, they wrote, ‘a case could be made for uniting the history of the humanities and the history of science under the head of “history of knowledge”’.Footnote ³⁵

There are certain recurring themes and approaches in this recent research on the history of the humanities. One type of investigation focuses on studying the formation of the humanities as a distinct field, along with how its relations to other areas of knowledge, particularly the natural sciences, have shifted over time.Footnote ³⁶ Another approach applies perspectives from the modern history of science to analyse humanists of the past; one example is using the concept of the persona to investigate ideals and norms prevalent among historians of a particular era.Footnote ³⁷ Yet another type of analysis concentrates on the materiality and infrastructure of the humanities, for example archives, libraries, and museums.Footnote ³⁸ And finally, researchers, not least Rens Bod himself, assume global perspectives and compare Western to other forms of knowledge.Footnote ³⁹

In a fourth version of the history of knowledge, rational, systematic, or academic knowledge is simply one among several forms of knowledge. Proponents of this specialisation feel that attention should also be paid to tacit and practical knowledge, as well as to indigenous knowledge. Anna Nilsson Hammar has taken, for example, Aristotle’s division of knowledge as her point of departure. She emphasises that researchers have hitherto focused on the production and circulation of scientific or rational knowledge (theoria), but have devoted less attention to other forms of knowledge (praxis and poiesis) or to the relationships among these.Footnote ⁴⁰

A greater multiplicity of forms of knowledge has also been suggested in two journals impacted by the history of knowledge. In the introduction to the first number of KNOW, Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer and her co-editors explain that the aim of the journal is ‘uncovering and explicating diverse forms of knowledge from antiquity to the present, and accounting for contemporary forms of knowledge in terms of their history, politics, and culture’.Footnote ⁴¹ In a similar manner, the editors of the Journal for the History of Knowledge stated in its initial issue that the journal will be devoted to ‘the history of knowledge in its broadest sense’, including ‘the study of science, but also of indigenous, artisanal and other types of knowledge’. This journal is also meant to offer a platform for contributions that compare Western and non-Western forms of knowledge, or that analyse relationships among concepts and practices from various parts of the world.Footnote ⁴²

Finally, in a fifth understanding of the history of knowledge the emphasis is on knowledge as a basic category in society. One common denominator among those who underline the role and relevance of knowledge in society is that they have academic backgrounds in the subject of history, with its traditional focus on politics, social relations, and cultural phenomena. In an early programmatic article from the German-language history of knowledge, ‘Was ist Wissensgeschichte?’ (Reference Sarasin2011), Philipp Sarasin emphasises that historians have always wanted to relate to broader contexts and have searched for totalities, be they the nation or society. Consequently, he argues that the history of knowledge should deal with ‘the social production and circulation of knowledge’, because knowledge moves among different people, groups, and contexts, and can in principle cross institutional, social, political, and geographical boundaries. This is not the same thing as the free dissemination and the even distribution of knowledge, but it means that knowledge by its very nature can be transmitted, put into circulation, and interact in other fields of knowledge in various social contexts.Footnote ⁴³

In another programmatic article, Simone Lässig discusses what the history of knowledge has to offer historical research in general. She considers the field a version of social and cultural history that investigates knowledge as a phenomenon that impacts nearly every aspect of human life. Her view of knowledge and society is clear in her concluding sentences: ‘The history of knowledge does not emphasize knowledge instead of society but rather seeks to analyse and comprehend knowledge in society and knowledge in culture. Approaching society and culture in all their complexity, the history of knowledge will broaden and deepen our understanding of how humans have created knowledge over the course of the past.’Footnote ⁴⁴

The five understandings of the history of knowledge described here are quite general: there are no discrete lines of demarcation among them, and none represents a well-defined research programme. If anything, they illustrate the fact that the history of knowledge is capable of attracting followers from many different academic disciplines, and that the specific knowledge-historical form adopted is determined by the intellectual and scholarly tradition the researcher in question belongs to and wants to promote.

Nevertheless, the differences matter to the histories we write and explore. Returning to the digital revolution, Silicon Valley, and Andrew Grove, with which this section began, researchers can approach these phenomena in many different ways. Those who are interested in worlds of learning and scientific progress will study Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as the pioneers of computer science, such as Claude Shannon or Alan Turing. Those who wish to write more comprehensive histories of society will use different chronologies and give other people centre stage. Perhaps, they will foreground Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and the introduction of personal computers into the home in the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps they will begin even later, in 1997, when Time Magazine named Andrew Grove the ‘Man of the Year’. The perspective will shift even more for those who are mainly interested in politics or society’s infrastructure. These historians may want to study the spread of computers in schools or the expansion of broadband networks. What interests encouraged these developments, and why? Were they connected to visions of a future information and knowledge society? Yet, other researchers may analyse the evolution and dissemination of programming languages, business concepts such as ‘the lean start-up’, or how different generations of young people have learned to play video games.

What is obviously interesting and stimulating to one historian of knowledge is not necessarily so to another. But what unites researchers in the field is a desire to historicise, explore, and analyse what knowledge has been and has meant in the past. The question is what analytic tools and concepts we can use. Let us explore some of them.

