Spaces of Global Knowledge: Exhibition, Encounter and Exchange in an Age of Empire

✍ Scribed by Diarmid A. Finnegan, Jonathan Jeffrey Wright

• Publisher: Ashgate
• Year: 2015
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 301
• Series: Studies in Historical Geography
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

’Global’ knowledge was constructed, communicated and contested during the long nineteenth century in numerous ways and places. This book focuses on the life-geographies, material practices and varied contributions to knowledge, be they medical or botanical, cartographic or cultural, of actors whose lives crisscrossed an increasingly connected world. Integrating detailed archival research with broader thematic and conceptual reflection, the individual case studies use local specificity to shed light on global structures and processes, revealing the latter to be lived and experienced phenomena rather than abstract historiographical categories. This volume makes an original and compelling contribution to a growing body of scholarship on the global history of knowledge. Given its wide geographic, disciplinary and thematic range this book will appeal to a broad readership including historical geographers and specialists in history of science and medicine, imperial history, museum studies, and book history.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 6
List of Figures and Tables......Page 8
List of Contributors......Page 10
Acknowledgements......Page 12
Introduction Placing Global Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century......Page 14
Part 1 Encounters and Identity......Page 30
1 Global Knowledge in a Local World: Charlotte Wheeler Cuffe’s Encounters with Burma 1901–1902......Page 32
2 Archaeology, Empire and the Field: Exploring the Ancient Sites of Cyprus, 1865–1876......Page 52
3 Webs of Science, Webs of Commerce: The Life-Worlds of a Merchant Naturalist......Page 70
4 Scientific Practice and the Scientific Selfin Rupert’s Land, c.1770–1830: Fur Trade Networks of Knowledge Exchange......Page 92
Part 2 Collection and Display......Page 110
5 Sampling the South Seas: Collecting and Interrogating Scientific Specimenson Mid-Nineteenth-Century Voyages of Pacific Exploration......Page 112
6 Curating Global Knowledge: The Museum of Economic Botany at Kew Gardens......Page 132
7 ‘A Depot for the Productions of the Four Quarters of the Globe’: Empire, Collecting and the Belfast Museum......Page 156
8 Malthus’s Globalisms: Enlightenment Geographical Imaginaries in the Essay on the Principle of Population......Page 180
Part 3 Circulation and Translation......Page 198
9 Brokering Knowledge in an Age of Mis-Recognition and Ignorance; or Displaying Haiti to the Masses......Page 200
10 ‘Throughout Bihar and Beyond’: Dublin University Mission and the Structuring of a ‘Global’ Medical Practice......Page 222
11 Historical Geographies of Textual Circulation: David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels in France and Germany......Page 240
Afterword Connections, Institutions, Languages......Page 258
Bibliography......Page 270
Index......Page 294