Transnational Cultures of Expertise

Circulating State-Related Knowledge in the 18th and 19th centuries

Lothar Schilling, Jakob Vogel, Lothar Schilling, Jakob Vogel

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110553734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire prémoderne

Building on the new critical historiography about the evolution of the European state, the book analyses how administrators, scientists, popular publicists and other actors tried to redefine the realms of state action in the "Sattelzeit" (Koselleck). By focussing on the specific strategies of these actors and on the transnational circulation and dissemination of state related knowledge itself, the contributors of the book highlight the fluidity and the interconnections of the European debate in the crucial period of the development of the modern nation-state and its administration. They study the common European features of the evolution of a new type of statehood built upon multiple circulations and transfers that forged administrative practices in the different fields of state action. Analysing important fields of expertise ranging from agricultural knowledge, mining sciences to anthropological knowledge, which laid the basis for the new "scientific" foundations of administration, the book underlines the necessity of a re-evaluation of the classical approaches to the history of state in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Table of contents

• About the Cover Image
• Preface
• Contents
• State-Related Knowledge: Conceptual Reflections on the Rise of the Modern State
• Part I: Defining the Fields of the State
• State and Civil Society in the Diffusion of Agricultural Knowledge in Sweden and Finland, 1739–1830
• Transfer of Knowledge, the State, and Economy in the Cuban Coal Question (Nineteenth Century)
• Patronage and Expertise: The Creation of Trans-Imperial Knowledge, 1719–1848
• Part II: Circulating State-Related Knowledge
• ‘Intelligencers’ (advertisement sheets) as Media of State-Related Knowledge?
• The Société des Observateurs de l’homme (1799–1804) and the Circulation of State-Related Knowledge under Napoléon
• Describing the World and Shaping the Self: Knowledge-Gathering, Mobility and Spatial Control at the Swedish Bureau of Mines
• Lost in Imperial Translation? Circulating Mining Knowledge between Europe and Latin America around 1800
• Part III: Negotiating Scales and Spaces of the State
• Territorialisation and Logistics of Knowledge and Learning: The Case of Mineral Resource Surveys in France in the Eighteenth Century
• “Political-Economic Principles” and Local Interests of Reception: Peripheral Authorisation of Knowledge in the Agrarian Policy of the Electoral Palatinate (ca. 1750–1800)
• Territorialising Atlantic Knowledge: The French State Tobacco Monopoly and the Globalisation of the Havana Cigar around the Mid-Nineteenth Century
• Index of Persons