The four articles in this special issue of Ambix were among the twenty-two papers presented at the conference ‘Sites of Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century.’ Held in Oxford at the Maison Française in July 2011, this meeting launched the project Sites of Chemistry, 1600–2000: a series of conferences investigating the wide and diverse range of physical spaces and places where chemistry has been practised.Footnote1 Because chemistry is above all an experimental science, its historiography has quite properly given prominence to the laboratory as its prime site. At the same time, histories have tended to privilege major scientific institutions and their dominant figures. What this series intends to contribute to our understanding of the history of chemistry is an expanded definition of where chemistry has been practised, which includes the princely court, the apothecary's shop, the learned society, the craftsman's workshop, and the industrial research and development laboratory, as well as mines, factories and farms, cabinets of curiosities, coffee shops, tax offices and law courts. As this range suggests, chemical knowledge was produced and used in geographically and socially dispersed areas, by various actors and for different ends.
By expanding the definition of what constitutes a site of chemistry, this series aims to encourage historians to adopt various approaches. First, to consider practice more extensively rather than focusing on major chemists and theories, thereby giving fuller recognition to the role played by the large mass of chemists in any period, who have tended to be overlooked in current historiography. Second, a focus on sites cannot ignore the social and cultural networks in which they were situated, and this provides a basis for investigating the circulation of people, ideas, practices and material objects around the chemical world. The project also explores the ways in which chemical practices, ideas and organisation were adapted and transformed as they moved from place to place. Third, because the study of sites requires an analysis of their physical organisation, it provides a means of integrating the study of the material culture of chemistry into its wider history. Finally, the analysis of sites and networks also provides a framework for investigating the roles of chemistry and chemists in innovation in both industry and agriculture. This is particularly important for the period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, where much detailed work on the relations between scientific practices and industrialisation and technological change remains to be done. The four papers in this special issue demonstrate the possibilities opened up by such a focus on sites.
Chemical practice is taken here to include research, teaching, learning, industrial application and routine analysis, theoretical debate and popular dissemination. While the form that chemical practice actually took at any particular location varied considerably—not all sites had an educational function, for example, or issued in a formal set of practices that could be shared or disseminated—the advantage of the approach taken in this series of conferences is that it provides the opportunity for comparative analysis, and for exploring the development and transformation of chemical practices over the long term. The project aims to provide a framework for such comparative and longitudinal studies by encouraging the use of a common set of categories in studies of individual sites. This involves, on the one hand, an investigation of the internal organisation—physical, social and economic—of a site and the identification of who was practising chemistry there, how and for what purposes. On the other, it seeks to situate sites in their wider, external environments, in particular through the detailed examination of chemists’ interactions, in and around specific sites, with other actors, thereby exploring the wider social, economic, political and cultural contexts for the practice of chemistry.
In keeping with these objectives, the papers presented at the Oxford conference covered a wide geographical range, spanning both the Old and New Worlds: from Amsterdam to Batavia, St Petersburg to Paris, Stockholm to Naples, London to Berlin, Madrid to Pennsylvania. The variety of chemical sites under consideration was equally wide. In addition to those presented in this volume, they included private laboratories, the Swedish Bureau of Mines, Vesuvius, James Watt's workshop, lecture halls, dissenting academies, medical faculties and apothecaries’ shops.
Selecting a limited number of papers for publication from such a rich variety of conference presentations always presents difficulties. In making their choice, the project's editorial group was guided by several considerations. It was agreed that papers should reflect both the range of sites discussed at the conference, and the themes that define the project more widely. At the same time, it was noted that many of the conference papers were concerned with France or Britain: countries that, to date, have tended to receive disproportionate attention from historians of eighteenth-century chemistry. We agreed that one benefit of the current volume was the opportunity to examine geographical regions and countries that have been underrepresented in recent literature. It was therefore a self-conscious decision on the part of the editorial group, when selecting papers, to focus on those dealing with chemical sites in countries that have been less frequently represented in histories of eighteenth-century chemistry, but which provide compelling illustrations of the themes defining the project. Finally, we agreed to include work by both new and established scholars.
The four papers in this special issue fulfil these objectives. Their geographical coverage—Prussia, Russia, Spain and Lower Hungary—presents alternative perspectives to those already familiar from studies of French and British chemistry, while also focusing on five major contexts relevant to much of European chemistry throughout the eighteenth century. These are the cultural interests of social elites; assaying and mining; medical practice; state-sponsored economic institutions; and academies and learned societies.
Ursula Klein studies the range of activities taking place within a single, specific site under the direct sponsorship of a monarch: the Royal Prussian Porcelain Manufactory in Berlin. Klein maps the transformation of this economically important space from primarily a site of production to a site of chemical experimentation, by revealing how knowledge moved between different types of ‘expert’: from the individual laboratory workers and Arcanisten, knowledgeable in the secrets of pastes and pigments, to the board of the Manufactory, and the ‘chemists’ appointed as external inspectors.
A variety of Russian sites, still linked by courtly interests, is surveyed in Simon Werrett's article. Scholarly interest in the famous laboratory of Mikhail Vasil'evich Lomonosov at the Imperial Academy of Sciences has tended to obscure a host of other chemical sites in eighteenth-century St Petersburg, including pyrotechnical and pharmaceutical workshops and teaching spaces. Like Klein, Werrett seeks to break down simplistic divisions between chemical artisanry and chemical science; showing how Lomonosov himself manipulated such divisions to distinguish his own activities from those of less educated rivals.
The interests of social elites are examined from a different perspective by Elena Serrano, who focuses on two learned female societies in Madrid: the Junta de socias de honor y mérito and the Asociación de señoras. Serrano traces the activities of these aristocratic ladies across a variety of spaces: women's prisons, textile workshops, the Foundling Hospital, and the meeting places of the societies themselves. In doing so, she argues for the role of both class and gender in shaping chemical knowledge in the urban public sphere of eighteenth-century Spain.
The final article, by Peter Konečný, takes us to the copper-rich mountains of Lower Hungary (modern Slovakia). The cameralist reforms of the Hapsburg state sought to maximise the economic value of this important mining region: from revising the administration of mines and smelteries, to the establishment of a central mining academy in Schemnitz. Just as the chemists appointed to the academy served as both teachers and mining officials, so the academy's laboratory served a variety of uses: from teaching to assaying, and experiments intended to improve the quality of smelted metals.
From laboratories to salons, fireworks to porcelain, these essays open up new contexts for the study of chemical spaces. Nevertheless, the space constraints of a special issue limit the range of topics that can be discussed in detail. Consequently, we do not discuss sites that functioned in contexts that were defined by the increasing popularity of chemistry as a public science: a development which, until the end of the century, was largely confined to Britain and France.Footnote2 A fuller picture might well have included the popular, public chemical sites to be found in increasing numbers first in Paris and London from the 1760s. It would also have given more weight to two other types of site that featured at the 2011 conference: the university (in particular the medical faculty), and the apothecary's shop and laboratory. The editors intend to address this imbalance in a planned volume of commissioned essays, provisionally titled Places and Spaces: Historical Perspectives on the Practice of Chemistry, that will be published at the end of the project.
Both the 2011 conference and the present volume thus mark only the first instalments of a programme of meetings and publications that, we hope, will foster new conversations and research across chemistry's history, from the early modern period to the present day. The conference in Oxford in 2011 was followed by the conference on nineteenth-century chemical sites held at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Science, Lopez Piñero, in Valencia, in July 2012. The next conference, on the twentieth century, will be held at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm in August this year, and will be followed by a conference on seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century sites in Oxford in July 2014. The series will conclude with a meeting in Leiden in 2015, which will consider the developments of sites of chemistry over the long term and in comparative perspective.
Acknowledgements
The conference was funded with the generous support of the Wellcome Trust, the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, the Maison Française d'Oxford, and Maney Publishing. The editor would like to thank Antonio Belmar, who is the joint co-ordinator of the project; the other members of the group that organised the conference – Marco Beretta, John Christie, Ernst Homburg, Ursual Klein, Muruiel Le Roux, and Lissa Roberts; and Georgette Taylor.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
John Perkins
Before he retired, John Perkins was Dean of Arts and Humanities at Oxford Brookes University, where he is now an associate of the Centre for Health, Medicine and Society: Past and Present. His main area of interest is the social history of chemistry in eighteenth-century France. He is currently writing a history of the Parisian chemical world, 1750-1810. Address: 19 Nethercote Road, Tackley, OX5 3AW, UK; E-mail: [email protected].
Notes
2 On this subject see, for example, the collected essays in John Perkins, ed., “Chemistry Courses and the Construction of Chemistry, 1750–1830,” Ambix 57 (2010).