Journal for the History of Knowledge
type: channel
description: The Journal for the History of Knowledge is an open access, peer-reviewed journal devoted to the history of knowledge in its broadest sense. Read more about the journal here.
publisher: A journal of Gewina, The Belgian-Dutch Society for the History of Science and Universities
language: en
publication name: Journal for the History of Knowledge
issn: 2632-282X
items: The End of Exchange
items: Shaping Scientific Authorship in the Twentieth Century
items: Formal Rule by Informal Code
items: Heroes of Production
items: Rewriting the Rules
items: Youth, Happiness, and Institutional Projects in the Early Eighteenth-Century German Lands
items: Projecting Chemistry in Lomonosov’s Russia (1741–1765)
items: From Spectacle to Specimen
items: Knowledge, Formats, and Fish
items: Projects in the History of Knowledge
items: Population Projections
items: From Universal to Global
items: Response
items: Introduction
items: Ignoring the Obvious About the World
items: Who Knows?
items: Reclaimed Land
items: Projects of Nutmeg and Indigo
items: Afterword
items: Regulating the City
items: Great Designs and Global Colonialism
items: The Nuclear Sea-Level Canal Engineering Feasibility Field Studies and Epistemic Risk in the Darién, 1965–1970
items: The Improvement Police
items: The Optics of St Francis’s Stigmatization
items: Loss
items: Traveling Mermaids, Traveling Materials
items: Contact Zones for a Global History of Knowledge
items: Global Knowledge Rituals
items: For a Multiple Decentering of the History of Knowledge
items: Notes from Global Asia

The End of Exchange
type: item
description: In the course of a few decades around 1970, the circulation of scientific publications changed from a system of exchange—between libraries, publishers, institutions—to one of commercial transactions. In this paper, I will discuss this fundamental change in terms of a shifting moral economy, where the roles, relations, and responsibilities of actors involved in scientific publication were redefined. I focus specifically on the Swedish Natural Sciences Research Council (NSRC) as a prime mover in this self-described “rationalization” process, and on the research libraries engaged in publication exchange. The powerful position of the NSRC as a funding agency in the precarious Swedish scientific publication market makes it a particularly illustrative example of changes in higher education and research that were taking place—although at different levels of speed, scale, and breadth—across many countries, languages, and disciplines. The case of the NSRC and publication exchange enables us to examine these changes not merely in terms of scale, but in terms of values.
subject: Special Issue
  topic: section
subject: History of scientific publication
  topic: keywords
subject: history of science policy
  topic: keywords
subject: library history
  topic: keywords
creator: Jenny Beckman
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Jenny Beckman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2026-09-01
publication date: 2026-09-01
doi: 10.55283/jhk.26268

Shaping Scientific Authorship in the Twentieth Century
type: item
description: “Notes to contributors” and “author guidelines” will be a familiar genre for most readers of this journal. These documents help editors and publishers to shape the behavior of scientific authors by laying down rules about the use of symbols and units, the formatting of bibliographic references, the structure and language of the article text, and the presentation of supporting images or tables. These documents were not, however, common features of academic publishing before the twentieth century, but they emerged during a period of growth and internationalization of the scientific community. A change in tone by the 1970s reflects a shift from collegial and collaborative efforts to publish research, to a world in which editors wielded both the threat of rejection and demands for payments. Very few of these instruction documents attempted to help novice authors by demystifying the publishing or peer review processes. Rather, they trained researchers to prepare typescripts that editors and typesetters could process efficiently, they helped to inculcate standard practices around the use of nomenclature, units and abbreviations within international disciplinary communities, and they began to make explicit certain norms of research conduct around authorship, collaboration and publishing practices.
subject: Special Issue
  topic: section
subject: academic publishing
  topic: keywords
subject: 20th century
  topic: keywords
subject: scientific journals
  topic: keywords
subject: authorship
  topic: keywords
subject: codes of conduct
  topic: keywords
creator: Aileen Fyfe
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Aileen Fyfe https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2026-09-01
publication date: 2026-09-01
doi: 10.55283/jhk.23127

Formal Rule by Informal Code
type: item
description: This paper examines the role of codes of conduct in relation to participation and scientific prestige in India’s three academies of science between 1970 and 2000. This period was one of increasing political and structural change for the Indian scientific state and the academies. Through archival material from the three academies and interviews with its fellows, this paper argues that science academies were mainly organized and run through informal codes of conduct regarding who could become fellows/members of the science academies, and how. The careful utilization of informal codes was done to build and maintain the scientific prestige of these academies and the small cluster of individuals who ran them. By examining three elements of participation in the academies—fellowship, membership, and the removal of fellowship—the paper shows that engagement in them by individuals in the scientific community was tempered by the utilization of informal codes, rather than formal ones, with the intention of cultivating and maintaining scientific prestige.
subject: Special Issue
  topic: section
subject: Codes of conduct
  topic: keywords
subject: science academies
  topic: keywords
subject: Indian science
  topic: keywords
subject: scientific prestige
  topic: keywords
subject: global history of science
  topic: keywords
creator: George Bailey
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 George Bailey https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2026-09-01
publication date: 2026-09-01
doi: 10.55283/jhk.23213

Heroes of Production
type: item
description: This article examines people-centered science in Indonesia between 1950 and 1965, and its role in the agrarian movement. It explores the decolonial context of knowledge production by examining the contribution of leftist figures, who were members of the Indonesian Peasants’ Front (Barisan Tani Indonesia—BTI), in creating people-centered science. Through an analysis of their personal profiles, innovations, and relations to power, the paper shows that BTI’s strategy of epistemological decolonization was very much a political business, which included negotiations with political leaders, the channeling of funds, and the mobilization of public support. It can be said that contrary to the assumption of the “purity” of people power or indigenous knowledge in decolonial Indonesia, the people-centered science of Indonesian leftists was constructed by connecting, borrowing, and adapting different roots, including those that were l eft by colonial institutions.
subject: Research Articles
  topic: section
subject: farmer scientist
  topic: keywords
subject: peasant movement
  topic: keywords
subject: rice production
  topic: keywords
subject: indonesia
  topic: keywords
subject: decolonization
  topic: keywords
creator: Grace Leksana
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Grace Leksana https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2026-09-01
publication date: 2026-09-01
doi: 10.55283/jhk.23215

Rewriting the Rules
type: item
description: This article examines how women astronomers navigated, contested, and sought to reform scholarly codes of conduct within scientific associations during the twentieth century, focusing on the case of astronomical societies, specifically the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Drawing on archival research, including correspondence, meeting records, handbooks, and institutional publications, it traces a shift from women’s accommodation to implicit gendered norms (before 1970), through active contestation and demands for reform (1970s–1980s), to the codification of more explicit standards of conduct in the 1990s. We distinguish between implicit and explicit codes of conduct and argue that, by putting matters of gender equality on the agenda of scientific societies, women astronomers helped transform previously unspoken expectations into explicit objects of discussion and reform. In doing so, they also produced new knowledge about inequality within their profession, notably by documenting experiences, naming structural constraints, and mobilizing statistics and international comparisons. The article centers on two key moments of transgression and codification: Margaret Burbidge’s 1971 refusal of the Annie Jump Cannon Prize and the drafting of the Baltimore Charter for Women in Astronomy in 1992. More broadly, it shows how scientific societies became spaces where norms of participation and conduct were not only enforced but also made visible, debated, and gradually reformulated.
subject: Special Issue
  topic: section
subject: Astronomy
  topic: keywords
subject: women scholars
  topic: keywords
subject: scientific societies
  topic: keywords
subject: gender equality
  topic: keywords
subject: scientific prizes
  topic: keywords
creator: Anna Cabanel
creator: Joris Vandendriessche
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Anna Cabanel, Joris Vandendriessche https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2026-09-01
publication date: 2026-09-01
doi: 10.55283/jhk.23170

Youth, Happiness, and Institutional Projects in the Early Eighteenth-Century German Lands
type: item
description: The period of the project’s flourishing has long been recognized as one in which young people were increasingly viewed as a social group with distinct needs—such as protection from neglectful caregivers—certain weaknesses, and key strengths. With some exceptions, age has not figured centrally in ongoing work on the history of projecting that this special issue prioritizes. Yet project-makers were very interested in age and devised projects that were specifically attuned to youth as a fresh, experiential, possibility-focused stage of life. In this article I argue that many German projectors were drawn to what was widely understood to be young people’s unique orientation toward happiness, a topic of much philosophical discussion and debate by 1700. I explore several reasons why this was the case, tuning into how assumptions about happiness and age impacted institutional projects created for young people from very different social groups: Erlangen’s Ritterakademie (a school for young noblemen), Waldheim’s Zucht-Waysen und Armenhaus (a prison, orphanage, and poorhouse), and a tree-planting project for village youth. I argue that in these projects the goal was to use the relationship between labor and happiness to produce higher-quality forms of work through clever managerial techniques.
subject: Special Issue
  topic: section
subject: youth
  topic: keywords
subject: happiness
  topic: keywords
subject: institutional projects
  topic: keywords
subject: labor
  topic: keywords
subject: workhouse
  topic: keywords
subject: Ritterakademie
  topic: keywords
creator: Kelly J. Whitmer
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Kelly J. Whitmer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-10-08
publication date: 2025-10-08
starting page: 119
ending page: 141
doi: 10.55283/jhk.23115

Projecting Chemistry in Lomonosov’s Russia (1741–1765)
type: item
description: This paper describes the projecting career of a polymath, academician, professor of chemistry, and “father of Russian science” Mikhail Vasil'evich Lomonosov (1711–1765). Hitherto, scholars have treated Lomonosov’s scholarly career as primarily motivated by a disinterested quest to bolster the sciences in Russia. This paper argues that Lomonosov’s promotion of chemistry at the Imperial Academy of Sciences and the Russian court was inextricably tied to his entrepreneurial ambitions as a projector. Examining selected examples of Lomonosov’s projects and projecting strategies, this paper shows how projects contoured his orations, odes, and scholarship, and in doing so underscores the centrality of projects to the crystallization of Russia’s popular scientific culture and discourse, and the development of chemistry as an academic discipline.
subject: Special Issue
  topic: section
subject: Mikhail Lomonosov
  topic: keywords
subject: 18th-century Russian chemistry
  topic: keywords
subject: projects
  topic: keywords
subject: patronage
  topic: keywords
subject: serfdom
  topic: keywords
creator: Reut Ullman
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Reut Ullman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-12-10
publication date: 2025-12-10
starting page: 163
ending page: 187
doi: 10.55283/jhk.19178

From Spectacle to Specimen
type: item
description: Amidst the nineteenth-century funfair, traveling menageries were an important and lucrative attraction providing light-hearted entertainment as well as circulating knowledge on natural history. This article delves into the multifaceted nature of knowledge creation, facilitation, and circulation by focusing on menageries as knowledge arenas, their owners as knowledge actors, and exotic animals as knowledge objects. Menagerie proprietors had different roles as entertainer, entrepreneur, expert, and facilitator: bridging gaps between various social groups, institutions, and geographical locations that resonated far beyond the confines of the fairground. It was this facilitating role that allowed menageries to function as multifaceted knowledge arenas: becoming an entertainment venue, school, artist atelier, or laboratory depending on the people that menagerie owners interacted with; and in its wake transforming these exotic animals into study objects, paintings, photos, and specimens. While knowledge creation, facilitation, and circulation are intertwined processes, engaging a diverse array of actors, research has oftentimes focused more on knowledge creators, offering a partial view. In exploring the multifaceted nature of knowledge, this article draws attention to the often invisible actors that played a facilitating role in the process of knowledge circulation.
subject: Research Articles
  topic: section
subject: itinerant showpeople
  topic: keywords
subject: travelling menageries
  topic: keywords
subject: knowledge actors
  topic: keywords
subject: science
  topic: keywords
subject: art
  topic: keywords
subject: education
  topic: keywords
subject: natural history
  topic: keywords
creator: Eva Andersen
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Eva Andersen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-12-10
publication date: 2025-12-10
starting page: 269
ending page: 303
doi: 10.55283/jhk.18022

