This Introduction offers a conceptualization of the Indo-Pacific, its islands and their place within the history of science. We argue that Indo-Pacific islands present a remarkable combination of social, political and spatial circumstances, which speak to themes that are central to the history of science. Having driven movements of people and represented staging grounds for explorations, expansions and cross-cultural exchanges, these spaces have been at the forefront of historical change. The historiographies of the two oceans have traditionally emphasized indigenous agency while downplaying European historical trajectories, and therefore they provide historians of science with materials and methodologies that promise nuanced portrayals of knowledge production in cross-cultural settings. Rather than unifying the oceans into a cohesive narrative, we seek to uncover the many horizons of Indo-Pacific worlds and pluralize the spaces within which knowledge travelled at specific times, but not at others. Offering a middle plane between the globe and the region, islands are particularly productive sites for such analyses, as they bring to attention both localized kinds of agency and the impacts of colonialism and globalization. This special issue investigates what happens to knowledge within island spaces and demonstrates that even as small strips of land, islands can significantly enhance our understanding of the practices of knowledge making within the broader contours of world history. In bringing to the fore the contributions of actors from across the wider social spectrum and, especially, the interacting roles of indigenous agents and their traditions, Indo-Pacific worlds thus offer exciting new directions for a field which has often been dominated by a focus on European institutions.

Originating as a presidential address during the seventieth birthday celebrations of the British Society for the History of Science, this essay reiterates the society's long-standing commitment to academic autonomy and international cooperation. Drawing examples from my own research into female scientists and doctors during the First World War, I explore how narratives written by historians are related to their own lives, both past and present. In particular, I consider the influences on me of my childhood reading, my experiences as a physics graduate who deliberately left the world of science, and my involvement in programmes to improve the position of women in science. In my opinion, being a historian implies being socially engaged: the BSHS and its members have a responsibility towards the future as well as the past.

William Harvey's famous quantitative argument from De motu cordis (1628) about the circulation of blood explained how a small amount of blood could recirculate and nourish the entire body, upending the Galenic conception of the blood's motion. This paper argues that the quantitative argument drew on the calculative and rhetorical skills of merchants, including Harvey's own brothers. Modern translations of De motu cordis obscure the language of accountancy that Harvey himself used. Like a merchant accounting for credits and debits, intake and output, goods and moneys, Harvey treated venous and arterial blood as essentially commensurate, quantifiable and fungible. For Harvey, the circulation (and recirculation) of blood was an arithmetical necessity. The development of Harvey's circulatory model followed shifts in the epistemic value of mercantile forms of knowledge, including accounting and arithmetic, also drawing on an Aristotelian language of reciprocity and balance that Harvey shared with mercantile advisers to the royal court. This paper places Harvey's calculations in a previously underappreciated context of economic crisis, whose debates focused largely on questions of circulation.

Academic careers in French science during the mid-nineteenth century were made within the Université de France, an integrated state system of secondary and higher education controlled by a centralized Parisian educational administration. Among the most respected members of the corps universitaire were Charles d'Almeida and Pierre Bertin, two historically obscure physiciens whose significance derives from their substantial contributions to the social organization, teaching and communication of French experimental physics. This two-part comparative biography uses their entwined careers to make a case for the emergence of a discipline of French experimental physics from the corps during the tumultuous politico-cultural transition from the Second Empire to the Third Republic. Of fundamental importance are disciplinary regimes of teaching and inspection within the corps, the foundation of the Société française de physique and the Journal de physique, and the diversification of the traditional pedagogical role of the Ecole normale supérieure, which, from around 1860, began to offer a career pathway for aspiring scientific researchers. Having established in this paper the socio-institutional mechanisms for the stabilization of a distinct field, in part two I characterize the epistemological–methodological aspects of French experimental physics.

