ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Democratic, Explosive, Insurrectionary: Edinburgh, Birmingham, and the Birth of a Radical Philosophical Chemistry

• In Event: Dissent, Translation, and Appropriation in Chemical Textbooks, 1760-1881

English Abstract

Historians of science will likely be familiar with the term ‘Chemical Revolution,’ in reference to the disproving of phlogiston theory by Lavoisier alongside other major chemical discoveries in the last quarter of the 18th century. They may be less familiar with the revolutionary role chemistry played in the British reform movement in that same period. In mid-18th century Britain, chemistry was beginning to come into its own as an academic discipline. Still, chemists struggled to gain acceptance in mainstream British natural philosophical institutions, either because chemistry -hands on, explosive, and experimental as it was- often resisted easy classification as natural philosophy, or because the natural philosophy it produced did not reinforce the Anglican hegemony demanded by the state. Thus, it was not in the universities of Oxford or Cambridge, or in the scientific and philosophical circles of London that chemistry would develop its own distinct natural philosophy (‘philosophical chemistry’), but in industrial hubs like Birmingham, and, crucially, the secular-founded University of Edinburgh. These non-state, non-Anglican settings opened the discipline to dissenters and other traditionally excluded practitioners and allowed philosophical chemistry to develop into something radical, in its theories, practices, pedagogies and texts, something which threatened the increasingly restrictive philosophy of the state, leading it to be almost inseparable from the philosophy of the reform movement. Textbooks and theories became ideological battlegrounds of reformist belief, and when the movement was crushed by the state, it would also represent a drastic reshaping of the discipline of chemistry.

Author

• Esther Simon, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign