Interconnected - Actors, Objects, and Ideas on the Move

GRAINES Summer School, St Andrews, 7-10 June 2015

Tag: knowledge

Hunting Whales and Making Knowledge: Dundee’s Globalisation through Trans-Maritime Whaling, 1750-1914

May 20, 2015 / / 0 Comments

My name is Matthew Ylitalo, and I am a first-year PhD student in Modern History at the University of St Andrews. Previously I studied in the United States before completing an MLitt at St Andrews. At Interconnected, I am keen to discuss processes by which one may identify existing networks ‘hidden’ within written sources and documentation. Furthermore, I desire to understand better how others are applying transnational and spatial history theories and methods to problems in their research.

Over the last fifty years, authors worldwide have contributed to a vast literature on whaling in the

Whaling Map East Coast US

Whaling Map East Coast US

long nineteenth century. Many of these narratives are written from an almost exclusively national and/or economical perspective. This circumscribing approach has effectively relegated whaling narratives to the realm of niche histories mostly cut-off from the local-global frameworks which brought it about. As a result, the participation of non-Western and remote actors in transnational whaling networks, the globalising roles of artisan industries, and the resulting production, circulation and refashioning of knowledge are not well understood. My research endeavours to identify these transmaritime relationships, analyse its transfers and epistemic migrations and assess what impact these exchanges had on Dundee, Scotland, in comparison to other transatlantic whaling ports.

Whaling Ship

Whaling Ship

Many towns throughout coastal Scotland engaged in whaling during the nineteenth century. On a transatlantic scale, ports such a New Bedford, Massachusetts and later, Sandefjord, Norway far outstripped Dundee in the magnitude of their whaling operations. But while most whaling communities followed an ephemeral pattern of existence, which consisted of hunting whales intensively for several decades, falling into decline and then realigning to different locally- or regionally-oriented commercial orbits, Dundee’s wooden whalers plied the icy waters of the ‘northern fishery’ for over 160 years. During that time, Dundonians established strong economic and cultural links with Shetlanders, Newfoundlanders and the Inuit of the Arctic. The Scottish diaspora seems to have extended these connections even further to Australia, New Zealand and Canada. By the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, exploration committees of the ‘Heroic Age’ sought out Dundee’s whalers for support in polar expeditions. Furthermore, prominent scientists from Dundee and St Andrews, such as Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, became influential figures within the whaling and scientific communities. Through the agency of its whaling crews, Dundee’s transmaritime interconnections between local experience and global structures not only helped materially shape today’s city, but also it laid planks for how modern polar science and environmental conservation would develop. Although never the geographical ‘the gateway to the North’, by the early twentieth century, Dundee, even with its whale trade flagging, could claim that in many respects, it was the ‘City of Discovery’ for knowledge of the polar regions.

 

Key subject-matter texts used in research:

Burnett, D. Graham, The Sounding of the Whale: Science and the Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (London, 2012).

Headland, Robert, ‘Geographical Discoveries in Antarctica by the Whaling Industry’ in Basberg, Bjørn; Ringstad, Jan Erik and Wexelsen, Einar (eds.), Whaling and History: Perspectives on the Evolution of the Industry (Sandefjord, Norway, 1993).

Jackson, Gordon, The British Whaling Trade (London, 1978).

Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the Social:  An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford, 2005).

Russell, Lynette, Roving Mariners:  Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790-1870 (Albany, 2012).

 

Tomlinson, Jim, Dundee and the Empire: ‘Juteopolis’ 1850-1939 (Edinburgh, 2014).

Tønnessen, J. N. and Johnsen, Arne O., The History of Modern Whaling, trans. R. I. Christophersen (Berkeley, 1982).

 

Key transnational, spatial and transcultural readings and articles of interest:

Baker, Alan R. H., Geography and History: Bridging the Divide (Cambridge, 2003).

Clavin, Patricia, ‘Defining Transnationalism’, Contemporary European History 14/4 (2005), 421-39.

Clavin, Patricia, ‘Time, Manner, Place: Writing Modern European History in Global, Transnational and International Contexts’, European History Quarterly 40/4 (2010), 624-640.

Iriye, Akira, Global and Transnational History:  The Past, Present, and Future (Basingstoke, 2013).

Tyrrell, Ian, Transnational nation : United States history in global perspective since 1789 (Basingstroke, 2007).

