What makes an early modern French technology?

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Notes

1. Latour, Science in Action.

2. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, and Shapin, A Social History of Truth.

3. Mukerji, Impossible Engineering, 204–14.

4. Mukerji, Impossible Engineering, 220.

5. In arguing against a teleological reading of his case, Alder makes the point that ‘[a]ny particular form of production must solve the problems of its own time.’ Alder, Engineering the Revolution, 5.

6. Sewell, The Logics of History, 100–3.

7. Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea. For a Venetian case of hydrological engineering that bears a strong resemblance to the problems Riquet experienced with the harbor at Sete, see Appuhn. ‘Friend or Flood?’

8. Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea, 272–84.

9. There is a vast literature on Renaissance Humanism and its relationship to ancient republicanism, and attempting to summarize it in a note is a fool’s errand. However, by way of introduction, see Baron, The Crisis; Hankins, Renaissance Civic Humanism; Yoran, ‘Florentine Civic Humanism’; Celenza and Gouwens, Humanism and Creativity; Kennedy, ‘The Republican Dilemma’; and for France see, Takeda, ‘French Absolutism’; Gundersheimer, French Humanism.

10. On Machiavelli and republicanism see Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment; Jurdjevic, ‘Machiavelli’s Hybrid Republicanism’; Najemy, ‘Baron’s Machiavelli.’

11. This is hardly an original observation, not even with regards to the politics of technology. Tocqueville, to cite a period appropriate French source, noted the difference in character between the character of science in republics and monarchies. See De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, chap. 20.

12. Worster, Rivers of Empire, 210–11.

13. Shapin, The Scientific Life.