ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

New Practices of Scientific Internationalism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Example of Geology

• In Event: Stratigraphy, Deep Time, and the Making of Geological Knowledge 2

English Abstract

While government connected scientific academies had made sporadic efforts at international cooperation in the past, and individual scientists had sometimes reached across national borders for collaborative travel and research, this paper argues that the 1830s saw a paradigm shift in scientific internationalism. Already in the 1820s, grassroots national scientific organizations with annual peripatetic conferences began to arise, first in Switzerland and Germany, with successors in Britain, France, Italy, and elsewhere. The extent to which these national organizations already involved international ties, however, has not been fully recognized, and marks an early stage of the development of scientific and political internationalism that expanded dramatically in the 1870s and after. As this paper will suggest, the formation of “epistemic communities” built upon that of “affective communities” through the face-to-face, group sociability and networking at the national conferences, including the international guests. Efforts to standardize scientific measurements, nomenclature, and visual representations also emerged early in this process. The paper explores these themes through examples from the sections for geology and mineralogy at national academic conferences in the 1830s and 1840s. Geological excursions featured in the scientific congresses from an early date as part of the mixed social and scientific program. As the paper will show, the conferences and field excursions increasingly involved international cooperation, above all through a series of meetings in Strasbourg, Stuttgart, and Bonn in 1834-1835 and Italy in the 1840s that assembled many of Europe’s geologist luminaries to discuss controversial issues in situ and calls for standardization of geological maps.

Author

• Brian Vick, Emory University