ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Managing Complexity: Investigating Plants, Forests, and Oceans in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

In the last four decades of the nineteenth century, biological research in Europe changed dramatically. While much emphasis recently has focused on the relationship between the changing worlds of global politics and economy, on the one hand, and field natural history and collecting, on the other, other narratives remain dominated by advances in microscopy, conceptual shifts in physiology, and the studies of heredity and evolution. Fieldwork that was not “imperial” has received less attention. Our panel looks at three cases taken from the German-speaking lands, where scientists investigated the growth of plants in nature, the functioning of forests, and the dynamics of ocean life. In all three cases, we analyze how these scientists addressed the methodological challenges of complexity and tried to find approaches that were scientifically sound but also adequate to the subject matter. The panel also considers the role of practical interests in shaping those meanings.

This session addresses the themes of "shifting perspectives" in several ways. First, our protagonists adjusted their own perspectives as they integrated observations and data from "the field” (whether field, forest, or ocean) that inevitably presented highly complex, varied, and locally specific data. How to draw out some kind of uniformity or big picture out of the field conditions they encountered? Second, our scientists tacked back and forth between their search for biological laws or generalizations and their desire to contribute to public welfare and the state's prosperity. Finally, we invite other historians to shift perspectives by revisiting continental science in the nineteenth century, which has largely fallen out of fashion in history (unless in terms of the histories of colonialism and imperialism), although its complexity has not yet been fully appreciated.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Angela Creager, Princeton University

Individual Presentations

• More Light! Biologizing Plant Growth, 1860s-1890s - Kärin Nickelsen, History of Science, LMU Munich

• Organizing Forest Experiments, 1868-1890 - Caterina Schürch, Institut für Philosophie, Literatur-, Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte, Technische Universität Berlin

• Ecologizing the German Oceans, 1868-1887 - Lynn K Nyhart, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Session Organizer

• Lynn K Nyhart, University of Wisconsin–Madison