An unpublished satirical work, written c.1848–1854, provides fresh insight into the most famous scientific voyage of the nineteenth century. John Clunies Ross, settler of Cocos-Keeling – which HMS Beagle visited in April 1836 – felt that Robert FitzRoy and Charles Darwin had ‘depreciated’ the atoll on which he and his family had settled a decade earlier. Producing a mock ‘supplement’ to a new edition of FitzRoy's Narrative, Ross criticized their science and their casual appropriation of local knowledge. Ross's virtually unknown work is intriguing not only for its glimpse of the Beagle voyage, but also as a self-portrait of an imperial scientific reader. An experienced merchant seaman and trader–entrepreneur with decades of experience in the region, Ross had a very different perspective from that of FitzRoy or Darwin. Yet he shared many of their assumptions about the importance of natural knowledge, embracing it as part of his own imperial projects. Showing the global reach of print culture, he used editing and revision as satirical weapons, insisting on his right to participate as both reader and author in scientific debate.

The British Museum, based in Montague House, Bloomsbury, opened its doors on 15 January 1759, as the world's first state-owned public museum. The Museum's collection mostly originated from Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), whose vast holdings were purchased by Parliament shortly after his death. The largest component of this collection was objects of natural history, including a herbarium made up of 265 bound volumes, many of which were classified according to the late seventeenth-century system of John Ray (1627–1705). The 1750s saw the emergence of Linnaean binomial nomenclature, following the publication of Carl Linnaeus' Species Plantarum (1753) and Systema Naturae (1758). In order to adopt this new system for their collections, the Trustees of the British Museum chose to employ the Swedish naturalist and former student of Linnaeus, Daniel Solander (1733–1782) to reclassify the collection. Solander was ordered to devise a new system for classifying and cataloguing Sloane's natural history collection, which would allow both Linnaeans and those who followed earlier systems to access it. Solander's work was essential for allowing the British Museum to realize its aim of becoming a public centre of learning, adapting the collection to reflect the diversity of classificatory practices which were existent by the 1760s. This task engaged Solander until 1768, when he received an offer from Joseph Banks (1743–1820) to accompany him on HMS Endeavour to the Pacific.

How did one man living on an island come to acquire information about the rest of the vast archipelago? This article traces the inter-island information networks of Georg Everhard Rumphius (1627–1702), an employee of the Dutch East India Company, who was able to explore the natural world of the wider archipelago without ever leaving the Moluccan island of Ambon. This article demonstrates the complexities of Rumphius's inter-island networks, as he collected information about plants and objects from islands near and far. Using his administrative, commercial and household networks, Rumphius was able to interact with local actors from across the social spectrum, whose own active collection, mediation and circulation of objects and information overlapped with imperial activities in the archipelago. This article examines Rumphius as both a collector and a mediator, who negotiated between multiple economies of exchange and translated information from different islands for his distant European readership. Such practices of localized translation demonstrate how knowledge produced on one island was the product of criss-crossing inter-island networks, as the information concerned underwent its own complicated processes of transmission and transformation within the archipelago before reaching its intended audience in Europe.

In this essay, I examine Robert Boyle's strategies for making imperceptible entities accessible to the senses. It is well known that, in his natural philosophy, Boyle confronted the challenge of making imperceptible particles of matter into objects of sensory experience. It has never been noted, however, that Boyle confronted a strikingly similar challenge in his natural theology – he needed to make an equally imperceptible God accessible to the senses. Taking this symmetrical difficulty as my starting point, I propose a new approach to thinking about the interconnections between Boyle's natural philosophy and natural theology. For the most part, studies of science and religion in the early modern period work by seeking out the influence of explicitly stated religious beliefs on scientific ideas. I argue, by contrast, that we need to focus on Boyle's representational practices, using his attempts to represent imperceptible entities as a means of uncovering metaphysical and theological presuppositions that he did not always articulate when stating his religious beliefs. With new interpretations of both A Discourse of Things Above Reason (1681) and Some Physico-Theological Considerations about the Possibility of the Resurrection (1675), I show that there were crucial similarities between Boyle's practices for representing both God and atoms. I go on to show, moreover, that Boyle used these practices to enact an ontological stance at odds with one of his most important professed beliefs.

