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Making the History of Early Modern Science: Reflections on a Discipline in the Age of Globalization *

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2017

Antonella Romano
Antonella Romano*
Affiliation:
Centre Alexandre Koyré – EHESS
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Abstract

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What kind of history is the history of science? To what extent does the academic research labeled as such delineate a homogeneous field? What are the current challenges that it faces? The recent translation of Simon Schaffer’s works into French, along with the publication of his 2014 Marc Bloch Lecture in the Annales, provides the framework for this article’s historiographical reflection on the profound changes that have taken place within the discipline over the last thirty years, particularly within a French context. The analysis is twofold. First, it aims to trace how new approaches to the sociology and anthropology of science have reconfigured the boundaries of the discipline. Second, it considers the effect of the abandonment of one of its major historiographical paradigms by most of the scholars currently working on early modern science: the scientific revolution as the rise of scientific modernity, underpinned by a Eurocentric vision of the production of knowledge. Although most research on the early modern period now strives to distance itself from this narrative, it must also face new challenges and questions—in particular the role of science in the processes of globalization and the multiplicity of sites and social configurations that participate in this change of scale. These challenges point towards new methods and styles in the history of science and, more broadly, the social sciences.

Type
The History of Science
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 70 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 307 - 334
Copyright
Copyright © Les Éditions de l’EHESS 2015

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank the review board of the Annales, who carefully read and critiqued the initial version of this article. I would also like to thank the following colleagues who willingly shared their doubts, comments, and thoughts with both honesty and generosity: Wolf Feuerhahn, Sabina Loriga, Rafael Mandressi, Dominique Pestre, Silvia Sebastiani, Stéphane Van Damme, and especially Simon Schaffer.

References

1. Schaffer, Simon, La fabrique des sciences modernes, XVIIe-XIXe siècle, trans. Aït-Touati, Frédérique, Marcou, Loïc, and Van Damme, Stéphane (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2014)Google Scholar. This work constitutes one of the author’s first “books,” published three years after a collection of articles translated into Spanish: Schaffer, , Trabajos de cristal: Ensayos de historia de la ciencia, 1650–1900, trans. Martiénez-Lage, Miguel and Pimentel, Juan (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2011)Google Scholar. The Spanish volume proposes a different selection of texts that throws the technological dimension of the investigation Schaffer has been conducting over the years into clearer relief. All of the articles chosen for the French volume, with the exception of “Newton on the Beach,” were written between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s. It should also be highlighted that the volume’s title was chosen by the editor and not the author.

2. Shapin, Steven, Une histoire sociale de la vérité. Science et mondanité dans l’Angleterre du XVIIe siècle, trans. Coavoux, Samuel and Steiger, Alcime (Paris: La Découverte, 2014)Google Scholar. Originally published as A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

3. Daston, Lorraine, L’économie morale des sciences modernes. Jugements, émotions et valeurs, trans. Lézé, Samuel (Paris: La Découverte, 2014)Google Scholar. Originally published as “The Moral Economy of Science,” Osiris 10 (1995): 3–24 Google Scholar. In the French volume, the translated article is accompanied by two texts by Stéphane Van Damme: “Lorraine Daston et la nouvelle histoire intellectuelle des sciences,” 7–18, and “Nous n’avons jamais été désintéressés: les sciences entre moralisation, éthique et affects,” 65–108. Himself an important figure in the international community of historians of science, Van Damme is the author of numerous studies that have greatly contributed to renewing the field for the early modern period. I will limit myself to citing his most recent book, À toutes voiles vers la vérité. Une autre histoire de la philosophie au temps des Lumières (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2014). He also contributed to the French translation of Schaffer’s collected articles mentioned in note 1.

4. Within Shapin’s extensive bibliography, I will simply cite his important contribution to the modern history of scientists: The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

5. This paradigm was resolutely surpassed in Schaffer’s study of the quarrel between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes cited in note 7. For Daston, see the texts by Van Damme cited in note 3 and Fassin, Didier, “Les économies morales revisitées,” Annales HSS 64, no. 6 (2009): 1237–66 Google Scholar.

