Trading Objecthood: Global Business and the Language of Natural History in the Long Nineteenth Century

Please register for the event.

 

History of Science Annual Workshop

 

The nineteenth century saw earlier regimes of monopoly and prestige giving way to open-ended competition over natural resources that were increasingly funneled into industrial production and mass consumption. As a result, the learned inquiry in natural history also became deeply entwined with new institutions (tariff, currency exchange, branding / patent, extraterritoriality…) that sprang in the age of global business. Epitomizing this period of intense change in the relationship between business and scientific communities is the issue of language: the naming and classification of flora, fauna and mineral matter began to incorporate more previously undocumented languages such as regional dialects, pidgin and creole, and the issue of translation and systematic nomenclature assumed new practical urgency in the geopolitical administration of trade. In this workshop, we bring together expertise in different regions to highlight a common theme in the history of science: namely, how the orderly construct of nomenclature and classification in early modern cultures accommodated, and even fostered, the exploitative and expansive ethics of industrial capitalism.

 

Speakers:

Nandini Bhattacharya (link is external), University of Dundee

He Bian, Princeton University

Janet Browne (link is external), Harvard University

D. Graham Burnett, Princeton University

Harold Cook (link is external), Brown University

Claire Cooper (link is external), Princeton University

James Delbourgo (link is external), Rutgers University

Michael Gordin, Princeton University

Kuang-Chi Hung (link is external), National Taiwan University

Stacie Kent (link is external), Boston College

Rachel Koroloff (link is external), Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Federico Marcon, Princeton University

Bernadette Pérez, Princeton University

Ruth Rogaski (link is external), Vanderbilt University

Winnie Wong (link is external), UC Berkeley

Rebecca Woods (link is external), University of Toronto

 

Organizers:

He Bian, Princeton University

Federico Marcon, Princeton University