A recently blossoming historiographical literature recognizes that physical anthropologists allied with scholars of diverse aspects of society and history to racially classify European peoples over a period of about a hundred years. They created three successive race classification coalitions – ethnology, from around 1840; anthropology, from the 1850s; and interwar raciology – each of which successively disintegrated. The present genealogical study argues that representing these coalitions as ‘transdisciplinary’ can enrich our understanding of challenges to disciplinary specialization. This is especially the case for the less well-studied nineteenth century, when disciplines and challenges to disciplinary specialization were both gradually emerging. Like Marxism or structuralism, race classification was a holistic interpretive framework, which, at its most ambitious, aimed to structure the human sciences as a whole. It resisted the organization of academia and knowledge into disciplines with separate organizational institutions and research practices. However, the ‘transdisciplinarity’ of this nationalistic project also bridged emerging borderlines between science and politics. I ascribe race classification's simultaneous longevity and instability to its complex and intricately entwined processes of political and interdisciplinary coalition building. Race classification's politically useful conclusions helped secure public support for institutionalizing the coalition's component disciplines. Institutionalization in turn stimulated disciplines to professionalize. They emphasized disciplinary boundaries and insisted on apolitical science, thus ultimately undermining the ‘transdisciplinary’ project.

In the late eighteenth century, the Ecole vétérinaire d'Alfort was renowned for its innovative veterinary education and for having one of the largest natural history and anatomy collections in France. Yet aside from a recent interest in the works of one particular anatomist, the school's history has been mostly ignored. I examine here the fame of the school in eighteenth-century travel literature, the historic connection between veterinary science and natural history, and the relationship between the school's hospital and its esteemed cabinet. Using the correspondence papers of veterinary administrators, state representatives and competing scientific institutions during the French Revolution, I argue that resource constraints and the management of anatomical and natural history specimens produced new disciplinary boundaries between natural history, veterinary medicine and human medicine, while reinforcing geographic divisions between the local and the foreign in the study of non-human animals. This paper reconstructs the Ancien Régime reasoning that veterinary students would benefit from a global perspective on animality, and the Revolutionary government's rejection of that premise. Under republicanism, veterinary medicine became domestic.

One of France's colonial enterprises in the eighteenth century was to acclimatize nutmeg, native to the Maluku islands, in the French colony of Isle de France (today's Mauritius). Exploring the acclimatization of nutmeg as a practice, this paper reveals the practical challenges of transferring knowledge between Indo-Pacific islands in the second half of the eighteenth century. This essay will look at the process through which knowledge was created – including ruptures and fractures – as opposed to looking at the mere circulation of knowledge. I argue that nutmeg cultivation on Isle de France was a complex process of creolizing expertise originating from the local populations of the plants’ native islands with the horticultural knowledge of colonists, settlers, labourers and slaves living on Isle de France. In this respect, creolization describes a process of knowledge production rather than a form of knowledge. Once on Isle de France, nutmeg took root in climate and soil conditions which were different from those of its native South East Asian islands. It was cultivated by slaves and colonists who lacked prior experience with the cultivation of this particular spice. Experienced horticulturalists experimented with their own traditions. While they relied on old assumptions, they also came to question them. By examining cultivation as an applied practice, this paper argues that the creolization of knowledge was a critical aspect in French colonial botany.

This paper examines how communities of naturalists in mid-nineteenth-century Britain were formed and solidified around the shared practices of public meetings, the publication and reading of periodicals, and the making and printing of images. By focusing on communities of naturalists and the sites of their communication, this article undermines the distinction between amateur and professional scientific practice. Building on the notion of imagined communities, this paper also shows that in some cases the editors and illustrators utilized imagery to construct a specifically British naturalist community. Following three ‘amateur’ natural-history periodicals (Science Gossip, Midland Naturalist and the Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club) the article demonstrates how the production and reproduction of natural history in the nineteenth century was contingent on community debate – and that this debate both was highly visual and moved across printed and geographical boundaries. This paper investigates images both for their purported success and for their ascribed value to natural history. Additionally, it considers the debates over their limitations and alleged failures of printing. Altogether, the article argues that investigating the communal practices of observation, writing, drawing and engraving allows for a better understanding of the shared practices of nineteenth-century natural history.

