Doctoral Dissertation Research: Ordering Knowledge, Reordering Empire

简介：该项目将研究17世纪英国科学经验知识生产实践中隐含的社会结构。本书将论证，这些结构在大西洋彼岸新建立的英国殖民地的组织中得到了概括。也就是说，英国科学的知识经济在大英帝国的政治经济中得到了重构。为了说明这一点，该项目将详细重构这一时期英国实用科学的知识经济。然后，它将根据这些知识的实践，审查一系列的案例研究的政治和经济发展的过程中，在17世纪的殖民企业，英国科学家发挥了突出的作用。其中包括哈德逊？s湾公司和新英格兰、弗吉尼亚、卡罗莱纳、牙买加和丹吉尔的殖民地。2008年9月至2009年2月期间，将在相关英文档案馆对这些个案研究进行研究。智力优势：这个项目考虑了三个向现代性过渡的共同点，其具体的相互联系迄今为止还没有被学者研究过;即伴随着英国科学革命的实用科学管理革命，英国商业资本主义在17世纪跨越大西洋的扩张，以及英格兰帝国内部政治结构的发展，这是第一次将全球贸易的管理作为国家的核心关注点。三个智力的贡献将这样做：1）一个新的模型来理解科学革命，认为在17世纪的科学发展与其他现代化的发展，如国家的形成; 2）一个论点，科学？它跨越政治、社会、经济和宗教界限？在某种程度上，历史学家还没有完全认识到这一点; 3）一种理解17世纪科学与商业关系的新方法，不仅考虑到探险的结果和商业的扩张如何塑造了欧洲人对世界的理解，而且考虑到科学本身如何塑造了扩张的过程。更广泛的影响：该项目将促进对我们全球商业体系的起源以及过去和现在科学与商业之间关系的影响的更深刻的历史理解。研究结果将通过在学术会议上的介绍和在学术期刊上发表文章的方式向学术界传播。将通过以书籍形式出版成果和通过编制本科生和研究生关于科学革命、现代世界早期的科学和商业以及大西洋世界经济和政治发展史的教学大纲来实现更广泛的传播。

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.