Knowledge, Formats, and Fish
type: item
description: The Society for the Promotion of Norwegian Fisheries (Selskabet for de norske fiskeriers fremme) was established in 1879 and started publishing the Norwegian Fisheries’ Journal (Norsk Fiskeritidende). The article argues that this journal, with a total of about 22,500 pages, has been vital to establish “the Norwegian fisheries” as a field of activity and knowledge. It is not only a historical source of information on the fisheries and fish trade in Norway, but a historical agent in its own right representing specific knowledge-making practices. The article explores how the journal was a driving force in constituting the fisheries as an object of knowledge and politics, and established them as networks of connected elements, agents, and issues. The exploration draws on two key theoretical concepts that both serve to highlight the journal’s own agency and performative dimensions: format and scale or scaling.
subject: Research Articles
  topic: section
subject: Knowledge formats
  topic: keywords
subject: epistemic genres
  topic: keywords
subject: scale
  topic: keywords
subject: journals
  topic: keywords
subject: Norwegian fisheries
  topic: keywords
creator: Anne Eriksen
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Anne Eriksen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2026-03-27
publication date: 2026-03-27
doi: 10.55283/jhk.21777

Projects in the History of Knowledge
type: item
description: The Panama Canal, the silkworm, a sugar plantation, the South Sea Bubble, an industrial workschool: they may seem to have little in common, but these, and other disparate interventions from around the globe, share a common epistemology relating knowledge and power in a specific dynamic: the project. A category new to the early modern period that still structures the world around us, the project offers tools for the critical and historical analysis of the large-scale, entangled changes that made modernity. Projects were, to borrow a phrase from Foucault, “technologies of power” that brought together, in a short span of time, many of the social mores, spiritual ends, and epistemic values associated with the modern world. Yet, even as projects claimed to offer new mechanisms for eradicating waste, solving problems, and realizing untold profits by mobilizing peoples and materials, they also engineered large-scale displacement and devastation. The history of projects centers not only the dynamism and ambition but also the violence and ignorance built into economically rationalized visions of the future. For projects were not the laughable schemes many satires suggested; they were integral to global capitalism, epistemic and financial risk-taking, labor exploitation, and environmental degradation. This special issue shows what their impacts were, how projects were configured as forms of knowledge, and how they interrelated with a global landscape of risk and possibility. Addressing their legacies requires critically exploring projects as modes of intervention in the world.
subject: Special Issue
  topic: section
subject: projects
  topic: keywords
subject: knowledge
  topic: keywords
subject: power
  topic: keywords
subject: situation
  topic: keywords
subject: violence
  topic: keywords
subject: risk
  topic: keywords
subject: labor
  topic: keywords
subject: information
  topic: keywords
creator: Vera Keller
creator: Ted McCormick
creator: Kelly J. Whitmer
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Vera Keller, Ted McCormick, Kelly J. Whitmer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-12-10
publication date: 2025-12-10
starting page: 9
ending page: 35
doi: 10.55283/jhk.21237

Population Projections
type: item
description: Centered primarily on the American Colonization Society (ACS), this article explores the movement to colonize free Black women and men in West Africa as a political—as well as a knowledge—project rooted in demography. Hostile to slavery and immediate emancipation alike, white colonizationists used quantitative rhetoric to transform African Americans along a vast spectrum of unfreedom into a “dangerous” and multiplying population in need of removal. While this demographic fearmongering proved effective, the ACS struggled to make large-scale expatriation appear equally so. To render removal “practicable,” colonizationists harnessed the fertility of African American women. By specifically targeting those in their procreative prime for expatriation, colonizationists believed they could gradually deplete the country’s Black population. The colonization project as envisioned by the ACS, then, was the clear inheritor of demography’s hierarchizing tendencies. Not only did colonizationists reproduce the epistemic violence of a system that fragmented and instrumentalized the bodies of Black women, but in specifically targeting the latter for expatriation, they produced a new category via which to define African Americans as a threatening and unassimilable population.
subject: Special Issue
  topic: section
subject: slavery
  topic: keywords
subject: race
  topic: keywords
subject: American Colonization Society
  topic: keywords
subject: gender
  topic: keywords
subject: demography
  topic: keywords
subject: population
  topic: keywords
creator: Meagan Wierda
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Meagan Wierda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-09-19
publication date: 2025-09-19
starting page: 189
ending page: 207
doi: 10.55283/jhk.19138

