Unifying Knowledge and Dividing Disciplines: The Development of Treatises in the Encyclopaedia Britannica

Abstract

The alphabetical encyclopedias that flourished in Europe after the sixteenth century were easy to consult but open to criticism for breaking up knowledge and destroying its unity. Lacking the prescribed course of reading of textbooks, treatises, and thematically organized encyclopedias, such works invited readers to choose their own points of entry and subsequent trajectories. Not only did the "circle of knowledge" at the origin of the encyclopedic tradition risk being obscured by arbitrarily arranged articles, individual arts and sciences were alleged to be trivialized by encyclopedists' acceptance of fragmentation. Alphabetical works of reference came with too many benefits—and too much appeal in an age in which knowledge was starting to be seen as public property and an element of sociability—to succumb to such criticism, but efforts were made to reconnect knowledge dispersed by the alphabet, whether through prefatory trees of knowledge, rubrics locating articles in larger units, or cross-references. The prospectus to the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768–71) announced that alongside articles, the proposed work would offer extended entries, or "treatises," on the arts and sciences in an attempt to spare readers the "labor of hunting for science through … a labyrinth."1 Typographical [End Page 57] differences in their titles and running heads reinforced the distinction between articles and treatises. In the third (1788–97) and fourth (1801–09)editions of the Britannica, many treatises were written by specialized contributors, an association that added to the work's growing prestige and marketability. Meanwhile in France, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke had begun publishing the Encyclopédie méthodique (1782–1832), a work consisting of independent, mostly alphabetical dictionaries on different subjects. Like the Britannica, the Méthodique attempted to preserve disciplines as wholes without renouncing alphabetical order, an effort that lent itself to the recruitment of expert contributors and reflected the increasing specialization of the sciences toward 1800.2 Although the Encyclopaedia Britannica's treatises, like the disciplinary dictionaries of the Encyclopédie méthodique, were written in response to the scientific and commercial culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they nonetheless first appeared in the original edition of 1768, a work compiled single-handedly by a generalist, the printer William Smellie. Ironically, we understand the ends that treatises served around 1800 better than the reasons for their appearance in the first edition of the Britannica. Similarly lengthy entries had been common in thematic encyclopedias, but almost none of the Britannica's alphabetical predecessors made use of such treatises, the notable exception being Dennis de Coetlogon's An Universal History of Arts and Sciences (1745). Since the early nineteenth century, resemblances have been pointed out between the organization of the first edition of the Britannica and that of Coetlogon's Universal History, but an influence of the latter on the former has never been more than conjectured.3 Nor have relations between the two works been analyzed. Here, after reviewing the treatment of disciplines in previous encyclopedias in order to gauge the novelty of the treatises in the Britannica and the Universal History, I will argue that Smellie did borrow the idea of treatises from Coetlogon's work, where they reflected the author's concern for aristocratic education and his enthusiasm for old-fashioned, Cartesian systems. Smellie's adaptation of treatises to his own more democratic, empirical aims testifies to their versatility as tools for organizing knowledge. Thereafter I will survey the evolution of treatises in the Encyclopaedia Britannica through the early twentieth century. Although the number of treatises grew with every edition, their length tended to decrease after 1800, so that the proportion of pages in treatises remained relatively constant for some time and even declined in the nineteenth century. The fact that treatises were growing shorter and more uniform in length by the mid-nineteenth century suggests that the Britannica's editors were exercising greater control over contributors, the latter's prestige notwithstanding, in the interest of creating...