This paper looks at phrenological charts as mediators of (pseudo-)scientific knowledge to individual clients who used them as a means of self-assessment. Phrenologists propagated the idea that the human mind could be categorized into different mental faculties, with each particular faculty represented in a different area of the brain and by bumps on the head. In the US and the UK popular phrenologists examined individual clients for a fee. Drawing on a collection of phrenological charts completed for individual clients, this paper shows how charts aspired to convey new ideals of selfhood by using the authority of science in tailor-made certificates, and by teaching clients some of the basic practices of that science. Hitherto historians studying phrenology have focused mainly on the attraction of the content of phrenological knowledge for the wider public, but in this paper I show how the charts enabled clients to participate actively in creating knowledge of their own bodies and selves.

This article engages with debates about the status and geographies of colonial science by arguing for the significance of meteorological knowledge making in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mauritius. The article focuses on how tropical storms were imagined, theorized and anticipated by an isolated – but by no means peripheral – cast of meteorologists who positioned Mauritius as an important centre of calculation in an expanding infrastructure of maritime meteorology. Charles Meldrum in particular earned renown in the mid-nineteenth century for theoretical insights into cyclone behaviour and for achieving an unprecedented spatial reach in synoptic meteorology. But as the influx of weather data dried up towards the end of the century, attention turned to developing practices of ‘single-station forecasting’, by which cyclones might be foreseen and predicted not through extended observational networks, but by careful study of the behaviour of one set of instruments in one place. These practices created new moral economies of risk and responsibility, as well as a ‘poetry’, as one meteorologist described it, in the instrumental, sensory and imaginative engagement with a violent atmospheric environment. Colonial Indian Ocean ‘cyclonology’ offers an opportunity to reflect on how the physical, economic and cultural geographies of an island colony combined to produce spaces of weather observation defined by both connection and disconnection, the latter to be overcome not only by infrastructure, but also by the imagination.

In this paper, I discuss the development and use of images employed by the Dresden Royal Museum for Zoology, Anthropology and Ethnography to resolve debates about how to use visual representation as a means of making ethnographic knowledge. Through experimentation with techniques of visual representation, the founding director, A.B. Meyer (1840–1911), proposed a historical, non-essentialist approach to understanding racial and cultural difference. Director Meyer's approach was inspired by the new knowledge he had gained through field research in Asia-Pacific as well as new forms of imaging that made highly detailed representations of objects possible. Through a combination of various techniques, he developed new visual methods that emphasized intimate familiarity with variations within any one ethnic group, from skull shape to material ornamentation, as integral to the new disciplines of physical and cultural anthropology. It is well known that photographs were a favoured form of visual documentation among the anthropological and ethnographic sciences at the fin de siècle. However, in the scholarly journals of the Dresden museum, photographs, drawings, tables and etchings were frequently displayed alongside one another. Meyer sought to train the reader's eye through organized arrangements that represented objects from multiple angles and at various levels of magnification. Focusing on chimpanzees, skulls and kettledrums from Asia-Pacific, I track the development of new modes of making and reading images, from zoology and physical anthropology to ethnography, to demonstrate how the museum visually historicized humankind.

The early decades of the twentieth century were marked by widespread optimism about biology and its ability to improve the world. A major catalyst for this enthusiasm was new theories about inheritance and evolution (particularly Hugo de Vries's mutation theory and Mendel's newly rediscovered ideas). In Britain and the USA particularly, an astonishingly diverse variety of writers (from elite scientists to journalists and writers of fiction) took up the task of interpreting these new biological ideas, using a wide range of genres to help their fellow citizens make sense of biology's promise. From these miscellaneous writings a new and distinctive kind of utopianism emerged – the biotopia. Biotopias offered the dream of a perfect, post-natural world, or the nightmare of violated nature (often in the same text), but above all they conveyed a sense that biology was – for the first time – offering humanity unprecedented control over life. Biotopias often visualized the world as a garden perfected for human use, but this vision was tinged with gendered violence, as it became clear that realizing it entailed dispossessing, or even killing, ‘Mother Nature’. Biotopian themes are apparent in journalism, scientific reports and even textbooks, and these non-fiction sources shared many characteristics with intentionally prophetic or utopian fictions. Biotopian themes can be traced back and forth across the porous boundaries between popular and elite writing, showing how biology came to function as public culture. This analysis reveals not only how the historical significance of science is invariably determined outside the scientific world, but also that the ways in which biology was debated during this period continue to characterize today's debates over new biological breakthroughs.

