A Global History of Global Physics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.46.1.03Keywords:
Humboldtian science, global physics, meteorology, miningAbstract
This contribution revisits a nineteenth-century research program coined by Susan Faye Cannon as “Humboldtian science,” named for the Prussian savant Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). The now-standard account of Humboldtian science developed by Michael Dettelbach in the 1990s describes a set of quantitative, law-seeking, cartographic sciences that involve widespread collaboration of savants and imperial bureaucrats, ranging from meteorology and magnetism to geology and plant geography. New perspectives from colonial and global history show the “Humboldtian” project as a diffuse system of inquiry shaped by widespread geographies of empire and extraction, particularly global mining industries. What Humboldt called “global physics” had deep roots in Prussian expansionism and ore mining in the 1790s. It was then coordinated across empires east and west, in the commodity frontiers of Ibero-America and Russo-Siberia. This article revisits Humboldt to open a connected history of sciences that served aggressive states and empires, in and outside of Europe.
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