Working Group: Itineraries of Materials, Recipes, Techniques, and Knowledge in the Early Modern World

Can we speak of a unified early modern world? Over the last decade at least, historians have debated whether overarching global connections can be detected in the period from about 1350 to about 1850. Among the various possibilities put forward--the use of gunpowder, conflict between nomads and settled urban dwellers as population grew and cultivated land use increased, the spread of pandemics, centralization of government, vernacularization of canonical textual corpora, conceptions of universal rule and millennial expectations—one phenomenon has been raised more persistently than others: the connections of commerce and increasing global economic integration, especially in the burgeoning trade in precious metals and luxury commodities across long-distance commercial networks. Of course, trade had flowed across Eurasia, around the Indian Ocean, and over the Mediterranean for millennia, but in this “early modern” period, larger parts of the globe became connected by the establishment of more or less regularized trading routes. Commodities and tribute bounced and jostled over these routes and along with them flowed knowledge. Knowledge moved in individuals as they migrated or were resettled in new territories and it moved along with sailors, soldiers, and merchants as they pursued trade and war. It traveled in objects, instruments, manuscripts, and printed books as trade routes opened up and collectors avidly sought rare and beautiful things, and it moved as factors sent back information to the metropolis. It moved as new institutions of European colonial administration, such as the Casa de Contratación of the Spanish monarchy, of religious propagation, such as the Jesuits, as well as of the new science, such as the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris, were established and began to sponsor information gathering of all kinds. Knowledge moved not just geographically but also epistemically, as knowledge systems of different social and cultural groups intersected. Knowledge was transformed as it traveled from local settings and vernacular modes of expression—such as manufactories in Jingdezhen and Puebla, shipbuilding arsenals in Calcutta and Ragusa, workshops and gardens everywhere, curiosity cabinets, and ships, to name only a few examples—to the knowledge and written forms of evidential studies, Bencao (materia medica) and pulu texts, astronomy and astrology, and of the “new experimental philosophy.” This movement resulted in new knowledge at the same time that it formed new hierarchies of intellectual authority. Does this global circulation of knowledge tie together an early modern world? Did it help bring into being new epistemologies and knowledge regimes? Can the rise of the “new philosophy” be linked to the movement of goods in the early modern period?

Much recent work in the history of science has focused on the circulation of knowledge within Europe and across the Atlantic World, and this has resulted in much new information about circulation, exchange, and the transformation of knowledge, as well as new conceptual and methodological perspectives on the circulation of knowledge, and, especially, on the issues of local and global in the formation of scientific knowledge. Some recent work has also begun to uncover the knowledge networks of East Asia, and with the work of the “new thalassology” on the Mediterranean, historians have also begun to examine the circulation of knowledge in this region. I think it is fair to say that the movement of knowledge across Eurasia (and especially across Central Asia) during the same period has been much less well-researched, despite some recent scholarship on the silk routes. Thus this MPIWG Working Group will consider in the first instance the movement and circulation of knowledge across the Eurasian continent in the “late medieval” and “early modern period”—ca. 750 to 1850 (this large span of time is necessary to include all parts of Eurasia, which define “early modern” differently). Participants will be asked to conduct research on and write chapters for an edited volume on the physical and epistemic travels of various forms of natural knowledge in this period.