Going Global in Polar Exploration: Nineteenth-century American and British Nationalism and Peacetime Science

Abstract

For much of the nineteenth century, national competition defined attempts to investigate the poles. International scientific cooperation depended on a variety of particular social and political factors. Such mutual collaboration could best occur during periods of relative diplomatic tranquility. Just as the decades between the Congress of Vienna (1815) and the outbreak of the Crimean War (1854) had provided such a space for scientific teamwork, so the political situation after the Congress of Berlin (1878) opened the possibility of another era of international scientific partnership. Indeed, rather than being novel, the efforts leading up to the coordinated study of the Arctic during the first International Polar Year (IPY) (1882–83) represented the return to a model of international action first seen earlier in the century. These synchronized attempts to solve the mysteries of the Arctic momentarily blunted nationalistic bravado in favor of a cosmopolitan study of geoscience but also gave domestic politics a more significant role in shaping those scientific ventures. Such cooperative scientific pursuits seemed well suited to the peacetime situations of the nineteenth century and serve as a model of analysis for history. By comparing parallel efforts by Great Britain and the United States to launch an Antarctic expedition in the early nineteenth century, it is possible to see the effect that domestic partisan realities could have on the supposedly impartial study of science in this period.