In 2016, during a visit to the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia (now the Science History Institute), I and Carin Berkowitz, then director of the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry at the Foundation, discussed possible topics and themes for future research workshops, one of which was ‘Chemistry in the early Americas’. I was thus gratified when I was invited to organize a programme on this topic for the Foundation’s annual Cain Conference in 2017. A call for papers duly followed, emphasizing the broad connotation of chemistry for the purposes of the conference: qualitative transformations of material substances. This was designed to include the practical arts such as smelting and refining, metallurgical knowledge more generally, pharmacy, distilling and decoction, alchemy, archaeological and environmental trace evidence, Atlantic transactions in an age of exploration, colonization and plant and mineral prospecting, interaction between indigenous, creole and European knowledges and skills, chemically-based manufacture, education, use and adaptation of European chemistry, and critical reflection upon narratological and interpretive frameworks of relevance to our topic.
My own motivation was ignorance. Whereas much is known concerning the presence of chemistry, widely construed, in ancient and early modern cultures in Asia, the Middle-East and Europe, the Americas seemed different: not wholly unstudied, but equally not studied as intensely or regularly with respect to history of chemistry before 1800. The intention thus was to start to open out a topic for historians of chemistry in ways which might invite further research. Our geographical framework does not however come without attending and basic issues. Historians, it used to be said, have two eyes, chronology and geography. But geography on its own, and especially with such a large unit as the American continent, does not guarantee any unity of actions which can attain degrees of narrative cohesion satisfactory for historians. Nor does the addition of chronology, a dated succession of events, guarantee it, for chronology per se, which can posit a historical temporality, does not of itself necessarily provide the kinds of sequences enabling narrative cohesion across a substantial period of time. The conference might in principle produce only a scattered set of chemical exempla, no doubt interesting in themselves, but lacking coherence across a large spatio-temporal extension. Such is indeed a possible historical constitution of the topic in question.
In the event, the Cain Conference produced rather more than scattered exempla, because the conference contributors, each bringing their own chosen topics, scholarly orientations and expertise, found significant overlap in their analytical frameworks, most obviously with reference to settings which involved the history of European settlement colonies and Atlantic relations and transactions, from Hispanic silver-mining in the seventeenth-century to north-American gunpowder manufacture in the early nineteenth-century. Hence the re-titling of this special issue as ‘Atlantic Chemistries, 1600–1820’. The articles presented here are a selection of the conference papers. The three papers not appearing were withheld for authorial personal reasons, but each of them also fell within the Atlantic category. Brent Lane’s ‘The primacy of Chemistry in the Speculative Financing of North American Settlement’ concentrated on Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke expeditions and their cohort of expert technical and scientific members. Lane sought out expedition subscribers, and used modern investment analysis to compare speculative expedition support with other competitor ventures. Samir Boumediene’s ‘A Specific Conquest: European Naturalists and the Search for Specific Remedies in the Americas’ emphasized the pharmaceutical, commercial potentials of specific plant products, concentrating latterly on the identification of quinquina as specific remedy for intermittent fevers, legitimating the concept of ‘specific’ in its central place within the history of chemical medicine. This analysis may be read, along with much else of great interest, in his book La colonisation du savoir. Une histoire des plantes medicinales du ‘Nouveau Monde’ (1492–1750). Donna Bilak’s ‘Chymistry in the Archives: The Gersholm Bulkeley Notebook Collection’, dealt with this practitioner of alchemical medicine in Connecticut, presenting her initial scholarly encounters with Bulkeley’s substantial notebooks, and the analytical problems which they present to historians, emphasizing the senses in which the notebooks are a largely unused source which can be used to reconstruct the laboratory practice and instrumentation, and the reading, of a seventeenth-century colonial medico-alchemical practitioner also involved in Atlantic transactions of relevant knowledge. This paper was prefaced by Jenny Miglus, librarian of the history of medicine at the Hartford Medical Historical Society, who detailed the provenance and history of the Bulkeley Collection, and further provided a high point of the conference by bringing some of the Notebooks for exhibition and direct inspection by conference participants, an instructive and memorable hands-on occasion.
The papers now included in this special issue range widely in topic and approach, each nonetheless written within an explicitly Atlantic framework. Mariana Sanchez Daza examines the key work of seventeenth-century Hispanic metallurgy, Alvaro Alonso Barba’s Arte de los Metales. Barba, a secular cleric working in Potosi, has long been a neglected figure, now receiving the historical attention his work merits. Sanchez Daza’s approach is partly through a form of book history, detailing the complex history of the Arte’s publication, and its considerable and influential longevity by showing its history of multiple translations into European languages from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. In addition this article offers an argument as to the appropriate categorization of Barba’s role in this Atlantic context, and provides evidence of the Paracelsan features which partly characterize his chemistry. John Stewart’s examination of the work of chemically educated medical men in Caribbean plantations and towns focuses on the chemistry they learnt at Edinburgh University’s Medical School in the eighteenth-century, and the ways in which it was used, particularly with reference to mineral waters and sugar production. At one level this work exemplified and exported the Scottish drive for economic improvement in agriculture and manufacture so characteristic of élite Scottish society. At another, and more fundamentally, their work was ascertainably integrated within the institution of slavery. As Stewart forcefully points out, this off-shoot of Scottish Enlightenment practice and ideology belies the characterization of Enlightened attitudes solely through the abolitionism exhibited by Scottish philosophical culture. The relation of chemistry to agriculture is further pursued in Christopher Halm’s examination of efforts to improve North-eastern American agricultural output in the second half of the eighteenth-century. He provides evidence of the growing conviction that chemistry is the key science for agriculturists, and for the increasing advocacy and institutionalization of applied chemistry. Thus far these findings invite comparisons with features of eighteenth-century agronomy in Britain and continental Europe, but Halm’s analysis is able to point out distinguishing features of the American experience, through his singular approach, focused on the substance Plaster of Paris (gypsum), whose use in Germany followed German emigrants particularly to Pennsylvania. This material focus, following the Plaster, allows Halm to show how economic and politicized factors also further distinguished this American context for practical chemistry.
Broadly political factors also mark the final two contributions. Thomas Apel produces a much-needed analysis of the complex developments attending the reception of Lavoisian chemistry in the new nation of the United States. He does so by careful reading of the changing responses to the new French chemistry as seen in particular in the pages of the journal The Medical Repository, in the work Samuel Latham Mitchill and Benjamin Woodhouse, around the turn of the nineteenth century. The changing dispositions exhibited in these writings do not submit to simplistic categories of acceptance or rejection, phlogistonists and oxygenists. By relating their dispositions to changing opinion in the intense political sphere, preoccupied as it was with the consequences of political revolution in France, and by attention to the epistemic and discursive registers of expression in politically contextualized scientific debate, Apel renders intelligible in depth this complex episode. Such contextual features reappear in Marc Macdonald’s concluding article which examines and contrasts the fortunes of two chemical families, the Priestleys and the DuPonts, after their politically-forced emigration the United States in the 1790s. This analysis utilizes two categories, the utopian hopes for realizing communities and educational institutions embodying the philosophical, religious and political ideals they held, and their interests in and expertise with practical chemistry. Macdonald’s pursuit of these themes often traces a history of failure in the land of the free, especially but not only with respect to new, utopian communities; practical schemes, including educational ambitions, also did not always fare well. The analysis brings out the contextual factors, political, economic and ideological, which made for success or failure in the American experience of these veterans of the Chemical Revolution.
The conference on which this collection is based had no ambition to achieve anything like a comprehensive or even preliminary survey of chemical America in early modern to modern times, and certain obvious topics remain under-represented, including particularly the development of chemistry’s institutional and educational presence, and the relationship between Atlantic chemistries and indigenous knowledge. What the collection tends to show is firstly the complexity of Atlantic transactions, secondly the necessity of attention to the variety of contextual factors which render these transactions explicable, and thirdly the differences in chemical knowledge and practice which historical attention to the western zone of Atlantic cultures can begin to clarify. We hope interested colleagues may follow with further studies of the subject.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to all The Chemical Heritage Foundation staff who helped support the proceedings of the Cain Conference 2017, the library staff, director Robert Anderson, and Beckman Center director Carin Berkowitz, for her excellent organizational coordination of the conference programme, for help with publication planning, and the early editorial phases of this special issue. Particular gratitude goes to Jenny Miglus for the Bulkeley Notebooks. Thanks also are due to the patience and understanding of the editors of Annals of Science, and finally my own personal thanks go to the authors of this collection, and their patience with the lengthy editorial process.
Disclosure statement
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