Compound Histories - (Hardcover)

About the Book

Compound Histories: Materials, Governance and Production, 1760-1840 explores the intertwined realms of production, governance and materials, placing chemists and chemistry at the center of processes most closely identified with the construction of the modern world.

Book Synopsis

Compound Histories: Materials, Governance and Production, 1760-1840 offers a new view of the period during which Europe took on its modern character and globally dominant position. By exploring the intertwined realms of production, governance and materials, it places chemists and chemistry at the center of processes most closely identified with the construction of the modern world. This includes the interactive intensification of material and knowledge production; the growth and management of consumption; environmental changes, regulation of materials, markets, landscapes and societies; and practices embodied in political economy. Rather than emphasize revolutionary breaks and the primacy of innovation-driven change, the volume highlights the continuities and accumulation of incremental changes that framed historical development.

Contributors are: Robert G.W. Anderson, Bernadette Bensaude Vincent, José Ramón Bertomeu Sánchez, John R.R. Christie, Joppe van Driel, Frank A.J.L. James, Christine Lehman, Lissa L. Roberts, Thomas le Roux, Elena Serrano, Anna Simmons, Marie Thébaud-Sorger, Sacha Tomic, Andreas Weber, Simon Werrett.

Review Quotes

"In this collection, Lissa L. Roberts and Simon Werrett propose an ambitious new agenda for examining relations between science and early industrial production, in which the centrality of chemistry is reasserted. [...] With fourteen chapters in total, the editors faced an obvious challenge of organisation, which they have met with a good measure of success. Each chapter has a well-developed introduction and conclusion, engaging with the common agenda for the volume. By articulating this agenda at length, the editors have also given a significant impulse to future research, and their comprehensive bibliography of secondary sources provides a handy resource for those investigations.
- Jan Golinski (University of New Hampshire), Ambix, 2018, 1-2, DOI 10.1080/00026980.2018.1488125. Mobilized by the environmental crisis, these historians of science are tackling a political and economic history of nitrogen, aluminum, cobalt or uranium unveiling the social, economic networks and complex policies in connection with agriculture, industry or even the consumption, and revealing geographies unpublished: in the case of aluminum, Europe in the Antilles in the nineteenth century and then to Postcolonial Ghana.

About the Author

Lissa L. Roberts, PhD. (1985), UCLA, is Professor of Long Term Development of Science and Technology at University of Twente. She serves also as editor-in-chief of the journal History of Science and co-edits the Brill Series "Cultural Dynamics of Science."

Simon Werrett, PhD. (2000), Cambridge, is Senior Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science, University College, London. Author of Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History (2010), he is completing a new history of experimental philosophy entitled Thrifty Science.