2.1 The Circulation of Knowledge

Historians of the twenty-first century, like other cultural and social researchers, have ended up ever more often studying interactions, interweavings, and patterns of movement. This increased interest can reasonably be linked to the globalisation of the last few decades, but the digital revolution also gives these subjects a high degree of topicality. In recent years, a good deal of attention has been paid to how knowledge is formed and reformed when it is in motion. Historians who tackle these questions have different interests and come from varying historiographical traditions. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern a convergence towards certain common problems, and an increasing number of scholars have begun to embrace a common concept: circulation.Footnote ⁴⁵

Circulation has become one of the most popular concepts in the history of knowledge. Joel Barnes has aptly spoken of it ‘as something of a master-concept’, at least in certain parts of the field.Footnote ⁴⁶ Historians have used it frequently in order to provide a more complex understanding of the processes of knowledge, not least in order to break down overly simple dichotomies such as centre–periphery, sender–receiver, and producer–user. The premise here is that circulating knowledge is in a state of potential change. This means that words like diffusion, dissemination, and mediation are problematic because they imply that what is in motion is actually fixed.Footnote ⁴⁷

In circulation studies, knowledge is instead considered dynamic. More concretely, analyses often focus on what happens when knowledge moves among different places, genres, and formats, but also on investigating the main material and media preconditions that exist at a given time. Furthermore, the concept of circulation contributes to a basic shift of perspective in the study of knowledge, from production to circulation. It is no longer the creation of and the conditions for new knowledge that are being observed, but how knowledge is used, how it moves, and how it is transformed. In addition, a circulation perspective entails a broadening of the view of the knowledge process so that other types of actors and historical contexts can be introduced into the analysis.Footnote ⁴⁸

Many of the foundational discussions on the circulation of knowledge have taken place in the history of science (and in part also, if from different points of departure, in the discipline of communication studies). An important impetus came from James A. Secord’s article ‘Knowledge in Transit’ (2004). This text can be characterised as a polemical programme statement for a new kind of history of science, one which does not put the study of the production of scientific knowledge at the forefront. Instead, Secord encouraged his colleagues to direct their analytic interest towards questions about knowledge in motion: What happens when knowledge circulates? How is it transformed from a concern for particular individuals to something that larger groups of people take for granted?Footnote ⁴⁹

According to Secord the most important development in the history of science in recent decades is that science has begun to be studied as a practical and situated activity. The predominant approach has been investigating in detail how particular actors have produced knowledge. The concreteness of the many case studies has contributed to the demystification of scientific activities, but the wider social significance of what is being analysed often remains unclear. Therefore, Secord encouraged historians of science to place as much weight on analysing audiences, readers, and media as they have on investigating voyages of discovery, laboratories, and experiments.Footnote ⁵⁰ According to Secord, all scientific activity should be considered a form of communication. He further stressed that historians of science have been far too ‘obsessed with novelty’, and have therefore been inclined to analyse origins, producers, and innovations. What happens to knowledge later has often been considered less important, and there has thus been a tendency to describe it cursorily after the main analysis has been completed.Footnote ⁵¹

‘Knowledge in Transit’ has made a significant impression in the two decades since its publication. It is frequently cited and often used in introductory discussions on choosing objects of study and approaches. And although one cannot discern a radical turn away from the study of the production of knowledge, there is no doubt that today many researchers with different specialisations are interested in how knowledge circulates.

Historians of the early modern global history of science are one example. To them, the circulation concept has become a tool for challenging a powerful Eurocentric narrative of ‘the scientific revolution’. According to this narrative, the modern natural sciences were born in Europe, only to thereafter spread to the rest of the world through colonial expansion. This story is intimately connected to classical modernisation theory and a unidirectional model of diffusion, where scientific knowledge is spread from the centre to the periphery because it is rational, true, and practically useful. Applying a circulation perspective allows this type of interpretation to be questioned. Researchers who have studied the history of European empires have, for instance, shown how important indigenous actors in the colonies were for processes of knowledge. There was never a scientific paradigm spreading frictionlessly from Cambridge, Leiden, or Montpellier to Bombay, Batavia, or Saigon. Knowledge was transformed when encountering local traditions of thought, social orders, and power hierarchies.Footnote ⁵²

Consequently, the circulation concept can be used in order to show how knowledge moves geographically, socially, chronologically, and through media and networks. Its analytical power lies in providing a concrete alternative to simple dissemination models, which many researchers view with scepticism. The concept of circulation thus complicates questions on how knowledge is produced and how it becomes significant. The most radical voices actually question the principle of dissemination itself and the idea that knowledge has a point of origin. According to this view, production and circulation are inseparable.Footnote ⁵³

Despite the analytical merits of the concept of circulation, there remains a problem: the concept is and remains elastic. Kapil Raj has characterised it as a ‘recurrent, though non-theorized, concept’, while James A. Secord – who himself directed attention to knowledge in motion – has recently claimed that the term risks being reduced to a ‘meaningless buzzword’.Footnote ⁵⁴ In a similar way, Philipp Sarasin and Andreas Kilcher have pointed out that circulation has become a catchword that can include almost any type of movement.Footnote ⁵⁵