6. Biagioli, Mario, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)Google Scholar. Whether or not Biagioli’s book circulated in France remains unknown, but awareness of his work was undoubtedly facilitated by the publication, two years later, of the article “Le prince et les savants. La civilité scientifique au XVIIe siècle,” Annales HSS 50, no. 6 (1995): 1417–53 Google Scholar. By placing the sociological perspective developed in Norbert Elias’ studies of Old Regime courtly societies at the center of his analysis, Biagioli proposed a shift in the sociological study of science along very different lines from science studies: the court (and therefore the prince) became one of the primary centers of scholarly innovation. In this way, he also broke new ground in Galilean studies by going beyond Pietro Redondi’s analysis, which aimed to reread the ins and outs of Galileo’s trial in terms of atomist philosophy: Redondi, Pietro, Galileo Heretic, trans. Rosenthal, Raymond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

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8. As early as 1982, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour edited a collection of English-language articles translated into French and entitled La science telle qu’elle se fait. Anthologie de la sociologie des sciences de langue anglaise (Paris: Pandore, 1982)Google Scholar. It was reprinted in 1991 by Éditions La Découverte, and its immediate reception calls out to be studied. The volume made two of Shapin’s articles available in French: “Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology,” Social Studies of Science 14 (1984): 481–520 Google Scholar, appeared as “Une pompe de circonstance: la technologie littéraire de Boyle”; “Phrenological Knowledge and the Social Structure of Early Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh,” Annals of Science 32, no. 3 (1975): 219–43 Google Scholar, as “La politique des cerveaux: la querelle phrénologique au XIXe siècle à Édimbourg.”

9. Koyré, Alexandre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957)Google Scholar, vii: “Time and again, when studying the history of scientific and philosophical thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—they are, indeed, so closely interrelated and linked together that, separated, they become ununderstanda-ble—I have been forced to recognize, as many others have before me, that during this period human, or at least European, minds underwent a deep revolution which changed the very framework and patterns of our thinking and of which modern science and modern philosophy are, at the same time, the root and the fruit. This revolution or, as it has been called, this ‘crisis of European consciousness,’ has been described and explained in many different ways.” Koyré’s two major works centered on the history of philosophical thought and on the history of scientific thought: Études d’histoire de la pensée philosophique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1961)Google Scholar, and Études d’histoire de la pensée scientifique (Paris: PUF, 1966)Google Scholar. On Koyré, see: Redondi, Pietro, ed., “Science: The Renaissance of a History,” special issue, History and Technology: An International Journal 4, no. 1/4 (1987)Google Scholar; Koyré, , De la mystique à la science. Cours, conférences et documents (1922–1962), ed. Redondi, Pietro (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 1986)Google Scholar.

10. The journal Science in Context was thus founded in 1987 with the following mission statement: “Science in Context is an international journal ... devoted to the study of the sciences from the points of view of comparative epistemology and historical sociology of scientific knowledge. The journal is committed to an interdisciplinary approach to the study of science and its cultural development—it does not segregate considerations drawn from history, philosophy and sociology. Controversies within scientific knowledge and debates about methodology are presented in their contexts.”

11. It is worth noting that French reviews of the original English edition of Leviathan were often along critical lines: Dominique Pestre, review of Shapin, and Schaffer, , Leviathan and the Air-Pump, in Revue d’histoire des sciences 43, no. 1 (1990): 109–16 Google Scholar.

12. Guesnerie, Roger and Hartog, François, eds., Des sciences et des techniques. Un débat (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 1998 Google Scholar).

13. Pestre, Dominique, “Pour une histoire sociale et culturelle des sciences. Nouvelles définitions, nouveaux objets, nouvelles pratiques,” Annales HSS 50, no. 3 (1995): 487–522 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. That same year, the journal published a dossier entitled “Rhétorique et civilité. L’histoire des sciences, XVIe–XVIIe s.,” Annales HSS 50, no. 6 (1995)Google Scholar, made up of Giovanna Ciffoletti, “La question de l’algèbre. Mathématiques et rhétorique des hommes de droit dans la France du XVIe siècle,” 1385–416, and Biagioli, Mario, “Le prince et les savants.” Two years later, in 1997, Annales HSS 52, no. 5 Google Scholar contained a dossier devoted to “Les expéditions scientifiques” and including the following studies: Bourguet, Marie-Noëlle and Licoppe, “Voyages, mesures et instruments. Une nouvelle expérience du monde au Siècle des lumières, Christian,” 1115–51 Google Scholar; Raj, Kapil, “La construction de l’empire de la géographie. L’odyssée des arpenteurs de Sa Très Gracieuse Majesté, la reine Victoria, en Asie centrale,” 1153–80 Google Scholar.

14. Here, I would like to refer to Goff, Jacques Le and Nora, Pierre, eds., Faire de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1974)Google Scholar, vol. 1, Nouveaux problèmes, vol. 2, Nouvelles approches, and vol. 3, Nouveaux objets. The title of Pestre’s article “Pour une histoire sociale” borrows this threefold division.

