ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Natural Extraction: Shifting Epistemic Hierarchies Within the Danish Atlantic Empire, 1770–1940

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Although now considered a small nation-state, Denmark has a long history of imperial power and control across the Atlantic. Since 1672, the formal Danish Empire expanded all the way from the icy north of Greenland to the tropical climate of the former Danish West Indies (today the US Virgin Islands), and yet the global and imperial turns have by and large evaded the study of Danish histories of science and knowledge. With this session, we aim to initiate a discussion of how knowledge-making and resource extraction was used strategically by Danish bureaucrats and scientists to stabilise and control the faraway territories of the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Iceland, and the Danish West Indies. Each paper analyses how the Danish state and state sponsored institutions, in unequal collaboration with regional actors, deployed intellectual and material resources to extract natural materials and knowledge in different regions of its Empire. We trace how Danish scientists and bureaucrats sought to survey the nature of its Atlantic Empire, be it underground coal seams, Arctic vegetation, or daily weather phenomena across different climates. The papers pay specific attention to the ‘paper technologies’ through which this knowledge was produced and circulated. Additionally, we highlight how local actors contested and co-opted imperial hierarchies of knowledge, especially by embedding themselves and their labour in its paper technologies; whether these were formatted as mineralogical surveys, herbaria sheets, or either preformatted or printed meteorological tables. Taken together, the papers highlight how hierarchies among actors, sites, and methods were continually negotiated and inscribed, as Inuit plant collectors became entangled with university-trained botanists; Copenhagen-based mining administration with small Faroese bygder; and imperial meteorological institutions with regional networks of observation.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Christoffer Basse Eriksen, Aarhus University

Individual Presentations

• Managing Faroese Coal: Negotiating Epistemic Hierarchies in the Danish Bureau of Mines, c. 1770-1790 - Niels Josva Balling, Aarhus University

• Meteorological Inscription Within a Fragmented Empire: Regional and Imperial Circulation of Paper-borne Weather Knowledge in Iceland and the Danish West Indies, 1841-1877 - Dann Grotum, European University Institute

• Rooted in Soil, Fixed on Paper: Hybrid Knowledge Exchanges in The Greenland Herbarium - Olivia Trude Struve, Aarhus University

Session Organizer

• Christoffer Basse Eriksen, Aarhus University