Doctoral Dissertation Research: Ordering Knowledge, Reordering Empire

引言：该项目将研究隐含在17世纪英国科学经验知识生产实践中的社会结构。这些结构在大西洋彼岸建立的新英国殖民地的组织结构中得到了重述。也就是说，英国科学的知识经济在大英帝国的政治经济学中得到了重构。为了说明这一点，本项目将详细重建这一时期英国的实用科学知识经济。然后，它将根据这些知识创造实践，对17世纪英国科学家发挥了突出作用的殖民冒险中的政治和经济发展过程进行一系列案例研究。案例中包括哈德逊河？美国海湾公司以及新英格兰、弗吉尼亚、卡罗莱纳、牙买加和丹吉尔的殖民地。这些案例研究将于2008年9月至2009年2月期间在相关的英语档案馆进行。知识价值：该项目考虑了三次现代性转型的共性，这些转型之间的具体联系迄今尚未得到学者的研究；也就是伴随英国科学革命而来的实践科学管理的革命，17世纪英国商人资本主义跨越大西洋的扩张，以及英帝国内部政治结构的发展首次将全球贸易管理作为国家的核心关注点。在此过程中，将做出以下三个智力贡献：1)建立一个理解科学革命的新模型，该模型将17世纪的科学发展与其他现代化发展（如国家形成）结合起来考虑；2)科学？它们跨越了政治、社会、经济和宗教的界限？是17世纪大西洋殖民经历的基础，其程度尚未被历史学家充分认识到；3)一种理解17世纪科学与商业关系的新方式，不仅考虑了探索的结果和商业的扩张如何塑造了欧洲人对世界的理解，而且考虑了科学本身如何塑造了扩张的过程。更广泛的影响：该项目将促进对全球商业体系起源的更深入的历史理解，以及过去和现在科学与商业之间关系的含义。这项研究的结果将通过在学术会议上的演讲和在学术期刊上的文章传播给学术听众。将通过以书籍形式出版成果和通过制定关于科学革命的本科和研究生教学大纲来实现更广泛的传播；近代早期世界的科学与商业以及大西洋世界的经济和政治发展史。

Introduction: The proposed project will examine the social structures implicit in practices of empirical knowledge production in seventeenth-century English science. It will argue that those structures were recapitulated in the organization of the new English colonies then being established across the Atlantic. That is to say, the knowledge economy of English science was reconstituted in the political economy of the British Empire. To illustrate this point, the project will reconstruct in detail the knowledge economy of practical science in this period in England. It will then examine in light of those knowledge-making practices a series of case studies on the process of political and economic development in seventeenth-century colonial ventures in which English scientists played a prominent role. Among the cases are the Hudson?s Bay Company and the colonies of New England, Virginia, Carolina, Jamaica, and Tangier. Research on these case studies will be conducted at the relevant English archives between September 2008 and February 2009. Intellectual Merit: This project considers the commonalities in three transitions to modernity whose specific interconnection has heretofore gone unexamined by scholars; namely, the revolution in the management of practical science that accompanied the scientific revolution in England, the expansion of English merchant capitalism across the Atlantic in the seventeenth century, and the development of political structures within the English empire that for the first time took the management of global trade to be a central concern of the state. Three intellectual contributions will made in doing so: 1) A new model for understanding the Scientific Revolution which considers developments in seventeenth-century science in conjunction with other modernizing developments such as state formation; 2) An argument that science?which operated across political, social, economic, and religious boundaries?was foundational to the colonial experience in the seventeenth-century Atlantic to an extent as yet not fully recognized by historians; and 3) A new way of understanding the relationship between science and commerce in the seventeenth century, considering not only how the results of exploration and the expansion of commerce shaped European understanding of the world, but also how the sciences themselves shaped the process of expansion. Broader impacts: This project will foster a deeper historical understanding of the origins of our global commercial system and of the implications of the relationship between science and commerce both in the past and in the present day. Results of the study will be disseminated to scholarly audiences through presentations at academic conferences and through articles in scholarly journals. Wider dissemination will be achieved through publishing the results in book form and through the development of undergraduate and graduate syllabi on the scientific revolution; on science and commerce in the early modern world; and on the history of economic and political development in the Atlantic world.