We share this criticism of the concept of circulation, but feel that it should not be discarded altogether. On the contrary, we propose proceeding from more limited and explicitly defined understandings of movements of knowledge. One of these we call the societal circulation of knowledge. The starting point here is that knowledge is studied as a broader societal phenomenon. In order for something to become the object of circulation analyses of this kind, it must have a certain societal relevance and reach. That which concerns only a few individuals or small groups of people is not central. This means, among other things, that scientific discoveries are of secondary importance while the focus is on substantial breakthroughs of knowledge that have an effect in wider social, economic, political, and cultural contexts.Footnote ⁵⁶ Like historians such as Philipp Sarasin and Simone Lässig, we build here on an older societal historical programme, and argue that the study of knowledge in society provides important entry points to history.Footnote ⁵⁷

In various studies, we have investigated how knowledge has circulated in society. Among other things, we have analysed how environmental issues went from being a concern for a small group of experts and scientists to becoming a public concern around 1970, but we have also charted the more general preconditions for the circulation of knowledge in the public sphere of the post-war era (in Section 3, we provide more detailed examples of how we have studied this kind of societal circulation of knowledge).

The movement of knowledge in past societies can, however, be investigated in many other ways. Erik Bodensten has, for instance, tackled the question of when knowledge about potatoes became more widespread in eighteenth-century Sweden. He shows that this was not a linear, cumulative process of diffusion, but that a distinct breakthrough of knowledge took place around 1749–1750, largely because a special network, which had long eagerly promoted potatoes, now gained control over important institutions and means of communication. Because of this, broader groups in society became aware of the relevance of potatoes, and a collective knowledge process was set in motion.Footnote ⁵⁸ Måns Ahlstedt Åberg investigates how knowledge circulated between the Swedish State Institute for Racial Biology and the Swedish general public in the 1930s. He demonstrates that there were exchanges of knowledge in both directions between the Institute and ordinary Swedes who participated in a major genealogical project.Footnote ⁵⁹

Historians can investigate the preconditions for the societal circulation of knowledge in various ways. For example, scholars have attempted to map the systems and platforms that provide historically specific prerequisites that set knowledge in motion. One analytical concept in this context is the knowledge arena. This can be understood as a place that, within its particular framework, offers an opportunity and sets boundaries for the circulation of knowledge. It functions as a meeting place or venue for a certain kind of knowledge actor and a certain type of audience. In order for an arena to promote the societal circulation of knowledge, it normally must have a measure of stability and permanence, even if the content of the knowledge that circulates in a particular arena can vary over time.Footnote ⁶⁰

The boundary between a knowledge arena and a knowledge institution can be difficult to maintain. In many cases, however, the degree of formalisation or regulation differs, because a knowledge institution tends to be a part of the established educational system or the scientific community. The status of an arena is also wholly dependent on how it is perceived by its contemporaries. There is thus a subjective aspect: a knowledge arena comes into existence and endures because certain groups perceive it as a place for the exchange and transmission of certain types of knowledge. Periodicals, TV programmes, book series, and social media accounts can fulfil such functions – but do not necessarily do so. What makes the concept especially useful is that it enables comparisons across space and time, which may make visible the shifting preconditions for the social circulation of knowledge.

Seen from this broader perspective, the knowledge arena is connected to the concept of infrastructure. By this is meant the basic preconditions for a society’s communication and mediation of knowledge, for instance the existence of a press corps, the art of printing, a school system, and postal services. This can also include the social structure of a society, and the opportunities various groups have for taking part in the main processes of knowledge. In times past, much of this infrastructure was oral, informal, and local, which means that historians of knowledge face certain difficulties. Nevertheless, recent research shows that also less well-off strata are rewarding objects of study on the basis of perspectives drawn from the history of knowledge. Because of material limitations, creative research approaches emerge that expand our understanding of people of the past.Footnote ⁶¹

Overall, the circulation concept is one of the most productive in the history of knowledge. It has proven useful for many different types of studies in various contexts, geographical spaces, and historical epochs. Accordingly, there is also an obvious risk that it becomes a watered-down concept, but, as we have emphasised, the way forward is not to abandon it but to specify the kind of knowledge in motion being foregrounded and how it can be investigated. More generally, circulation offers a perspective on how the history of knowledge can be studied, and how knowledge processes can open up to multifaceted analyses.

2.2 Knowledge Actors

Every land and every era has its allotted share of biographies of prominent scientists, intellectuals, and educational reformers. Nevertheless, it is not misleading to claim that the theoretical currents that have influenced historical and sociological studies of knowledge since the 1960s have emphasised structures rather than actors, collectives rather than individuals. This is true for Karl Mannheim’s and Ludwik Fleck’s concept of a Denkstil, Thomas S. Kuhn’s concept of a paradigm, and Michel Foucault’s concept of an épistémè, and also for the concepts of later theoreticians such as Pierre Bourdieu, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour.Footnote ⁶²

Despite all the innovative research that these influential thinkers have given rise to, there is a risk that the history of knowledge becomes anonymous unless individuals are allowed to be the subjects of narratives. Suzanne Marchand has expressed this fear and criticised a tradition in the histories of knowledge and science that she calls ‘Foucauldian structuralism’ with ‘its erasure of individual biographies and intentions’. Marchand asks, ‘is there room in the history of knowledge for an approach that privileges not the knowledge making as such but the wider context and the peculiarities of the knowers?’Footnote ⁶³ We would like to think so. To us, knowledge is always socially anchored, and in order to understand its dynamics different kinds of knowledge actors must be afforded space in the analyses.