From Universal to Global
type: item
description: In this paper, I argue that the global history of knowledge may become an empirical substitute for philosophical epistemology. I present a fundamentally Braudelian vision for such a history, prioritizing long-term and large-scale analyses rather than simply focusing on travel and exchange. Finally, I argue that the material conditions that are best suited to the global history of knowledge may be found outside of the United States, where the professional reward structures and the existing structures of funding may not support collaborative work over longer periods of time.
subject: Forum
  topic: section
subject: History of Science
  topic: keywords
subject: Historical epistemology
  topic: keywords
subject: Historical materialism
  topic: keywords
subject: Global
  topic: keywords
subject: Research funding
  topic: keywords
creator: Harun Küçük
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Harun Küçük https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-12-20
publication date: 2024-12-20
doi: 10.55283/jhk.19525

Response
type: item
description: Response to the contributions to the Forum "Decentering the History of Knowledge."
subject: Forum
  topic: section
creator: Anna Grasskamp
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Anna Grasskamp https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-12-20
publication date: 2024-12-20
doi: 10.55283/jhk.19523

Introduction
type: item
description: An introduction to the Forum "Decentering the History of Knowledge," by the Editors in Chief of the Journal for the History of Knowledge.
subject: Forum
  topic: section
creator: Sven Dupré
creator: Geert Somsen
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Sven Dupré, Geert Somsen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-12-20
publication date: 2024-12-20
doi: 10.55283/jhk.19522

Ignoring the Obvious About the World
type: item
description: This essay takes up four kinds of “not knowing” that have been central to knowledge-making in African Studies. I chose ignorance and African history to open a dialogue with the other authors in this issue. The essay deals with therapeutic non-systems, cultural ignorance, disappearing knowledge, and sovereign forms of community care. It uses a now-classic article by Murray Last, on the health-seeking practices of Hausa speakers in northern Nigeria in the 1960s and 1970s, as its anchor. Embedded in the essay is a tacit question about the history of anarchic modes of collective organization in places under-served by states.
subject: Forum
  topic: section
subject: colonialism
  topic: keywords
subject: Africa
  topic: keywords
subject: ignorance
  topic: keywords
subject: anthropology
  topic: keywords
subject: knowledge
  topic: keywords
subject: medicine
  topic: keywords
creator: Helen Tilley
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Helen Tilley https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-12-20
publication date: 2024-12-20
doi: 10.55283/jhk.19473

Who Knows?
type: item
description: This essay explores some aspects of the future of the history of knowledge by reflecting on my ongoing research concerning the historical study of scientific journals in Japan. It places particular emphasis on the posthumanist approaches and uses of new digital technologies within the history of knowledge.
subject: Forum
  topic: section
subject: History of knowlege
  topic: keywords
subject: Posthumanism
  topic: keywords
subject: Flattened ontology
  topic: keywords
subject: Scientific journals
  topic: keywords
subject: Artificial intelligence
  topic: keywords
creator: Kenji Ito
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Kenji Ito https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-12-20
publication date: 2024-12-20
doi: 10.55283/jhk.19472

Reclaimed Land
type: item
description: Although natural history as a genre had classical, medieval, and Renaissance forms, seventeenth-century natural histories played a distinctive role in relation to projects – especially large-scale projects of expropriation, economic exploitation, planned mobility, and settlement. Sites targeted for such projects must be shown to be thoroughly known for the projects proposed to seem feasible or profitable and the risks involved calculable and worthwhile; at the same time, portraying these sites as vacant, waste, or unimproved – tabula rasa, white paper, terra nullius – supplied an important justification and argument for the kinds of intervention and expropriation these projects required. In this context, natural history (conceived of as embracing both works of nature and the achievements of art) became part of a larger epistemic project that predicated the assessment of a situation’s future potential on the knowledge of its present state and resources – often known through local testimony – while simultaneously downplaying past interventions, including even earlier natural histories. Such histories partook of the nature of projects while serving as important instruments for projectors. Though visible in natural histories of various parts of the early modern world, this dynamic is particularly clear in the case of natural histories in Cromwellian and later Stuart Ireland.
subject: Special Issue
  topic: section
subject: natural history
  topic: keywords
subject: projecting
  topic: keywords
subject: land
  topic: keywords
subject: trade
  topic: keywords
subject: empire
  topic: keywords
creator: Ted McCormick
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Ted McCormick https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-09-19
publication date: 2025-09-19
starting page: 59
ending page: 77
doi: 10.55283/jhk.19171