15. Callon, Michel, “Éléments pour une sociologie de la traduction. La domestication des coquilles Saint-Jacques et des marins-pêcheurs dans la baie de Saint-Brieuc,” special issue “La sociologie des Sciences et des Techniques,” L’année sociologique, 3rd ser., 36 (1986): 169–208 Google Scholar. That same year, the English translation was published in Law, John, ed., Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986)Google Scholar. For a summary, see Akrich, Madeleine, Callon, Michel, and Latour, Bruno, Sociologie de la traduction. Textes fondateurs (Paris: Presses des Mines, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Porter, Catherine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

16. On the Centre international de synthèse, see Biard, Agnès, Bourel, Dominique, and Brian, Éric, eds., Henri Berr et la culture du XXe siècle. Histoire, science et philosophie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996)Google Scholar; Gattinara, Enrico Castelli, Les inquiétudes de la raison. Épistémologie et histoire en France dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Vrin/Éd. de l’EHESS, 1998)Google Scholar.

17. Pestre, Dominique, introduction to L’étude sociale des sciences. Bilan des années 1970 et 1980 et conséquences pour le travail historique, ed. Pestre, Dominique (Paris: Cité des sciences et de l’industrie, 1992), 5–13 Google Scholar.

18. Latour, Bruno, “Les chantiers actuels des études sociologiques sur les sciences exactes,” in Guesnerie, and Hartog, , Des sciences et des techniques, 11–24 Google Scholar. The modest title of this article is quickly belied by the definition of science studies proposed on its first page: “[a] hitherto marginal domain that intersects and reformats preoccupations coming from history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, economics, and psychology applied to scientific practices and technologies as they are developed in laboratories and research departments.” For a more recent account that summarizes and develops earlier observations, see Pestre, Dominique, Introduction aux science studies (Paris: La Découverte, 2006)Google Scholar.

19. See the table of contents, which brings together some thirty articles based on seven themes: the sociology of science is paired with intellectual history; epistemology is placed alongside social history; area studies are examined through the lens of the relationship between scholarly traditions and cognition; and an entire section is devoted to the issue of scientific objectivity, based on Daston’s proposal.

20. See above, n. 9.

21. The golden age of great syntheses experienced an initial moment of glory in the 1950s: Hall, Alfred Rupert, The Scientific Revolution, 1500–1800: The Formation of the Modern Scientific Attitude (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1954)Google Scholar; Koyré, , From the Closed World Google Scholar; Kuhn, Thomas S., The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957)Google Scholar; and Butterfield, Herbert, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800, revised ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1957)Google Scholar. It was relayed in France by, for example, Taton, René, ed., Histoire générale des sciences, 3 vols. (Paris: PUF, 1957–1964)Google Scholar. For works that began putting things into perspective in the 1990s, see: David C. Lindberg and Westman, Robert S., eds., Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Shapin, Steven, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Osler, Margaret J., ed., Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dear, Peter, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and its Ambitions, 1500– 1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. For a presentation of this historiography, see Cohen, H. Floris, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

22. On the case of Descartes, see: Azouvi, François, Descartes et la France. Histoire d’une passion nationale (Paris: Fayard, 2002)Google Scholar; Van Damme, Stéphane, Descartes. Essai d’histoire culturelle d’une grandeur philosophique (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2002)Google Scholar. The same type of study could be carried out for all “national heroes,” and the historiography devoted to them read as a process of “nationalization,” in the tradition of a type of history of science established as a genre from the Enlightenment. On Galileo, see Geymonat, Ludovico, Galileo Galilei: A Biography and Inquiry into His Philosophy of Science, trans. Drake, Stillman (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965)Google Scholar.

23. The “Science and Empires” program is run by the commission of the same name, which is part of the “History of Science” division of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Among the publications in this domain, see: MacLeod, Roy and Rehbock, Philip F., eds., Nature in its Greatest Extent: Western Science in the Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Jami, Catherine, Petitjean, Patrick, and Moulin, Anne-Marie, eds., Science and Empires: Historical Studies about Scientific Development and European Expansion (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992)Google Scholar. As important as it was and despite what it said about the capacity of French research to contribute to the field—it is worth referring to Rashed, Roshdi, ed., Histoire des sciences arabes (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1997), 3 vols.Google Scholar—this type of approach did not become part of the general landscape of the history of science until the end of the 1990s, notably within the framework of seminars held by the Centre Alexandre Koyré.