A knowledge actor can be described as a person who, in a particular historical context, contributes to producing and/or circulating knowledge. Under certain circumstances, various kinds of audiences can also be included in the actor concept; they then become co-creators in the knowledge process. Knowledge actors can be studied using social history as a point of departure, for example by analysing their societal positions and various forms of capital. This type of study is relatively common, but, as Philipp Sarasin points out, an investigation that stops here risks demonstrating a kind of sociological reductionism. He asserts that the study of knowledge actors should also include the content and form of the knowledge in question. Thus, an individual’s capacity and authority to act as a knowledge actor also depends on the theoretical and practical knowledge that the individual possesses or transmits.Footnote ⁶⁴

In our own investigations into the history of knowledge, we have emphasised the significance of knowledge actors. David Larsson Heidenblad has, in a study of the breakthrough of environmental issues in post-war Sweden, argued that around 1970 several historical actors were putting new issues on the agenda and setting new knowledge in motion. ‘In my view, the social breakthrough of knowledge occurred because specific people did specific things at specific times, which triggered chain reactions’, writes Larsson Heidenblad. In his study, the central knowledge actors are chemist Hans Palmstierna, journalist Barbro Soller, and historian Birgitta Odén, but he also broadens the scope to include environmental activists, upper secondary school teachers, and students. Overall, he exposes broad societal processes of knowledge and the roles played by various actors.Footnote ⁶⁵

In a similar way, Johan Östling, Anton Jansson, and Ragni Svensson Stringberg have foregrounded knowledge actors in studying the circulation of humanistic knowledge in post-war society. In their account, columnists, researchers, authors, and intellectuals are significant, but so too are managers of publishing companies, TV entrepreneurs, periodical editors, organisers of public education, and sundry other persons. These humanist knowledge actors had varying backgrounds, profiles, and functions, but were active, individually or together, in public knowledge arenas. Often these actors had university educations in the humanities, and not a few had completed a doctorate, but people who lacked academic experience were also important for the humanities in the public sphere during the post-war decades.Footnote ⁶⁶

One important message in our studies is that co-operation among a number of different actors is required for knowledge to be set in motion. Who these actors are varies from one era to another. This means that historians of knowledge must investigate particular role distributions and constellations. Individuals are thus significant as knowledge actors, but they are never alone. Of this, we are convinced.

Our approach is consistent with the main points of departure for the circulation of knowledge described earlier. For example, Lissa Roberts maintains that circulation should not be understood as having to do with something being moved from a central to a local context only to later return to its point of origin. She feels instead that circulation should be used to avoid privileged positions that are taken for granted, such as European metropoles and learned societies.Footnote ⁶⁷ Similarly, Kapil Raj affirms that the strength of a circulation perspective is that it gives an actor’s role to all those involved in knowledge processes. By this, he does not mean that the power and opportunities of historical actors are evenly distributed – on the contrary – but he does maintain that a circulation analysis is an advantageous way to empirically investigate these power relationships, rather than assuming that there exists a certain relationship of dominance that consistently manifests itself in particular ways.Footnote ⁶⁸

Raj and his colleagues have developed a vocabulary for analysing a broader repertoire of actors. Using concepts like go-betweens, intermediaries, and brokers of knowledge, they have been able to capture the dynamics and hierarchies of various knowledge processes.Footnote ⁶⁹ They have often taken colonial connections as a starting point, wishing to problematise the relationship between presumed centres and peripheries, although the concepts can also be used in other contexts, for example to demonstrate the multiplicity of actors involved in the production and circulation of knowledge.

This type of concept can also be used to study other phenomena. For instance, historian of education Johannes Westberg has discussed nineteenth-century teachers using the concept of knowledge brokers as a point of departure (a concept he has taken from researchers in the educational and health sciences). It is obvious that teachers worked in classrooms and taught children, but Westberg is interested in their other roles as knowledge actors. Many of them, not least in the countryside, had other mandates as well, for example in political bodies, libraries, or banks. As knowledge brokers they could be confident in the authority they had as teachers, while they simultaneously functioned as bridge builders between the educational system and other sectors of society. Using this analytical concept, a multifaceted picture emerges of teachers from that time.Footnote ⁷⁰