Projects of Nutmeg and Indigo
type: item
description: This article explores the history of projecting within the Royal African Company (RAC), the English slaving company that held the monopoly on English trade with the western coast of Africa in the late seventeenth century. It examines how the slaving company sought to extract profit through the application and collection of natural knowledge. It focuses on the company’s nutmeg and indigo projects of the 1690s as projects in which knowledge, labor, and power intertwined. Amid concerns about retaining its monopoly, RAC nutmeg and indigo projects each sought to enact large-scale environmental transformations of areas adjacent to the company’s slaving forts. The RAC’s efforts to introduce nutmeg to West Africa highlight the company’s repeated efforts to acquire African natural knowledge in order to apply it for profitable ends. Yet knowledge acquired by the company relating to West African indigo production was ignored in its plans for establishing plantations in the 1690s. Although the company’s leaders frequently emphasized that attentiveness to local knowledges was essential to its financial success, in the case of indigo it ignored the knowledge it had previously collected and instead embraced the type of large-scale restructuring of labor and environments that often characterized early modern projecting.
subject: Special Issue
  topic: section
subject: Royal African Company
  topic: keywords
subject: projects
  topic: keywords
subject: slave trade
  topic: keywords
subject: natural knowledge
  topic: keywords
subject: history of knowledge
  topic: keywords
subject: history of ignorance
  topic: keywords
creator: Kathleen S. Murphy
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Kathleen S. Murphy https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-09-24
publication date: 2025-09-24
starting page: 79
ending page: 96
doi: 10.55283/jhk.19143

Afterword
type: item
description: .
subject: Special Issue
  topic: section
subject: power/knowledge
  topic: keywords
subject: entrepreneurship
  topic: keywords
subject: business history
  topic: keywords
subject: history of slavery
  topic: keywords
subject: projects
  topic: keywords
creator: Matthew David Mitchell
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Matthew David Mitchell https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-12-10
publication date: 2025-12-10
starting page: 233
ending page: 241
doi: 10.55283/jhk.19179

Regulating the City
type: item
description: At the end of the eighteenth century, amidst devastating outbreaks of yellow fever, there were multiple plans to deliberately inundate the streets of Philadelphia to clean dirt and rubbish from the ground and to purify potentially miasmatic air. This essay examines the infrastructure lying beneath this project—an urban drainage system capable of rapidly and completely moving large quantities of water across and underneath the city’s streets without leaving residual fluid to stagnate. From William Penn’s initial planning for a gridded city in the 1680s to the creation of projects of deliberate inundation at the end of the eighteenth century, Philadelphia’s streets were the objects and sites of projecting as Philadelphians crafted an urban envirotechnical system that used, repurposed, and replaced elements of the area’s pre-existing hydrology. Efforts to produce this system consistently encountered problems as city authorities attempted to produce knowledge that could be synthesized across multiple scales.
subject: Special Issue
  topic: section
subject: drainage
  topic: keywords
subject: urban environment
  topic: keywords
subject: infrastructure
  topic: keywords
subject: water
  topic: keywords
creator: Keith Pluymers
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Keith Pluymers https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-10-08
publication date: 2025-10-08
starting page: 143
ending page: 162
doi: 10.55283/jhk.19110

Great Designs and Global Colonialism
type: item
description: This essay resituates “great designs” within the history of projecting by exploring how the schemes of Sir Balthazar Gerbier (1692–1633) interacted with what became known historiographically as the French Grand Dessein, the Dutch Groot Desseyn, and the English Western Design. Analyzed from the perspective of the history of knowledge, great designs are revealed to be risk-taking, uncertain, and constructed from fragments of disparate knowledges. Period views of great design can illuminate how public policy related to private individuals, what the temporality of planning was, and how success and failure were viewed. This reconsideration can inform how we construct narratives concerning European history, politics, and global colonialism and understand processes of change.
subject: Special Issue
  topic: section
subject: projects
  topic: keywords
subject: intelligence
  topic: keywords
subject: secrets
  topic: keywords
subject: colonialism
  topic: keywords
subject: alchemy
  topic: keywords
subject: mining
  topic: keywords
subject: enslavement
  topic: keywords
creator: Vera Keller
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Vera Keller https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-09-19
publication date: 2025-09-19
starting page: 37
ending page: 57
doi: 10.55283/jhk.19176

