ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Artisans of the Ocean: Atlantic pilots, local knowledge and global networks in Early Modern Iberia

• In Event: Practitioners, Artisans and Instruments in the Making of Premodern Science, II

English Abstract

Historians of science have paid considerable attention to the major social and cultural transformations brought about by science. However, when they have done so, they have unequivocally focused on certain individuals or groups, almost always identified as brilliants men of science, leaving out of the analysis many other communities of knowledge that also played a relevant role in the context of that social change. A paradigmatic case is that of European maritime expansion and the emergence of modern science. According to the main historiographical currents on modern science, it would seem that both phenomena belonged to different, even opposing, worlds. On one side, we have mere adventurers who could barely read and write. On the other, the self-proclaimed fathers of scientific modernity. Now, is it possible to consider non-scientific and non-scholarly individuals, traditionally excluded from the world of knowledge, as the main agents and drivers of social change? Is modern science the result of the ideas of a select group of ‘modern’ men, or is it something more than that?
To answer this question, a detailed analysis of ocean navigation practiced in the Iberian world during the first stage of expansion is proposed. This analysis will allow us to draw conclusions about the role that Atlantic pilots played in shaping modern cosmography and European geographical thought in particular, and modern science in general. The forms of social organization of these new subjects of science, their learning processes and means of acquiring information, their skills and abilities, their knowledge, and their material artifacts can serve as precise indicators for measuring the presence of maritime culture and the practical dimension of knowledge in the construction of modernity.

Author

• Antonio Sanchez, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid