When I opened the course handbook last week, I was glad see that the readings for our eighth tutorial really coincided well with my ongoing research. The aim of my project is to recreate and study the often-overlooked knowledge trading networks that existed between French and British scientists in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, and until now I had been unaware of the quite specific approaches used by transnational historians to study agents and processes of cross-cultural transfer. Each of the key readings set for the week provided very useful methodological framing devices for my topic.
The most valuable, in terms of my focus, was described in the article provided by Lux and Cook. The ‘weak tie’ approach to studying scientific networks that they advocated brought my attention to the importance of devoting more research to connections between less visible French and British botanists in the Antilles. The works of sociologists like Granovetter and Latour (to which I was previously ignorant) seem to fit neatly with the aims of my project: they hypothesized that scientific knowledge might circulate more effectively between individuals who are relatively less attached to formal institutions of knowledge cultivation. In sum, that ‘individuals with many weak ties’ to these institutions could be, and could have been, ‘best placed’ to diffuse new scientific discoveries. Thus far my research on Caribbean botany has been driven by a focus on ‘elite’ cultivators of knowledge who were stationed at state-sponsored institutions of science. My exposure to sociological theories of scientific networking has since however brought my attention to extending the scope of my reading to interconnections between relatively less elite cultivators of knowledge in the eighteenth-century; supervisors of private rather than public gardens in Jamaica and Saint Domingue for example.
But I also took some very useful conceptual perspectives from Secord’s work on what he termed ‘knowledge in transit’. His idea of scientific information as a medium of cross-cultural communication stood out and made me think more about what might be describe quite literally as the science of diplomacy: the way in which eighteenth-century intellectuals in the Caribbean cultivated and selectively diffused the botanical knowledge they held in order to forge cross-cultural connections between Britain and France at the colonial periphery. Certainly, thinking about botanists in this light might strengthen my hypothesis that scientists in the eighteenth-century could serve a dual function as informal envoys and formal cultivators of useful knowledge. Frontier diplomacy between France and Britain in the Antilles might well have relied more on botanists than has traditionally been assumed.