Sites of Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The four articles in this special issue of Ambix were among the twenty-two papers presented at the conference ‘Sites of Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century.’ Held in Oxford at the Maison Francaise in July 2011, this meeting launched the project Sites of Chemistry, 1600–2000: a series of conferences investigating the wide and diverse range of physical spaces and places where chemistry has been practised. Because chemistry is above all an experimental science, its historiography has quite properly given prominence to the laboratory as its prime site. At the same time, histories have tended to privilege major scientific institutions and their dominant figures. What this series intends to contribute to our understanding of the history of chemistry is an expanded definition of where chemistry has been practised, which includes the princely court, the apothecary’s shop, the learned society, the craftsman’s workshop, and the industrial research and development laboratory, as well as mines, factories and farms, cabinets of curiosities, coffee shops, tax offices and law courts. As this range suggests, chemical knowledge was produced and used in geographically and socially dispersed areas, by various actors and for different ends. By expanding the definition of what constitutes a site of chemistry, this series aims to encourage historians to adopt various approaches. First, to consider practice more extensively rather than focusing on major chemists and theories, thereby giving fuller recognition to the role played by the large mass of chemists in any period, who have tended to be overlooked in current historiography. Second, a focus on sites cannot ignore the social and cultural networks in which they were situated, and this provides a basis for investigating the circulation of people, ideas, practices and material objects around the chemical world. The project also explores the ways in which chemical practices, ideas and organisation were adapted and transformed as they moved from place to place. Third, because the study of sites requires an analysis of their physical organisation, it provides a means of integrating the study of the material culture of chemistry into its wider history. Finally, the analysis of sites and networks also provides a framework for investigating the roles of