Chemical Knowledge in Transit

Abstract

This special issue of Ambix began with “Crossing Oceans,” a conference held in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in August 2014, jointly organised by the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (SHAC); the Centre Simao Mathias (CESIMA), Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo (PUC-SP); and the Centre for Logic, Epistemology andHistory of Science (CLE), State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). This conference marked several important milestones. It celebrated the twentieth anniversary of CESIMA, one of the world’s largest and most successful centres for research in the history of science, together with colleagues from CLE, an equally important centre in the philosophy of science. This was also the first time that SHAC had sponsored a major event outside Europe or North America. Yet this conference marked neither an ending nor a beginning: the groundwork for the meeting was laid on exchanges of scholarship (and scholars) between Brazil and the United Kingdom over the past decade, and which we hope will continue for many years to come. It is therefore fitting that, in preparing this special issue, we should take up the theme of “transits” of chemical knowledge—whether of theoretical aspects, practices, materials, instruments, or apparatus. This theme leads us to ask how the science of material transformation was itself transformed through local, regional, and global exchanges. As is well known, early attempts to understand the spread of science and technology were based on to the so-called “centre–periphery” model, according to which global exchanges are characterised by an unequal relationship extending from economic and political cores to dependent, subordinate areas. Full taxonomies of spatial