ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Sea-Work and Modern Science 1900-1939 1

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

By the turn of the twentieth century, the challenges of investigating the marine environment had produced more than one model for science at sea: the shore-based marine laboratory, the global voyage, the seasonal series, or the basin study. Reconstruction in the 1920s and 1930s spurred re-evaluation of all these models, prompting new debates about oceans and modern science. In now-classic historiography, oceanography was the first big science – driven by scale, government support and global voyages. Yet this account may obscure the plethora of deliberate experiments with ‘sea work’ in the first decades of the twentieth century. Twentieth century oceans presented scientists with a decisively modern environment. Marine sciences were deeply implicated in contemporary debates about the role of the sciences in modern civilization. Research on fisheries, or the currents that linked continents and populations, or new technological access to oceans (on the surface and in the depths) all had obvious practical implications. The oceans epitomized the scientific aspiration to knowledge on a planetary scale, and posed questions about the unity of science and the boundaries of disciplines. Finally, the marine sciences were preoccupied with the many challenges of how to collaborate and organize scientific work in large or remote spaces. Examining the wide range of approaches 1900-1939 suggests the unique ways that marine sciences in this period raised critical questions about observation and epistemology, networks and collaboration, and the social and economic benefits of science.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Katharine Anderson, York

Commentator

• Katharina Steiner, University of Geneva

Individual Presentations

• Imperialism Beneath the Mediterranean Waves: Submarine Telegraphy – Friend or Foe? - Ada Ferraresi, ERC-CoG DEEPMED Project Department of History and Geography University of Seville

• The Plankton Discovery: Historiographical Insights into the Emergence of Limnology and Marine Science - Pier Luigi Pireddu, University of Lisbon

• Cruises, Basins, Canal: Finding International Scales in ICES - Helen Rozwadowski, University of Connecticut Avery Point