Another way of approaching knowledge actors is through network or field analyses of various kinds. One tradition, inspired by Pierre Bourdieu among others, reveals how individuals are included in various groups based on the social or cultural capital they possess. These networks are vital for maintaining systems of power and promoting careers. Elite schools and top universities have become the objects for many studies of this kind.Footnote ⁷¹ Other researchers use digital tools to map the relationships and patterns of movement of knowledge actors. In one large project, the early modern European Republic of Letters was visualised using the voluminous correspondences of, among others, famous and lesser-known philosophers and scholars.Footnote ⁷² Another method of analysing networks is that employed by Harald Fischer-Tiné. One of his books investigates medical history in Colonial India, specifically the parallel formation of Western colonial medicine and the transformation of local South Asian varieties of the healing arts in the nineteenth century. He concludes that medical knowledge developed in polycentric communication networks, a concept he deploys to pluralise a centre–periphery model that otherwise risks giving the impression that all significant knowledge production occurred in a metropole (London, Edinburgh, Oxford) while the colonies supplied only the raw materials of science. He argues instead that Bombay and Calcutta were what Bruno Latour has called centres of calculation – central locations for knowledge generation with their own authoritative networks. Because standards regulating South Asian scientific practice were different from and less strict than those in Great Britain, new and sometimes unconventional methods were given greater latitude, thereby benefiting the development of medical knowledge.Footnote ⁷³

Knowledge-historical studies of actors can, however, just as well focus on other domains than science or medicine. Anna Nilsson Hammar and Svante Norrhem have investigated servants in noble households in the seventeenth century. By analysing supplications from servants to their masters, these two historians demonstrate that a significant amount of both theoretical and practical knowledge – such as administrative, legal, and economic knowledge – was required to navigate these households and thereby maintain or improve one’s position.Footnote ⁷⁴ Researchers in the history of childhood and youth have explored the roles younger persons may have played as knowledge actors. For instance, Björn Lundberg argues that students were important actors in creating awareness of global issues in the 1960s. He demonstrates how school campaigns contributed to setting knowledge in motion.Footnote ⁷⁵

The perspective of power is central in many investigations of history’s knowledge actors. For example, there has long been a feminist current in the history of science. Susan Leigh Star and Margaret W. Rossiter are among those who took an early interest in gendered structures in the academy. Since then several gender historical studies have demonstrated how the traditional male professor was dependent on other knowledge actors for his work, not infrequently more or less invisible women. Typical examples from the natural sciences include a celebrated male professor’s human computers and laboratory assistants, who were never mentioned at the publication of an epoch-making scientific work.Footnote ⁷⁶ A particular variant of this social order was ‘the scientific family’. Within the framework of marriage, a couple could engage in a kind of scientific teamwork, but there was no doubt about who ranked highest and enjoyed the most prestige, even when the wife also possessed solid academic qualifications. Additionally, it was long expected that a professor’s wife would not only be her husband’s assistant or secretary, but that she would also assume the role of hostess at dinners and other representational functions in the home.Footnote ⁷⁷

An important concept in many newer studies of knowledge actors is the scientific persona. This concept, as defined by Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum, can be seen as a kind of cultural identity that materialises at the intersection of an individual’s biography and a societal institution. The persona influences the individual’s body and mind while simultaneously forming a collective; it designates a species rather than a person. A scientific persona – whether an instrument maker, a technocrat, or an independent scholar – takes shape in a specific historical context, but may undergo changes. At any given moment, the number of possible forms is, however, clearly limited.Footnote ⁷⁸ Herman Paul has approached personae in the humanities in a similar manner, singling out what holds a scholarly persona together, such as common virtues, skills, and desires.Footnote ⁷⁹ In a study of Marie Curie, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén has also used the persona concept to analyse the construction of the world’s best-known female researcher. Additionally, her book is a good example of how historians, when focusing on one person, can get at so much more than a single individual, in this case everything from intellectual property to celebrity culture.Footnote ⁸⁰ And of course the persona concept can also be applied to other types of knowledge actors, not just scientists.

Most knowledge-historical studies of actors seem to be synchronic – that is, they investigate how individuals or collectives functioned as knowledge actors in one particular era. However, it is quite possible to also imagine diachronic studies that follow change and continuity for a certain type of actor over longer periods of time. In this spirit, Peter Burke has written a book on the polymath as a historical type, from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag. He identifies five hundred people who can be classified as polymaths, but he is not content with creating a group portrait of some of the most colourful individuals from the history of learning. Instead, Burke examines details and uncovers larger patterns in the history of advanced knowledge. On the basis of the polymath as a knowledge actor, he illuminates the shifting conditions of the formation of knowledge from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries, not least comprehensive questions concerning the necessity and curse of specialisation.Footnote ⁸¹

In several studies, Sven Dupré and his colleagues have also adopted longer temporal perspectives to study the skills and capacities of various knowledge actors. In an anthology he co-edited with Christine Göttler, attention is focused on the intricate relationship between knowledge and discernment in early modern artists’ communities and learned circles. Discernment was linked to a special ability to discover the secrets of nature or existence, and was considered a kind of knowledge restricted to genuine experts in various artistic and scientific fields.Footnote ⁸²

In other words, there are multiple analytic possibilities for studying knowledge actors. We therefore doubt the validity of Suzanne Marchand’s fears about the persistence of a primacy of structures in the history of knowledge. Nevertheless, the history of knowledge must also study other objects than individuals and their lives. It is therefore high time we move on to a discussion of the institutions of knowledge.

2.3 The Institutions of Knowledge

Institutions have long been an object of study for those of us interested in the history of knowledge. In the history of education preschools, schools, and folk high schools (independent adult education colleges) have received much attention; historians of science have concentrated on academies, research institutes, and laboratories; historians of books and media have written about archives, libraries, and museums; and political scientists and historians of politics have examined committee reports and parliamentary processes. These institutions of knowledge are often part of an established educational system, a scientific community, or political or cultural life. Elementary schools, teacher training colleges for women, and the university were, for instance, institutions of knowledge at certain times in modern history within a shared institutional system, where they constituted interdependent and interacting parts of a relatively well-delimited unit.Footnote ⁸³

However, a knowledge-historical perspective can also here contribute to increased understanding of a phenomenon, enabling us to see new connections. Not all institutions of knowledge have been components of formalised educational or scientific systems. The monastic system, established in the fifth and sixth centuries in France and Italy, originated in the eastern parts of the Roman Empire and in the Middle East. Older historiography often emphasised the spiritual and social functions of the monasteries, but based on the premises of this book they can equally well be considered knowledge institutions. Many monasteries acquired significant book collections, and because of their libraries, a good deal of learning survived the tumultuous events of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Furthermore, monasteries’ scriptoria were vital for securing the production of books; in many regions, especially from the ninth to the beginning of the thirteenth centuries, they had in practice a monopoly on the production of books.Footnote ⁸⁴

As always, a historian of knowledge can also focus on other epochs and phenomena. In the later part of the nineteenth century, think tanks began to appear in the United Kingdom, mainly with a focus on economic issues. These gradually became meeting places for politicians, researchers, and opinion leaders. After World War II, several American think tanks were established, many functioning as tools in the ideological and intellectual struggle of the Cold War. Since the 1980s, the number of thinks tanks has increased in many parts of the world. According to reports, there are today over 11,000 brain trusts with various political, scientific, and religious overtones. Some of these produce knowledge in a strict sense, while others concentrate on circulating particular types of information and forming opinions. But are these think tanks truly institutions of knowledge? Should we not rather see them as knowledge arenas of the kind introduced in the previous section, that is, as places that within a given framework offer opportunities for and set limits on the circulation of knowledge? And is it mainly knowledge that think tanks are interested in – are they not equally often promoting an ideological line, developing policy, or even spreading propaganda? A knowledge historian can profitably pose such questions.

A knowledge-historical approach can on a more fundamental level contribute to revising previously accepted interpretations of the development of well-established knowledge institutions. A classic institution to study is the university. In historiography, the university appears as an entirely European institution, whose beginnings can be traced back to Bologna and Paris in the High Middle Ages. An example of this is the introduction to A History of the University in Europe, where it is claimed that mediaeval European universities were ‘indisputably an original institution’ that ‘gradually spread to the whole of Europe and then to the whole world’.Footnote ⁸⁵

Recently an alternative historiography has begun to take shape. Two researchers of education, Roy Lowe and Yoshihito Yasuhara, are pioneers in this field. In their book The Origins of Higher Learning, they depict the rise of European universities in the twelfth century as the end point of a long process that began with the very oldest civilisations of Asia and the Middle East. Their point of departure is that all complex societies in history have had institutions of higher learning, and they thereby combine a global with a knowledge-historical perspective to make visible the significance of different knowledge institutions in the past. These institutions have varied in character and status, but the point Lowe and Yasuhara make is that all cultures with a certain degree of complexity need institutions that can safeguard, transmit, and – albeit to varying degrees – develop higher learning. From this vantage point, the European university is a specific variant of a more general historical phenomenon. At the same time, they do not deny that mediaeval universities were special, and that they, like no other institution of higher learning, developed into a global prototype in the early modern and modern eras.Footnote ⁸⁶

Inspired by Lowe and Yasuhara, it is thus possible to write history in which the university becomes only one example of an institution of higher learning. In order to understand its emergence and identify what was new in Europe of the High Middle Ages, it is useful to compare it with older institutions of knowledge. Precursors can be found in the Classical Mediterranean world. In Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, a more cohesive constellation of institutions of knowledge emerged. The first more permanent school was Plato’s Academy, where multiple subjects were taught. After his death, Plato’s disciples continued his work. At the same time, the Mouseion, one of antiquity’s foremost centres of learning, was founded in Alexandria. Here philosophers and other thinkers conducted research financed by the Ptolemies. Overall, these and other knowledge institutions had a very significant impact. Libraries, academies, and other educational establishments here acquired a form that became a model for later eras, not least in mediaeval and Renaissance Europe.Footnote ⁸⁷

Institutions of higher learning were obviously not only Western innovations. In the middle of the first millennium BCE, several centres of learning were founded on the Indian subcontinent along the two northern rivers, the Ganges and the Indus. These areas were characterised by political, religious, and cultural diversity, but the spread of Buddhism in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE contributed to a more widespread and more unified way of thinking in southern and south-eastern Asia. Several Buddhist monasteries were founded and some became intellectual power centres, for example Taxila in today’s Pakistan and Nalanda in present-day India. Further north in China, other institutions of knowledge developed, not least along the Huang He. Especially the latter part of the Zhou dynasty, 770–256 BCE, was characterised by scientific curiosity and intellectual vitality. In the fifth century BCE, Confucius quickly gathered a large group of followers, and because of them his ideas became foundational for Chinese society, despite his never establishing his own institution of learning. There were, however, other physical centres of higher learning. The so-called Jixia Academy, situated in eastern China in present-day Shandong, attracted a large group of learned men of varying philosophical and religious persuasions. Other forms of sophisticated knowledge, not least in the natural sciences and technology, developed in various types of state-run institutes.Footnote ⁸⁸

Examples from older Asian and European history indicate that numerous institutions of higher learning existed long before the emergence of the university in the high mediaeval Christian West. At the same time, it is obvious that the university as an institution of knowledge had its own distinctive features. Its fundamental mission was to transmit older truths. Research – in its present meaning of actively and systematically generating new, science-based knowledge – did not become a key concern of the university until the nineteenth century. Instead, mediaeval academic teachers essentially administered, handed down, and interpreted Classical or Christian authorities. This was accomplished mainly through lectures, but also through disputations, in both cases using Latin as a lingua franca. The raison d’être of the university was to provide advanced studies for future priests, lawyers, physicians, and civil servants based on the worldview of mediaeval culture.Footnote ⁸⁹

In a wider perspective, the mediaeval university turned out to be an extraordinarily vital institution that was able to survive under various societal systems. Referring back to the discussion of knowledge circulation, it is interesting to investigate how this model of advanced knowledge adapted to new realities when transferred to other parts of the world. When an institution is established in a new context it can be modelled to various degrees on an older pattern, but local circumstances always have an impact, and the institution may acquire other functions, structures, and tasks. For example, Spanish colonisers were the first and most active in founding universities on the American continents in the sixteenth century. Inspiration came mainly from the Spanish academic tradition, especially the University of Salamanca. Early on, the Spanish academic offensive in Latin America was interwoven with the greater Christian mission, and ecclesiastical orders usually played an important role at various kinds of educational institutions. It was not uncommon for a seminary or monastery to develop into a university, often maintaining its strong ecclesiastical character. This was the case for the first university established in the New World, in Santo Domingo in 1538 in present-day Dominican Republic. In 1551, the Spanish crown sanctioned founding universities in Lima and Mexico City.Footnote ⁹⁰

Consequently, by combining global and knowledge history, it is possible to reinterpret the history of the university and distance it from a Eurocentric norm. Similarly, other research into the history of knowledge can open up new perspectives on the history of knowledge institutions. Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen have, in a special issue of the Journal for the History of Knowledge, used the concept of bureaucratic knowledge for this purpose. They define bureaucracies as ‘socio-material structures in perpetual motion, which constantly adapt their procedures to meet shifting goals as they regulate state, economic, or religious affairs’. With this definition, Felten and von Oertzen challenge a modern understanding of bureaucracy closely linked to Max Weber, in order to be able to instead study and compare such things as churches, businesses, and states from different periods and cultures. They focus on the epistemic dimensions and knowledge practices of bureaucracies, in order to ‘recover actors’ ways of organizing the social and material worlds’.Footnote ⁹¹

This special issue also contains several empirical contributions that deal with bureaucratic knowledge or bureaucracies of knowledge. Harun Küçük writes about the practices of knowledge developed for taxing the population of the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. Sixiang Wang analyses how Korea in the early modern era built up a corps of translators and interpreters in the service of diplomacy. Anna Echterhölter investigates how German academics and bureaucrats mapped indigenous legal traditions in the colony of German New Guinea in the decades around 1900.Footnote ⁹²

Inspired by this type of research, it is possible to study the university as an institution of knowledge based on new approaches. Not least can the university’s administrative system, organisational form, and production of knowledge be linked to sweeping societal changes in the surrounding world. This is true of the processes of early modern state formation, of the Sovietisation of Russian universities after 1917, of the Europeanisation of the European universities since the 1980s, and of numerous other processes where institutions of knowledge have undergone significant changes.

In summary, in this section, we have introduced a few key concepts from the history of knowledge and demonstrated how they may be used. We are well aware that this focus means that we have not been able to draw attention to other fruitful concepts and perspectives in the field. For example, practical knowledge or ‘know-how’ has been studied by both Pamela H. Smith and Dagmar Schäfer.Footnote ⁹³ Other historians, including Joshua Ehrlich, have taken an interest in the politics of knowledge and the suppression of knowledge.Footnote ⁹⁴ Still others, such as Ann Blair, have analysed how knowledge scarcity and knowledge glut have been dealt with in different historical contexts.Footnote ⁹⁵

In this small Element, we cannot delve deeply into all the exciting subdivisions of the history of knowledge. In the following section, we will instead be more specific, and provide examples from our own research of how the history of knowledge can be conducted.

3.1 Introduction

As we have seen, the history of knowledge can be written in many different ways and via various specialisations. The field is open and invites researchers from different backgrounds and with different interests. At the same time, it cannot simply be a general meeting place for sundry researchers in the humanities who are interested in knowledge; if it were, it would risk becoming far too diffuse, lacking in identity. Instead, we feel that the field has and should have the capacity to generate research. It has doubtlessly been so for us.