24. Éric Brian, “Action et abstraction. Notes d’actualité sur l’histoire des sciences,” in Guesnerie and Hartog, Des sciences et des techniques, 41. See also Brian, , “Ce que l’histoire des sciences peut apprendre de l’histoire. Le cas de l’Académie royale des Sciences à l’époque moderne,” in La science à l’époque moderne (Paris: Presses de l’université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1998), 59–70 Google Scholar, published under the aegis of the Association of Early Modernist Historians in French Universities.

25. Roche, Daniel, Le siècle des Lumières en province. Académies et académiciens provinciaux, 1680–1789 (Paris/La Haye: EHESS/Mouton, 1978)Google Scholar; Roche, , Les Républicains des lettres. Gens de culture et Lumières au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1988)Google Scholar. On the legacy of Roche and the many ways in which his work nourished the history of science and technology, see Milliot, Vincent, Minard, Philippe, and Porret, Michel, eds., La grande chevauchée. Faire de l’histoire avec Daniel Roche (Geneva: Droz, 2011)Google Scholar.

26. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar. In the French tradition inaugurated by Febvre, Lucien, see Martin, Henri-Jean and Chartier, Roger, eds., Histoire de l’édition française (Paris: Promodis, 1982–1986), 4 volsGoogle Scholar.

27. Lepetit, Bernard, Carnet de croquis. Sur la connaissance historique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999)Google Scholar. Daniel Nordman was influential in the flourishing of imperial and colonial themes in the wake of research centeredon the Mediterranean: Bourguet, Marie-Noëlle, Lepetit, Bernard, Nordman, Daniel, and Sinarellis, Maroula, eds., L’invention scientifique de la Méditerranée. Égypte, Morée, Algérie (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 1998 Google Scholar).

28. Perrot, Jean-Claude, Une histoire intellectuelle de l’économie politique, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 1992)Google Scholar; Bourguet, Marie-Noëlle, Déchiffrer la France. La statistique départementale à l’époque napoléonienne (Paris: Éd. des Archives contemporaines, 1988)Google Scholar; and Brian, Éric, La mesure de l’État. Administrateurs et géomètres au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994)Google Scholar.

29. Roger, Jacques, Buffon: A Life in Natural History, trans. Bonnefoi, Sarah Lucille (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Roger, , Pour une histoire des sciences à part entière, ed. Blanckaert, Claude (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995)Google Scholar; Blanckaert, , ed., Le terrain des sciences humaines. Instructions et enquêtes (XVIIIe-XXe siècle) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996)Google Scholar; and Corsi, Pietro, The Age of Lamarck: Evolutionary Theories in France, 1770–1830, trans. Mandelbaum, Jonathan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

30. Jacob, Margaret, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1988)Google Scholar; Minard, Philippe, La fortune du colbertisme. État et industrie dans la France des Lumières (Paris: Fayard, 1998)Google Scholar; and Hilaire-Pérez, Liliane, L’invention technique au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000)Google Scholar.

31. Chartier, Roger, review of Shapin, and Schaffer, , Leviathan and the Air-Pump, in Le Monde des livres, January 28, 1994, p. viii Google Scholar. Other contemporary reviews published in French include the following: Redondi, Pietro in Annales HSS 51, no. 2 (1996): 362–64 Google Scholar; Chabaud, Gilles in Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 43, no. 2 (1996): 382–84 Google Scholar; and Blondiaux, Loïc in Politix 8, no. 32 (1995): 176–81 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a critique of the historical training of historians of science in the 1980s and 1990s, see Daston, Lorraine, “Science Studies and the History of Science,” in “The Fate of Disciplines,” ed. Chandler, James and Davidson, Arnold I., special issue, Critical Inquiry 35, no. 4 (2009): 798–816 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. Chartier, review, viii.

33. With this in mind, it is even more astonishing that Shapin’s Social History of Truth, which was originally written and published in English less than a dozen years after Leviathan and the Air-Pump and which constitutes an extension of this book both methodologically and thematically, has only recently been published in a French translation (see above, note 2). And yet it was an important, audacious, and innovative work capable of speaking to a wide group of specialists from different intellectual traditions. See the review by Grenier, Jean-Yves, “Les habits de la vérité. La validation scientifique vue comme une production sociale, selon Steven Shapin,” Libération, June 5, 2014, pp. vi–vii Google Scholar.