The Nuclear Sea-Level Canal Engineering Feasibility Field Studies and Epistemic Risk in the Darién, 1965–1970
type: item
description: What kind of knowledge is needed to blast a seaway across the Central American isthmus with buried thermonuclear bombs? That question pervaded an ambitious Atomic Age project: the proposal to renegotiate the inequitable 1903 treaty between Panama and the United States and to replace the aging, US-controlled Panama Canal and its colony-like enclave with a streamlined waterway. While Cold War-era projects employing the “peaceful atom” may now appear bizarre or geopolitically symbolic at best, the nuclear canal engineering feasibility studies in the Darién had tangible environmental, epistemological, and diplomatic effects. Moreover, despite the futuristic aspirations of the “Panatomic Canal,” the investigations perpetuated colonial values. While the field directors learned to respect the region’s Indigenous populations and recognized that their landscapes were unamenable to nuclear conquest, the Washington commissioners included tropes in their final report about “primitive” people in “primeval” jungles resisting modernity, and expressed confidence that nuclear excavation technology would still proceed “someday.” Examining social and epistemic practices of the isthmian canal field studies, as revealed in public and private records, illuminates problematic continuities in the history of world-building projects by researchers working in transimperial contexts.
subject: Special Issue
  topic: section
subject: peaceful nuclear explosives
  topic: keywords
subject: fieldwork
  topic: keywords
subject: Panama Canal
  topic: keywords
subject: Darién
  topic: keywords
subject: megaprojects
  topic: keywords
creator: Christine Keiner
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Christine Keiner https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-09-24
publication date: 2025-09-24
starting page: 209
ending page: 232
doi: 10.55283/jhk.19175

The Improvement Police
type: item
description: Studies of England’s path to industrialization often stress the significance of natural resources, knowledge, or power, but an early-eighteenth-century manuscript’s proposal for national wealth stressed instead the relationship, not the choice, between these factors. Its author, Nehemiah Grew, a former secretary of the Royal Society and prominent authority on plants, argued in 1706 that the state should authorize, disseminate, teach, and mandate the application of natural knowledge to farming, mining, trade, and manufacture. State officers would collect and explain scientific research—knowledge that would support supervision over and interventions into land management, work, consumption, and family life. While Baconian “improvement” in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is often seen as amateur and voluntary, Grew envisioned a state actively instructing its people in mandatory best practices and disciplining their behaviors. Properly armed with state power, science would make England’s people happy, its monarch invincible, and “there will be inventions new and infinite to the end of the world.” The beneficiaries of such policy were presented as a “public” that was distinct from England’s people, comprised instead of quantifiable and taxable wealth. Grew’s rhetoric worked to obscure his relationship to early modern projects, presenting instead the disinterested expertise characteristic of later Enlightenment political economy.
subject: Special Issue
  topic: section
subject: improvement
  topic: keywords
subject: projecting
  topic: keywords
subject: mercantilism
  topic: keywords
subject: Royal Society
  topic: keywords
subject: Nehemiah Grew
  topic: keywords
creator: William Cavert
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 William Cavert https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-12-10
publication date: 2025-12-10
starting page: 97
ending page: 118
doi: 10.55283/jhk.19141