In this section, we provide more tangible and empirically based examples of precisely what a knowledge-historical perspective might entail, and how it can give rise to new productive research. Above all, we would like to illustrate what sets knowledge-historical investigations apart from those of the history of culture, education, or science.

Our analytical point of departure is the circulation of knowledge, that is, one of the most popular concepts in the history of knowledge. We focus on two kinds of circulation. First, we take up what we call the societal circulation of knowledge. The starting point is, as was made clear in the previous section, that knowledge is studied as a broader societal phenomenon with a not insignificant social reach and importance. Second, we provide examples of how the circulation of knowledge shaped people’s lives. This means that knowledge in various ways impacted the trajectories of the lives of individuals and influenced their relationships to existence at large. Concretely, this could manifest itself as follows: acquired knowledge could influence the ideas, convictions, and identities of particular individuals, but skills and abilities picked up could also form the foundations of their professional paths and careers. In addition, knowledge could in diverse ways encourage action and cause people to maintain, adjust, or change habits, behaviours, or lifestyles.Footnote ⁹⁶

In the following, we will demonstrate how knowledge circulation can manifest itself. Our examples are drawn from three research fields where we have been active in recent years: environmental history, the history of the humanities, and the history of knowledge of shareholding. As researchers, we have dealt mainly with modern history in the Western world, and this specialisation is reflected in the historical examples we cite. At the same time, our goal is for these specific cases to illustrate more general points and problems in the history of knowledge. We begin each exemplification with circulation in society, and then move on to knowledge in people’s lives. It soon becomes obvious that it is often difficult to completely separate these two approaches: they tend to interact with each other, and at times are two sides of the same coin.

3.2 Knowledge in Circulation: Perspectives in Time and Space

With these examples – the breakthrough of the environmental movement, the history of the humanities, and the history of shares – we wanted to illustrate how the circulation of knowledge can be studied. We have in all three cases foregrounded both the movement of knowledge in society and the effect this has had on people’s lives. In addition, we wished to illustrate how a knowledge-historical perspective can contribute to new scholarly questions taking centre stage and new source materials, actors, and contexts becoming significant. The first example concerns knowledge in the natural sciences, but it is not the academic actors or the institutions of science that are essential. Using a knowledge-historical approach, we can instead show how a radical change in political and public consciousness came about with respect to environmental issues. The second example involves an expansion of the perception of humanists and their fields of activity, from the learned sphere to the broader public sphere. If the first example dealt with tipping points and breakthroughs of knowledge, we here emphasise continuities and the slow change of a humanistic culture of knowledge. The final case concerns a kind of everyday knowledge with comparatively weak links to established educational institutions such as schools and universities. This example shows how a knowledge-historical perspective can help us investigate socially important forms of knowledge that fall outside the framework of the histories of education and science.

Our three examples are rather specific, but we still want to believe that they contain more general knowledge-historical insights. At the same time, one can of course ask how universal our assumptions and approaches are. We have mainly dealt with the modern period, with a certain emphasis on the post-war era, and geographically we have remained mainly in Western Europe and North America. Are our analytic concepts and frameworks useful also with respect to other times and places?

Kajsa Weber, an expert on the history of early modern books and knowledge, has challenged us on these points. She argues that the understanding of society that forms the basis of our concept of the societal circulation of knowledge is only applicable to modern history and not valid in older contexts. Weber maintains that in early modern society a certain type of knowledge was reserved mainly for small societal groups, for example learned or ecclesiastical associations. In that society there was a strong sense of the legitimacy of hierarchical orders, and there was no egalitarian ideal like the one found in democratic mass societies. This meant that in the pre-modern period the circulation of at least certain kinds of knowledge by definition was an elite phenomenon, and that it is difficult to argue for a broader societal breakthrough.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ It is possible that it was not before the emergence of a civic public sphere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a press corps and a new kind of book market, that preconditions were created for the kind of societal circulation of knowledge exemplified above.

Other researchers could challenge us on other points. For instance, Federico Marcon, a historian specialising in early modern Japan, has emphasised the risk of uncritically using knowledge-historical perspectives developed in a Western research context for conditions in, say, East Asia.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Maria Bach, who has investigated Indian economists of the nineteenth century, has in a similar way contributed to problematising Western starting points in the study of the history of knowledge.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Global historian Lisa Hellman has also sounded a note of caution. She has pointed out the necessity of analysing the global dynamics of power in the production and circulation of knowledge, especially the importance of considering ‘coerced actors’ and their limited room to manoeuvre.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

The question then becomes how universal our analytical concepts – such as knowledge arena, knowledge actor, and circulation of knowledge – actually are. These are interesting reflections worth considering, and they deserve serious discussion and empirical examination. More generally, these points of view indicate the importance of historians of knowledge not limiting themselves to one particular period, geographical area, or segment of society, but instead remaining open to impetuses and insights from researchers with specialities other than their own. We hope therefore that the international knowledge-historical community will also in future embrace researchers with diverse specialities and backgrounds.