34. On this notion, see the critique of Gibbons, Michael et al., eds., The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage Publications, 1994)Google Scholar in Pestre, Dominique, “La production des savoirs entre académies et marché. Une relecture historique du livre: ‘The New Production of Knowledge, ‘ édité par M. Gibbons,” Revue d’économie industrielle 79, no. 1 (1997): 163–74 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, republished as “La notion de régime de savoirs,” in Pestre, , Science, argent et politique. Un essai d’interprétation (Paris: INRA, 2003), 31–36 Google Scholar. On the modern moment, see: Pestre, , À contre-science. Politiques et savoirs des sociétés contemporaines (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2013)Google Scholar; Pestre, , ed., Le gouvernement des technosciences. Gouverner le progrès et ses dégâts depuis 1945 (Paris: La Découverte, 2014)Google Scholar.

35. For a joint study of Philippe Descola and Bruno Latour, see de Fornel, Michel and Lemieux, Cyril, “Quel naturalisme pour les sciences sociales?” in Naturalisme versus constructivisme , ed. de Fornel, Michel and Lemieux, Cyril (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 2007), 7–25 Google Scholar. More broadly, see Ingold, Alice, “Écrire la nature. De l’histoire sociale à la question environnementale?” in “Environnement,” ed. Ingold, Alice, special issue, Annales HSS 66, no. 1 (2011): 11–29 Google Scholar. Ingold notably highlights a change of paradigm in the relationship between the social sciences and nature: “the idea of a historical rupture in the relationship between societies and nature; the planetary dimension of ecological phenomena; and, finally, the previously unheard-of reflexivity of societies in their relationship to the environment” (p. 11). An idea of the abundance of studies published in this field can be gleaned from the eighty-three pages of reviews at the end of the special issue. This collection provides an excellent illustration of the domain’s rapid expansion and its tendency to become increasingly autonomous, with a diversity of approaches matched by the diversity of spaces and periods covered.

36. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 15. In this essay, iconoclastic in both tone and subject matter, a paragraph is devoted to the “Crisis of the Critical Stance” and the “three distinct approaches to talking about our world: naturalization, socialization, and deconstruction” (p. 5). Naturalization is associated with the growth of neurobiology and with the work of Jean-Pierre Changeux, which is challenged by Latour’s analysis. In the pages that follow and in his requalification of the notion of modernity, Latour relies on Descola’s investigation.

37. Descola, Philippe, Anthropology of Nature: Inaugural Lecture Delivered on Thursday 2 March 2001, trans. Libbrecht, Liz (Paris: Collège de France/OpenEdition, 2014), 4 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. More broadly, see Descola, , Beyond Nature and Culture, trans. Lloyd, Janet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)Google Scholar. On Descola’s undertaking, see the critical reading by Lenclud, Gérard, “L’universalisme ou le pari de la raison. Note sur (et contre) le relativisme,” in L’universalisme ou le pari de la raison. Anthropologie, histoire, psychologie (Paris: Gallimard, 2013)Google Scholar.

38. Larrère, Catherine, Les philosophies de l’environnement (Paris: PUF, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Larrère, , Du bon usage de la nature. Pour une philosophie de l’environnement (Paris: Aubier, 1997)Google Scholar; Larrère, , “La question de l’écologie. Ou la querelle des naturalismes,” in “Naturalismes d’aujourd’hui,” special issue, Cahiers philosophiques 127 (2011): 63–79 Google Scholar, which also includes an interview with Descola; and Drouin, Jean-Marc, L’écologie et son histoire: réinventer la nature (1991; repr. Paris: Flammarion, 1999)Google Scholar.

39. Ingold, Tim, “Human Worlds are Culturally Constructed: Against the Motion (1),” in Key Debates in Anthropology, ed. Ingold, Tim (London: Routledge, 1996), 112–18 Google Scholar; Ingold, , “Eight Themes in the Anthropology of Technology,” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 41, no. 1 (1997): 106–38 Google Scholar; Ingold, , “Hunting and Gathering as Ways of Perceiving the Environment” and “Building, Dwelling, Living: How Animals and People Make Themselves at Home in the World,” in The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, respectively 40–60 and 172–88.

40. Locher, Fabien and Quenet, Grégory, eds., “Histoire de l’environnement,” special issue, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 56, no. 4 (2009)Google Scholar; Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste et al., Introduction à l’histoire environnementale (Paris: La Découverte, 2014)Google Scholar; and Quenet, Grégory, Qu’est-ce que l’histoire environnementale? (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2014)Google Scholar.

41. Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste, L’apocalypse joyeuse. Une histoire du risque technologique (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2012)Google Scholar; Bonneuil, Christophe and Joly, Pierre-Benoît, Sciences, techniques et société (Paris: La Découverte, 2013)Google Scholar, notably pp. 29–38; Jarrige, François, Technocritiques. Du refus des machines à la contestation des technosciences (Paris: La Découverte, 2014)Google Scholar.

42. See notably the following studies on pollution: Massard-Guilbaud, Geneviève, Histoire de la pollution industrielle. France (1789–1914) (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 2010)Google Scholar; Roux, Thomas Le, Le laboratoire des pollutions industrielles. Paris, 1770–1830 (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011)Google Scholar.

43. On the historical aspect, see the special issue “Climat et histoire, XVIe-XIXe siècle,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 57, no. 3 (2010)Google Scholar, particularly Garnier, Emmanuel, “Fausse science ou nouvelle frontière ? Le climat dans son histoire,” 7–41 Google Scholar. On the problems of modeling, see Dalmedico, Amy Dahan, ed., Les modèles du futur. Changement climatique et scénarios économiques: enjeux scientifiques et politiques (Paris: La Découverte, 2007)Google Scholar.

44. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chakrabarty, , “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 1 (2014): 1–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The latter article opens with the following declaration: “Anthropogenic global warming brings into view the collision—or the running up against one another—of three histories that, from the point of view of human history, are normally assumed to be working at such different and distinct paces that they are treated as processes separate from one another for all practical purposes: the history of the earth system, the history of life including that of human evolution on the planet, and the more recent history of industrial civilization (for many, capitalism).”

45. Ibid., 3–4.

46. Chakrabarty, , Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

47. Guldi, Jo and Armitage, David, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, discussed in the dossier of articles on the Longue Durée published in this issue of the Annales, pp. 219–303.

48. Sahlins, Marshall, The Use and Abuse of Sociobiology: An Anthropological Critique of Socio-biology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

49. By way of an example, see the special dossier “Roundtable: History Meets Biology,” American Historical Review 119, no. 5 (2014): 1492–1629 Google Scholar.

50. Feuerhahn, Wolf and Mandressi, Rafael, eds., “Les sciences de l’homme à l’âge du neurone,” special issue, Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines 25 (2011)Google Scholar; Shryock, Andrew and Smail, Daniel Lord, eds., Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

51. Smail, Daniel Lord, On Deep History and the Brain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. For an example, see the special issue “Traduire et introduire,” Tracés. Revue de sciences humaines 14 (2014)Google Scholar. Part of this issue is devoted to Smail, notably the critical reading by Rafael Mandressi, “L’historien, le cerveau et l’ivresse des profondeurs,” 113–26.

52. And thus the divide between these approaches and those working with social actors widens. See: Grove, Richard H., Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Schiebinger, Londa and Swan, Claudia, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005)Google Scholar, especially the article by Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, “Measurable Difference: Botany, Climate, and the Gardener’s Thermometer in Eighteenth-Century France,” 270–86; and Safier, Neil, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53. Braunstein, Jean-François, ed., Canguilhem. Histoire des sciences et politique du vivant (Paris: PUF, 2007)Google Scholar; Bert, Jean-François and Lamy, Jérôme, eds., Michel Foucault. Un héritage critique (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2014)Google Scholar, which contains an interview with Schaffer that is of particular interest for the observations made in this article. See also Schaffer, Simon, “How Disciplines Look,” in Interdisciplinarity: Reconfiguration of the Natural and Social Sciences, ed. Barry, Andrew and Born, Georgina (London: Routledge, 2013), 57–81 Google Scholar.

54. Haraway, Donna, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991)Google Scholar; Haraway, , “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” and the other essays collected in The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004)Google Scholar; and Haraway, , The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

55. Schaffer, Simon, “Newton on the Beach: The Information Order of Principia Mathematica,” History of Science 47 (2009): 243–76 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Translated in La fabrique des sciences as “Newton à la plage: l’ordre de l’information dans les Principia mathematica, ” 15–54. The title is borrowed from that of an opera by Philip Glass, directed by Robert Wilson in 1976: Einstein on the Beach.

56. Schaffer, , “The Asiatic Enlightenments of British Astronomy,” in The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820, ed. Schaffer, et al. (Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications, 2009), 49–104 Google Scholar.

57. Ibid., 51. On Tafazzul, see p. 53.

58. Raj, Kapil, “Mapping Knowledge Go-Betweens in Calcutta, 1770–1820,” in Schaffer, et al., The Brokered World, 105–50 Google Scholar.

