This proposal requests funds to cover travel and accommodation for American participants in an international workshop to be held at the Teylers Museum, the Netherlands in September 2006. The purpose of the workshop is to enable participants to present and discuss their contributions to a collaborative volume of essays that will be published and made electronically available on the Internet in 2007. Intellectual Merit. The theme of the overall project, of which the workshop is a part, examines knowledge production and circulation at a key moment in the development of global scientific, commercial and political systems. The period 1770-1820 was decisive for the reformation of imperial projects in the wake of military catastrophe and politico-economic crisis, both in the north Atlantic and the southern Asian spheres. The conjuncture also notoriously saw the overhaul of networks and institutions of natural knowledge, whether commercial, voluntary or organs of state. Both the Industrial and the Second Scientific Revolutions have been dated to this moment. New and decisive relations were forged between different cultures? knowledge carriers. Contributors will consider knowledge movements that escape simple models of metropolitan center and remote colonial periphery. They will question the immutable character of mediators and agents in knowledge communication. Instead, they will explore how experiences of travel, assimilation and expropriation changed both the bearer of knowledge and the knowledge communicated. A range of knowledges was in play here: natural history, astronomy, survey science and engineering. So was a range of mediators: missionaries, entrepreneurs, spies, diplomats and navigators. This projects aim is to help make a better account of the worldly interaction between the form of knowledge communicated, the agents of communication and the paths they traveled. The innovative character of this project has a number of facets. It brings together historical issues generally treated separately to provide a better understand of the simultaneous rise of Western industrialization and imperialism. It seeks to demonstrate that the history of European science needs to be understood as part of an increasingly global circulation of knowledge, practices and power relations. Methodologically it replaces oppositional schemes such as Western science versus indigenous knowledge, rational knowledge versus superstition, elite science versus popularization and pure science versus applied science with a recognition that interaction and travel necessarily reshape or reconfigure both the new objects or procedures of knowledge production and the social structures into which they are introduced. The broader impact of this project can be assessed at various levels. First, the results of the workshop, once edited into a coherent book with a substantial introduction that discusses the overall issues analyzed in its individual essays, will be made available both in hardback and electronic form to insure the broadest dissemination and use possible. The essays will be written with a view toward classroom use at the college level so as to help broaden the geographical and cultural scope of history of science courses. Further, current participants are part of a network that is working toward increasing collaboration between historians of science from the North (Europe and North America) and the South (especially South America, India and Indonesia).
