Finding a Teacher of Navigation Abroad in Eighteenth-Century Venice: A Study of the Circulation of Useful Knowledge

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONThis paper explores an example of the deliberate circulation of useful knowledge by the state in the second half of the eighteenth century: the location and employment of an English teacher of navigation by the Venetian government. Arthur Edgcombe, a former Royal Naval officer who ran a private navigational school in Portsmouth, was head-hunted by an agent of the Republic in 1766 to serve as master of the Scuola Nautica: a school established to train Venetian merchant seamen, aged fourteen to sixteen, in the theory and practice of navigation. His acceptance of employment and transfer to Venice inaugurated a period of English influence at the school that lasted until the fall of the Republic in 1797, by the end of which he and his son Thomas, who succeeded him as master, had taught several hundred Venetian subjects. The excellent results of the nautical school - in large part due to its two English masters - mark it out as one of the most successful of a number of commercial and maritime reforms in eighteenth-century Venice.1Situating this case study within the context of the broader scientific and industrial diffusion of knowledge in the late Enlightenment, this paper will argue that it allows us a privileged glimpse of how the 'knowledge economy' operated in practice, thanks to the unusually rich traces left by Edgcombe in the Venetian state archives. Venice's search for a teacher of navigation highlights the crucial role that the state and its agents often played in the international circulation of technology and scientific practices and reveals the social embeddedness of that knowledge. What did it mean for a state such as Venice to acquire useful knowledge in the eighteenth century? In this case it meant primarily negotiating the international labour market and attracting a skilled worker: the embodiment of knowledge and know-how. The communication of that knowledge and its 'localisation' in Venice was a process equally rooted in socio-cultural relations whose success depended on a degree of local adaptation and mediation.This paper therefore adds a contribution to the ongoing debates amongst historians of science, technology and the economy about how and why knowledge moves across borders. The question 'How does knowledge circulate?' has the potential to unite the efforts of historians of science, argues James Secord, when scientific knowledge is understood to be a form of communication.2 Within economic history, the work of Joel Mokyr has in recent years highlighted the epistemological foundations of economic growth and argued for the crucial role played by the interface of science and technology.3 Institutions that favoured the free circulation and communication of certain types of knowledge and practices are held to have been integral to what he terms the 'Industrial Enlightenment' . In the process Mokyr has left us with the concept of 'useful knowledge' - knowledge of the material world which incorporates both propositional and prescriptive knowledge, i.e. science and technology. As a more holistic attempt at conceptualising knowledge production, useful knowledge can perhaps go some way towards re-integrating our historically- and culturallyloaded distinctions between science and technology or between men of science and craftsmen in our analyses.4Contemporaries in the eighteenth century had their own schemas for conceptualising the 'art of navigation' and frequently subdivided it into 'theory' and 'practice' or 'scienza' and 'arte' (craft) as Thomas Edgcombe explained in Venice.5 Pupils at the Royal Naval Academy, Portsmouth in the 1770s, for example, were taught that navigation may be divided into two parts, namely mechanical and theoretical. Mechanical or working navigation, comprehends the art or working of a ship ... Theoretical navigation or the art of piloting concerns those methods whereby the navigator or pilot discovers on what tack the ship must steer so as to arrive safely at the intended place. …