59. Schaffer, “The Asiatic Enlightenments,” 53.

60. Schaffer, , “Ceremonies of Measurement: Rethinking World Histories of Science,” Annales HSS (English Edition) 70, no. 2 (2015): pp. 335–60 Google Scholar.

61. Clark, William, Golinski, Jan, and Schaffer, Simon, eds., The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999)Google Scholar. For an overview of Schaffer’s trajectory, see Damme, Stéphane Van, “Laborious Nature: Simon Schaffer and the History of Science,” trans. Behrent, Michael C., Books&ideas.net, published March 23, 2015 Google Scholar: http://www.booksandideas.net/Laborious-Nature.html.

62. The center/periphery paradigm was synthesized in the 1960s by Basalla, Georges, “The Spread of Western Science,” Science 156, no. 3775 (1967): 611–22 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Since then, the increase in research on other European spaces should be noted. For studies of Iberian and Italian Catholicity conducted over the last ten years, see in particular: Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Bleichmar, Daniela et al., eds., Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Romano, Antonella, ed., Rome et la science moderne entre Renaissance et Lumières (Rome: École française de Rome, 2008)Google Scholar; and Andretta, Elisa, Roma medica. Histoire d’un système médical au XVIe siècle (Rome: École française de Rome, 2011)Google Scholar. More broadly, the geographies of knowledge production have been at the heart of an abundance of research, which has contributed to decentering the questions posed and the areas examined: Cook, Harold J., Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Günergun, Feza and Raina, Dhruv, eds., Science Between Europe and Asia: Historical Studies on the Transmission, Adoption and Adaptation of Knowledge (New York: Springer, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kontler, László et al., eds., Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires: A Decentered View (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63. The mathematical primacy of Renaissance Italy came to an end with the country’s peripheralization as soon as it ceased to produce figures such as Galileo. As a consequence, Italy provided its European audience with a model of pantheonization where the heroes of “modern science” were transformed into the new martyrs of backward societies. The “Black Legend” that haunted the Iberian peninsula was deeply associated with the story of its inability to have jumped on the train of modernity at the right moment.

64. The model of the scientific revolution was also a physico-mathematical one, as highlighted above. Modernization was therefore measured against the growth of this field, according to the rationale of a teleological vision of history that saw a continuity between the “scientific revolution” and the “industrial revolution.” The shift from research into the physico-mathematical sciences toward questions about the natural sciences was therefore crucial in the reconfiguration of research agendas over the last thirty years, and has increasingly gathered speed since the early 2000s.

65. Needham, Joseph, The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (1969; repr. London: Routledge, 2013), 61–62 Google Scholar. For a critical reading, see Raj, Kapil, “Rescuing Science from Civilisation: On Joseph Needham’s ‘Asiatic Mode of (Knowledge) Production,’” in The Bright Dark Ages: Comparative and Connective Perspectives, ed. Bala, Arun and Duara, Prasenjit (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 255–80 Google Scholar.

66. In this respect, see the compilation of articles by Raj, Kapil, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and his stimulating introduction on pp. 1–26.

67. See above, n. 62.

68. Schaffer, preface to La fabrique des sciences, 8.

69. Schaffer, “Ceremonies of Measurement,” 336.

70. Ibid., 348: “It is not my aim here to pursue the ambitions of this universal ethnography of a globally diffused ritual system.”

71. In the decade following the publication of Revel, Jacques, ed., Jeux d’échelles. La micro-analyse à l’expérience (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1996)Google Scholar, which grew out of a research seminar at the EHESS, investigations and debates multiplied in France, raising the issues of scales and methods. As a reminder, the propositions of histoire croisée (intersecting history) and histoires connectées (connected histories) developed at the same time. In 2001, the first issue of Annales HSS 56 contained two collections of articles. The first, entitled “Une histoire à l’échelle globale. Braudel et l’Asie,” was composed of an article by Roy Bin Wong (“Entre monde et nation: les régions braudéliennes en Asie,” pp. 5–41) and an article by Maurice Aymard (“De la Méditerranée à l’Asie: une comparaison nécessaire [commentaire],” pp. 43–50), adopting an economic perspective. The first of these articles has since been translated into English: Wong, Roy Bin, “Between Nation and World: Braudelian Regions in Asia,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 26, no. 1 (2013): 1–45 Google Scholar. The second dossier of articles was called “Temps croisés, mondes mêlés” and brought together an article by Sanjay Subrahmanyam (“Du Tage au Gange au XVIe siècle: une conjoncture millénariste à l’échelle eurasiatique,” pp. 51–84) and an article by Serge Gruzinski (“Les mondes mêlés de la Monarchie catholique et autres ‘connected histories,’” pp. 85–117), which were in turn discussed by Roger Chartier (“La conscience de la globalité [commentaire],” pp. 119–23), from a cultural point of view. During the same period, the following collective volume raised the issue of scales of analysis in distinct terms: Werner, Michael and Zimmermann, Bénédicte, eds., De la comparaison à l’histoire croisée (Paris: Seuil, 2004)Google Scholar.