Drawing from Creole and Atlantic medical knowledge: the health service of the Saint-Domingue expedition (1802-1803)

May 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments

 

My name is Pierre Nobi and I am a graduate student in my second year of Sciences Po Paris’s Master in history. My Bachelor was also at Sciences Po, and I spent a year in exchange at the University of Bath (UK). My current research focuses on the health service of the French expedition to Saint-Domingue (present-day Haïti) in 1802-1803. Traditionally, its presence in the historiography is reduced to a brief overview of the yellow fever epidemic that decimated the French army and a discussion on how big a factor it was to the failure of the expedition. Moving past military history’s fetishisation of this factor of defeat, I aim to uncover instead the various actors and medical practices of the health service, and examine it as a “colonial medical encounter” (Thoral, 2012).

Thus, this health service must be replaced in the larger context of scientific developments in the colony of Saint-Domingue in the 18th century. I believe the geographical scope should be broadened too, as Saint-Domingue was at the heart of a well-connected Atlantic scientific world, and yellow fever epidemics plagued the whole of the West Indies, the Eastern coast of the United States and even Spain between the 1790s and the 1820s.

map yellow fever nobi

This map of the main epidemics in the Americas is still very much a work in progress

 

Transnational and network analysis are thus key approaches to my research, even though I still have much to learn about them, and thus I am looking forward to listening to your presentations and participating in the discussions. In my contribution to the summer school, I would like to present the two networks that the health officers turned to.

 

Creole network

While it is often described as if it were a homogeneous entity defined as metropolitan and military, the health service in fact incorporated numerous colonial physicians and surgeons, and consulted local botanists. Furthermore, while official healthcare was provided to soldiers in the colony’s hospitals, colonists and officers were often treated in their homes by women of colour. Health officers had the opportunity to witness, discuss and imitate this creole treatment. I am particularly interested in the process by which they appropriated this treatment and, much like the colonial physicians of the 18th century, “laid claim to the status of authors of new knowledge about American nature” (Murphy, 2011) by presenting these women as holders of a “vulgar” knowledge, leading to the “textual erasure” of their presence.

Atlantic network

The other network in which the health officers participated is the circulation of medical knowledge among physicians of the Atlantic world. French and British colonial physicians had already been sharing during the Seven Years’ war, but from the 1790s onward these exchanges boomed. Dominguan physicians emigrated during the Haitian Revolution and settled in the United States. They took part in the raging debate in America on the contagion of yellow fever, that also spread to much of the Atlantic world, and engaged the work of physicians from Britain and the West Indies. The health officers of the Saint-Domingue expedition inscribed their own research in this context, and they referred profusely to the opinion of American and British physicians. After the expedition, they presented themselves as American experts on yellow fever.

 

Bibliography

James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (eds.), Science and empire in the Atlantic world, New York, Routledge, 2008.

This edited volume is probably one of the key readings on history of science and colonization in the Atlantic. Delbourgo’ and Dew’s introduction, “The far side of the ocean”, lays the groundwork for the study of scientific journeys and research in the Atlantic, while the essays cover various geographic areas, such as Brazil, the United-States or Saint-Domingue. Susan Scott Parish’s essay “Diasporic African sources of Enlightenment knowledge” is also useful to understand the appropriation of African knowledge by colonial physicians.

Katherine Arner, « Making yellow fever American: the early American Republic, the British Empire and the geopolitics of disease in the Atlantic world », Atlantic Studies, 2010, vol. 7, no 4, p. 447‑471.

Katherine Arner’s work has many connections to my own research. This article retraces the connections of the yellow fever debate in the United States with a “multi-centered Atlantic world”, and examines the transnational networks of physicians involved. (Her recent PhD is more complete but also less easily accessible :  Katherine Arner, The malady of revolutions: yellow fever in the Atlantic world, 1793-1828, PhD dissertation, John Hopkins University, Baltimore, 2014.

Arner, Making yellow fever american

Erica Charters, « Colonial disease, translation and Enlightenment: Franco-British medicine and the Seven Years’ War » in Frans De Bruyn and Shaun Regan (eds.), The culture of the Seven Years’ War: empire, identity, and the arts in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2014, p. 69‑90.

Erica Charters explores the networks of translations and citations of the medical publications of French and British colonial and naval physicians, which lays the ground for the connections of the 1790s and 1800s I am studying.

