War By Other Means: the Art and Science of Fireworks in Europe, 1500-1850

Fireworks exploded into European culture at the end of the sixteenth century as central components of court spectacle. In the eighteenth century, this role was dramatically transformed as enlightened savants and pyrotechnicians found new commercial and utilitarian uses for fireworks. My work follows this transition and explores the variety of competing forms of knowledge, skill, and labour which led to the change.

Traditionally, the history of fireworks has been examined by historians of art and architecture, who scour courtly displays for their hidden allegory and political symbolism, and by pyrotechnicians who present pyrotechny as a fumbling art brought to perfection only with the application of chemical science. Fireworks are thus presented as either being ‚texts’ to be deciphered, or as footnotes to the greater progress of science.

I challenge these accounts by pointing to a complex economy of knowledge, skill, and labour which lay behind fireworks spectacles. Fireworks history can be reread as a story of constant and changing intersections and contests between various groups of pyrotechnicians, natural philosophers, courtiers, artists and entrepreneurs during the early modern period. These contests not only transformed the manner in which fireworks were made, comprehended, and performed during this time, but also shaped the broader culture of arts and sciences.

Exploring the culture of pyrotechnic production thus contributes to debates in the history of science about the interaction of arts and sciences, and the relationship of scientific knowledge and practical skill and labour. Often, arts are contrasted to sciences in terms of essential divisions between ‚thinking’ and ‚doing’, ‚theory’ and ‚practice’, and opposed cultures of openness and secrecy, tradition and innovation etc.. Yet fireworks were never clearly any of these things, and the terms are better viewed as positions in arguments over what the nature of fireworks practice should be. For example, some protagonists tried to make fireworks a ‚science’ while others tried to make it an ‚art’; Competing groups labelled competitors as conservative and secretive, and their own work as open and progressive; fireworks could be a resource for scientific arguments and science could be a resource for fireworks. There were no easy divisions, essences, or contrasts – rather a complex of interactions and contests whose result was the gradual transformation of fireworks’ performance, use, and definition over time.

Finally, this project also argues that a valuable way to make sense of the diverse attributions and arguments given pyrotechnic work in the early modern period is to pay attention to the places where fireworks were made, performed, and discussed. Different sites were invested with different rules for understanding, using, and debating fireworks, so debates were as much geographical as intellectual and practical. One way to read the history of fireworks, and of arts and sciences more generally, is as a process whereby different social and physical spaces are brought into contact, forced together, or separated. The transition of fireworks from court spectacle to utilitarian and commercial technology depended fundamentally on the dynamics of sites such as the arsenal laboratory, the travelling pyrotechnic family, the scientific academy, the pleasure garden and the court.