72. Schaffer, preface to La fabrique des sciences, 7.

73. Schaffer, “The Asiatic Enlightenments.”

74. Pollock, Sheldon, “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 4 (2009): 931–61 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75. Schaffer discovered Foucault earlier than his anglophone colleagues, while staying in Paris in the early 1980s and attending classes at the Collège de France. See the interview with Schaffer published as “Taxonomie, discipline, colonies: Foucault et la Sociology of Knowledge . Entretien avec Simon Schaffer,” in Bert and Lamy, Michel Foucault, 363–74, especially pp. 364–65.

76. Schaffer, , “Measuring Virtue: Eudiometry, Enlightenment and Pneumatic Medicine,” in The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Cunningham, Andrew and French, Roger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 281–318 Google Scholar. Translated in La fabrique des sciences as “Mesurer la vertu: eudiométrie, Lumières et médecine pneumatique,” 217–57.

77. Schaffer, , “Experimenters’ Techniques, Dyers’ Hands, and the Electric Planetarium,” Isis 88, no. 3 (1997): 456–83 Google Scholar, citation p. 483. Translated in La fabrique des sciences as “Les techniques de l’expérimentateur, les mains du teinturier et le planétarium électrique,” 171–216.

78. Schaffer, , “Astronomers Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal Equation,” Science in Context 2, no. 1 (1988): 115–45 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 118. Translated in La fabrique des sciences as “Quand les astronomes marquent leur temps. Discipline et ‘équation personnelle,’” 259–97. It should be noted that this is one of the oldest articles published in the French volume.

79. Ibid.

80. Schaffer, “Taxonomie, discipline, colonies,” 371.

81. Schaffer, preface to La fabrique des sciences, 7.

82. It would take more than a single article to lay out the history of these relations, which is made up of profound divergences and projects for alliances. The research program known as “Science, Technology, and Society” constitutes the most recent example, in the model of the study of “technosciences.”

83. For an example of the former current, see Jan de Vries and his approach to the technological mutations of early modern Europe in terms of an “industrious revolution”: de Vries, Jan, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Demand and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the latter, see Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, which reopens “Needham’s question.”

84. Schaffer, Simon, “L’inventaire de l’astronome. Le commerce d’instruments scientifiques au XVIIIe siècle (Angleterre-Chine-Pacifique),” Annales HSS 60, no. 4 (2005): 791–815 Google Scholar. It is worth recalling the mission statement of this article, set out on p. 791: “Two aspects of the use of instruments are envisioned here: by constructing knowledge, they act as mediators between the world and their users; by elaborating communities of knowledge, they mediate between various users. The history of science has recently sought to demonstrate the articulation between these two uses, since the question of knowledge is related to the social order.”

85. Schaffer, preface to La fabrique des sciences, 7.

86. Ibid., 8.

87. Ibid.

88. Schaffer, , “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Science 21, no. 1 (1983): 1–43 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Translated in La fabrique des sciences as “La philosophie naturelle et le spectacle public au XVIIIe siècle,” 115–70.

89. Schaffer, preface to La fabrique des sciences, 11–12.

90. Ibid., 7ff.

91. Schaffer refers to Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726), Travels in the Mogul Empire A.D. 1656–1668 by François Bernier (1699), and Persian Letters by Montesquieu (1721).

92. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, “Hearing Voices: Vignettes of Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400–1750,” Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998): 75–104 Google Scholar, here pp. 99–100.

93. Bertrand, Romain, L’histoire à parts égales. Récits d’une rencontre Orient-Occident, XVIe-XVIIe siècle (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2011)Google Scholar. See also the critical discussion of this work in Monde(s). Histoire, espaces, relations 3 (2013): 147–69.

94. I refer the reader to a similar exercise by Gruzinski, Serge, What Time is it There? America and Islam at the Dawn of Modern Times, trans. Birrell, Jean (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010)Google Scholar.