Charters, Colonial disease, translation and Enlightenment

James E. McClellan and François Regourd, The colonial machine: French science and overseas expansion in the Old Regime, Turhout, Brepols, DL 2011, 2011, 694 p.

This book, by the two main historians of science in Old Regime Saint-Domingue, explores the French scientific-technico-medical “colonial machine” and the various gears of its network – colonial physicians, metropolitan and colonial academies or botanical gardens, or the ministry of the navy and the colonies.

Kathleen Murphy, « Translating the vernacular: indigenous and African knowledge in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic », Atlantic Studies, 2011, vol. 8, no 1, p. 29‑48.

This article studies the process by which colonial physicians present themselves as the sole authors of the knowledge provided by Amerindian and African informants.

Murphy, Translating the vernacular

Travel, correspondence and constitution of scientific knowledge in the modern era: Michel Adanson (1727-1806), French naturalist and academic

May 12, 2015 / / 1 Comment

My PhD project, based on Michel Adanson’s scientific travels to Senegal (1748-1754), analyzes how scientific knowledge was shaped through correspondence – the written exchanges between a scientist in the field and his academic correspondent in the metropole.

From the 17th-18th century, scientists undertook trips to the French colonies and trading posts overseas. Their goal was to bring back new knowledge. In their endeavors, they had to rely on the support of the King (known as the “Protector of Science” Adanson, 1763). Another option was to be recruited by the French East India Company in order to travel and explore the trading areas. This was the case for Michel Adanson, naturalist and French academician. Nominated as correspondent of the Académie Royale des Sciences (Paris) in 1749 while he was in Senegal, Adanson periodically sent letters to his academic correspondents Réaumur and Bernard de Jussieu. These were not only reports of his daily activities, but also on his interactions in the contact zones.

Thus, my main interest in this research is to uncover the local systems of knowledge. While research on scientific travels has so far focused on the traveler and his collection, this study highlights his collaborators’ production of knowledge. Adanson’s correspondence allows these knowledge systems to be traced, since he mentions, at various points, his informants’ scientific contributions to his work and offers insights into their understanding.

Looking at correspondence in a transnational dimension, this investigative angle also contributes to the field of scientific epistolary studies. Until now, these studies have focused on the scholarly correspondence networks in the so-called “republic of science”. In addition to its elitist undertones, this approach confined the “public space of science” to the European geographical area. My project, contrary to this tradition, directs attention to the transnational dimension of scientific correspondence.

Ousmane Seydi is a PhD candidate at the University of Basel and member of the Basel Graduate School of History (BGSH). Before coming to Basel, I studied at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar (Senegal), from where I hold a Master’s degree in history.

My contribution to the summer school will be to discuss the use of Michel Espagne’s notion de transfert culturel in the context of transnational research. In relation to the focus of the summer school, this is the reading which inspires me the most.

The notion of transfert culturel has the particularity to add to the concept of “circulation of knowledge” giving it a more complete sense. Transfert culturel takes into account not only the circulation of knowledge, but also the direction of changes related to the passage of knowledge from one space to another. One other key point in this short but very dense introduction is the idea that knowledge is always constructed through a contact, a move. Espagne’s notion allows me to transcend the illusion of the eighteenth-century scientific exclusivism. In fact, this encompasses the notion of a confluence of knowledge, by, in my case, pinpointing external cultural ideas that penetrated the travel writings of scientists. Employing Espagne’s approach thus allows me to identify the voices of Adanson’s Senegalese informants in his scientific writings.

 

Bibliography:

Espagne, Michel, “La notion de transfert culturel”. Revue Sciences/Lettres 2013/1. http://rsl.revues.org/219.

Kapil, Raj, Relocating modern science: circulation and the construction of knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900, Houndmills and New york, Palgrave Macmilan, 2007.

Macleod, R., (ed.), Nature and empire: Science and the colonial entreprise, Osiris, seconde série, volume 15, 2000.

Krige, J., Kai-Henrik B., Global power knowledge: science and technology in international affairs, Osiris, seconde série, volume 21, 2006.

Green, E. M., “Plant knowledge at the Cape: A study in African and European collaboration”, International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol. 36, N°2,   2003, pp. 367-392

 

© 2026 Interconnected – Actors, Objects, and Ideas on the Move

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