page  from encyclopedia on the “twelve sciences”

Caption: A book page taken from the sixteenth-century encyclopedia on “twelve sciences”, written by Nev'î Efendi.

Source: open access, Open Collections Program at Harvard University, Houghton Library, Harvard University (https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/islamic-heritage-project/catalog/40-990114152050203941)

 

Working Group (2020-2027)

Agriculture and the Making of Sciences (1100–1700)

The science of farming is a science full of benefits; it is the origin of all industries.” ʿ ilm-i filāḥat ʿ ilm-i pür menāfiʿ ve aṣl-ı cemi-i ṣanāyıʿ, Nevi Efendi (1533/4–1598)

Agriculture essentially means reducing complex ecosystems to controlled habitats for a few selected species of plants and animals. It encourages meticulous observation of natural patterns, and its improvement and stability often provide the backdrop for experimentalism and natural history.

This working group explores how the quotidian labour of the field informed the disparate ways of organizing knowledge across pre-modern Middle East and Sinographic realms. Our sights train on:

  1. Boundary work: how historical actors classified and negotiated “peasantly” knowledge among various fields of knowledge in Asian cultures. Some of these fields of knowledge parallel modern disciplines, such as medicine, hydrology, forestry, geography, or botany, but nevertheless had very different boundaries, teleologies, and structures. Others have no comparable Western counterpart. We aim to comprehend the “scientific” rationale underlying these domains of learning.
  2. Material practices: the role of empirical observation, argumentative styles, and experimentation in this boundary work. Across the Islamicate and the Sinographic world, agriculture formed the economic backbone while political power was concentrated among landowning elites. These elites, while removed from direct agricultural labor, positioned themselves as learned stewards of the land. Such hands-on engagement of elites with the material realities of agriculture—while often mediated through hired labor—generated both practical and theoretical knowledge. Our purpose is to elucidate these generative processes, while remaining particularly attentive to the agency of material actions. 

Recent Activities

Reading Group “Agriculture, Metrology, and Statecraft in the Sinographic World, 1000–1850,” held on every other Tuesday from 15:00–17:00, beginning 23.01.2024.

Reading Group “Agriculture in the History of Science,” held fortnightly on Fridays, 11.11.2022–10.02.2023.

News & Upcoming

Edited volume in preparation, edited by Justin Niermeier-Dohoney and Aleksandar Shopov: “Toward a Global History of Soil: Sciences, Practices, and Materialities in the Early Modern World”  (Brill, forthcoming).

The group has partnered with Brill to launch the book series     “Agriculture and the Making of Sciences, 1100–1700: Texts, Practices and Transcultural Transmission of Knowledge in Asia.”

A chain-pump depicted in Wang Zhen’s Nongshu

A chain-pump depicted in Wang Zhen’s Nongshu (“The Book on Agriculture”), first published in Yuan-period China. Source: open access, the Naikaku Bunko Collection, National Archives of Japan Digital Archive (https://www.digital.archives.go.jp/das/image/F1000000000000099582)

 

News & Press

Academic publisher Brill releases new open-access series Agriculture and the Making of Sciences

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Call for Papers: Conference on Scientific, Practical, and Material Culture of Soil in the Premodern World

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Past Events

A Green-Colored Leaf Called Tabaġa: Early Ottoman Inquiries into an American Plant

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Reinventing Disaster in Yuan China

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Agriculture and the Making of Sciences

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Agriculture and the Making of Sciences

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Digitizing Land: Methods and Visualizing a Fifteenth-Century Egyptian Cadastral Survey

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Soil and Farming Implements in Medieval and Early Modern Egypt

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Mapping Soil Types in a Fifteenth-Century Egyptian Cadastral Survey

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Famine Foods in the Early Modern Sinosphere

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Agriculture and the Making of Sciences, 1100-1700

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Agriculture and the Making of Sciences, 1100-1700

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Agriculture and the Making of Sciences, 1100-1700

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Soil Fertilisation in Mamluk and Ming Agricultural Manuals

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European Discourses on the Effects of Indian Foods during the 15th to 18th Centuries: From the Fruits of Paradise to the Racialization of Nutrition

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Towards a Global History of Soil: Sciences, Practices, Materialities and Mobilities, 1100-1700

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Botanical Knowledge of Food Plants in Middle and Late Imperial China

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Soils, Stars, and Statecraft: Cosmological Conceptions of Agriculture in China and Europe, ca. 1600-1789

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Water’s Benefits: Scholarly Knowledge and Statecraft Science

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Moonrise, Moonset, and Planting Times

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The Agrarian Structure of the Sultanate of Mysore (1761-1799)

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Putting Knowledge to Practice: "Reading" Agricultural Terraces in Medieval Palestine

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Astrometeorology and Global Climate Theory: Interpreting John Goad's Weather Notebooks, 1652-1682

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Projects