Save Cover Preview

Working Knowledge

A Simon Schaffer Reader

Simon Schaffer

Edited by Charlotte Bigg, John Tresch, and Simon Werrett

Working Knowledge

A Simon Schaffer Reader

Simon Schaffer

Edited by Charlotte Bigg, John Tresch, and Simon Werrett

Collects key articles by Simon Schaffer, one of the most important historians of science working today.

Working Knowledge is the first English-language collection of essays by Simon Schaffer, coauthor of Leviathan and the Air-Pump, a landmark text in the history of science. Though the latter may be his most famous book, Schaffer is also renowned for seminal articles on Isaac Newton and the cultures of popular spectacle, nineteenth-century physics and its practices of labor discipline and standardization, the history of anthropology and collecting, and the globe-spanning cultural interactions that have shaped modern science. Working Knowledge compiles these well-known pieces alongside newer selections, making them accessible in a single place and representing the huge scope and impact of Schaffer’s oeuvre.

The Reader divides sixteen of Schaffer’s articles across five thematic sections, which take up timely issues like the turn toward global histories of science; the intersection of science and capitalism; the interaction between bodies and machines; and the connection between science, politics, and the environment. Eight new essays by notable historians such as Adrian Johns, Lissa Roberts, and Steven Shapin bring Schaffer’s pieces into discussion with current scholarship. Illustrations and brief commentaries by Schaffer and the artist Adam Lowe, a longtime collaborator, are included throughout the volume.

Bringing together essential articles that were previously scattered across several publications, Working Knowledge is an insightful introduction to Schaffer and his ever-relevant writing.

Read More Read Less

672 pages | 53 halftones | 6 x 9

History: History of Ideas, History of Technology

History of Science

Reviews
Table of contents
Excerpt
Gallery
Awards
Author Events
Related Titles

Reviews

“If you were looking for a guide to the most influential work in the history of science in the past forty years, written by one of its most brilliant and original thinkers, this expertly edited volume of Schaffer’s collected essays should be top of your list. Even on second or third reading, every essay is still powerful and provocative—a master class in how to rethink a whole discipline.”

Lorraine Daston, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

“Schaffer writes history as if ideas have gravity, drawing institutions, instruments, and empires into converging orbits. His scholarship reveals not only how science operates and is performed, but how it travels across oceans, through social orders, and between minds. With a gift for uncovering the improbable connections between seemingly minor details and vast intellectual structures, Schaffer transforms footnotes into revelations. Framed by illuminating introductions from leading historians of science, Working Knowledge foregrounds Schaffer’s rare capacity to elucidate the material and conceptual architecture of science in ways that are both vivid and broadly accessible.”

Jean-François Gauvin, Université Laval

Table of Contents

Editors’ Preface, by Charlotte Bigg, John Tresch, and Simon Werrett

Part 1. Opening
In Conversation: Simon Schaffer and the Politics of Intellectual Inquiry, by Lissa Roberts

Part 2. Performance
Science Performed: The Priestley Principle, by Frédérique Aït-Touati and Adrian Johns
Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century
Glass Works: Newton’s Prisms and the Uses of Experiment
Easily Cracked: Scientific Instruments in States of Disrepair

Part 3. Capitalism
Opening Marxism’s Black Box, by Jenny Bulstrode, Myles W. Jackson, Dániel Margócsy, and Kapil Raj
Newton at the Crossroads
Late Victorian Metrology and Its Instrumentation: A Manufactory of Ohms
Golden Means: Assay Instruments and the Geography of Precision in the Guinea Trade
Instruments as Cargo in the China Trade

Part 4. Bodies/Machines
Where Bodies Meet Machines, by Iwan Rhys Morus and H. Otto Sibum
Astronomers Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal Equation
Self Evidence
Enlightened Automata

Part 5. Cosmology
Cosmology as Science and Culture, by Jan Golinski, Stéphane Van Damme, Michael Bravo, and Lauren Kassell
Herschel in Bedlam: Natural History and Stellar Astronomy
Newton on the Beach: The Information Order of Principia Mathematica
The World as Animal

Part 6. Travel
The Reflexive Encounter Between Metrology and Orientalism, by James Delbourgo, Samaa Elimam, Rohan Deb Roy, and Richard Staley
From Physics to Anthropology and Back Again
The Asiatic Enlightenments of British Astronomy
Oriental Metrology and the Politics of Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Survey Sciences

Part 7. Conclusion
Taking the Measure, by Steven Shapin

Archives Consulted
Bibliography
Contributors
Index