This essay examines how Indo-Pacific indigenous plant names went from being viewed as instruments of botanical fieldwork, to being seen primarily as currency in anthropological studies. I trace this attitude to Alexander von Humboldt, who differentiated between indigenous phytonyms with merely local relevance to be used as philological data, and universally applicable Latin plant names. This way of using indigenous plant names underwrote a chauvinistic reading of cultural difference, and was therefore especially attractive to commentators lacking acquaintance with any indigenous language or culture. When New Zealand anthropologists embraced this role for Māori phytonyms in the 1890s, however, they did so possessed of a relatively in-depth understanding of Māori culture and the Māori language. This discussion has three primary aims: to illuminate nineteenth-century scholarly engagements with Indo-Pacific plant classifications, in contrast to a prevailing historiographical emphasis on European disregard for this subject; to analyse how indigenous phytonyms acted as ‘boundary objects’ interfacing between cultures and disciplines; and to illustrate the politics of scientific disciplinarity in a colonial context.

This essay revisits the drafting of the first UNESCO Statement on Race (1950) in order to reorient historical understandings of mid-twentieth-century anti-racism and science. Historians of science have primarily interpreted the UNESCO statements as an oppositional project led by anti-racist scientists from the North Atlantic and concerned with dismantling racial typologies, replacing them with population-based conceptions of human variation. Instead of focusing on what anti-racist scientists opposed, this article highlights the futures they imagined and the applied social-science projects that anti-racist science drew from and facilitated. The scientific experts who participated in drafting the first UNESCO Statement on Race played important roles in late colonial, post-colonial and international projects designed to modernize, assimilate and improve so-called backward communities – typically indigenous or Afro-descendent groups in the global South. Such connections between anti-racist science and the developmental imaginaries of the late colonial period indicate that the transition from fixed racial typologies to sociocultural and psychological conceptualizations of human diversity legitimated the flourishing of modernization discourses in the Cold War era. In this transition to an economic-development paradigm, ‘race’ did not vanish so much as fragment into a series of finely tuned and ostensibly anti-racist conceptions that offered a moral incentive for scientific elites to intervene in the ways of life of those deemed primitive.

In 1878, amid a rapidly proliferating social interest in public health and cleanliness, a group of sanitary scientists and reformers founded the Parkes Museum of Hygiene in central London. Dirt and contagion knew no social boundaries, and the Parkes's founders conceived of the museum as a dynamic space for all classes to better themselves and their environments. They promoted sanitary science through a variety of initiatives: exhibits of scientific, medical and architectural paraphernalia; product endorsements; and lectures and certificated courses in practical sanitation, food inspection and tropical hygiene. While the Parkes's programmes reified the era's hierarchies of class and gender, it also pursued a public-health mission that cut across these divisions. Set apart from the great cultural and scientific popular museums that dominated Victorian London, it exhibited a collection with little intrinsic value, and offered an education in hygiene designed to be imported into visitors’ homes and into urban spaces in the metropole and beyond. This essay explores the unique contributions of the Parkes Museum to late nineteenth-century sanitary science and to museum development, even as the growth of public-health policy rendered the museum obsolete.

In Vienna, the close of the First World War and the period of the peace negotiations in Paris saw an enormous boom of ethnic-geographic research approaches and ethnic map-making. This process continued with the appointment of the Viennese geographer Hugo Hassinger (1877–1952) to the chair of human geography at the University of Vienna in 1931 and intensified with the establishment of the South East German Research Association and the National Socialist takeover in March 1938. But did the initiatives to create ethnic maps originate with politicians and authorities, or did they come from the scientists themselves? This article argues that scientists embarked upon ethnic geographies on their own initiative. Although political institutions used scientists and their resources for their own, political ends (ethnographic maps served as an important source for the National Socialists in their operations for ethnic consolidation), scientists also mobilized resources from the political sphere for career and disciplinary purposes.