The Optics of St Francis’s Stigmatization
type: item
description: This article examines the changing iconographical conventions representing Francis’s stigmatization and explores how they might be understood in the context of contemporary intellectual trends within the Franciscan order. The evolving ray imagery in visual representations of the stigmatization can be productively interpreted through theories of the visual process, especially perspectiva, which was based on Arabic optical theory and initially adopted in the Latin West by English Franciscans. Latin articulations of perspectiva were compatible with hagiographical accounts of Francis’s stigmatization, especially Bonaventure’s, and therefore provided the Franciscan order with a more precise language and set of theories to explore how to visually represent the stigmata being impressed on Francis’s body. Both visual processes and Francis’s stigmatization can be understood as specific examples of the ‘multiplication of species’ model. The stigmatization was therefore depicted as comprehensible through its consistency with natural processes of causation. This article explicitly connects the history of optical science with the history of Franciscan iconography and hagiography to demonstrate the richness and complexity of the interactions between different areas of Franciscan knowledge production and dissemination.
subject: Research Articles
  topic: section
subject: stigmata
  topic: keywords
subject: perspectiva
  topic: keywords
subject: Franciscan
  topic: keywords
subject: iconography
  topic: keywords
subject: hagiography
  topic: keywords
subject: knowledge transfer
  topic: keywords
creator: Genevieve E. Caulfield
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Genevieve Caulfield https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-12-20
publication date: 2024-12-20
doi: 10.55283/jhk.18384

Loss
type: item
description: This essay compares two statistical notions of error to draw out their distinctive epistemological and normative implications. The first sense crystallized in the nineteenth century as practical techniques for producing estimates from discrepant observations were interpreted as metaphysical laws of error. Historians have shown how these interpretations produced new forms of social knowledge and control over normal types. Although the metaphysical understanding of these laws was abandoned, error continued to be a major theme in twentieth-century statistical thought. A second sense of error associated with machine learning emerged in the second part of the century. This began when John von Neumann and Frank Rosenblatt developed statistical theories of computing, notably as machines able to learn from their environments. In the 1980s, researchers developed techniques such as backpropagation that used error measurements to improve a model’s performance on learning tasks. Comparing these conceptions of error, I argue that we can perceive a larger shift from a politics of normal types revealed by the regularity of error to what I term a “politics of tasks” in which errors are used to refine desired behaviors.
subject: Research Articles
  topic: section
subject: error
  topic: keywords
subject: statistics
  topic: keywords
subject: machine learning
  topic: keywords
subject: computing
  topic: keywords
creator: Alexander Campolo
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Alexander Campolo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-12-10
publication date: 2025-12-10
starting page: 305
ending page: 325
doi: 10.55283/jhk.18717

Traveling Mermaids, Traveling Materials
type: item
description: This article—which is mostly based on secondary literature following the questions suggested by a visit to the Victoria & Albert Museum—proposes how a decentering of the history of knowledge can be achieved by thinking with museum objects. I chose a particular Leitmotiv, distributed through international trade and scientific networks, which, in the longue durée, brought together a variety of people and connected the most diverse geographies. It follows the itineraries of the Mediterranean mermaid transformed in Latin America into a mermaid musician/guitarist, a character displayed in textiles, ceramics, and furniture and which is featured today in collections of popular culture, ethnography, and decorative arts. Using this example, this paper explores the cross-cultural transfers that shaped and cross-linked cultures to remind us that such objects were the result of multiple exchanges happening in several places and that, to understand them, historians have to cross national and disciplinary borders, languages, and, finally, those chronological periods that make us forget the centrality to history of change and continuity.
subject: Forum
  topic: section
subject: Cochineal dye, Mermaids, Collecting, Latin America
  topic: keywords
creator: Irina Podgorny
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Irina Podgorny https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-12-20
publication date: 2024-12-20
doi: 10.55283/jhk.18647

Contact Zones for a Global History of Knowledge
type: item
description: Among the various research and writing challenges that a global history of knowledge entails, the geographical question of how to assess the global knowledges from its local contexts requires particular attention. By considering different and recent historiographical backgrounds, in this article I contend that the concept of “contact zones” holds significant profitability, since it provides a valuable framework for writing compelling stories about the dynamics of the multifaceted processes involved in the creation, transmissions, and transformation of knowledges in a world characterized by diversity and interdependence. Early modern Spanish America is highlighted here as an exemplar case for analyzing the practices of exchange, translation, and negotiation emerging in contact zones of knowledges.
subject: Forum
  topic: section
subject: Contact zones
  topic: keywords
subject: Early Modern knowledges
  topic: keywords
subject: Early Modern Spanish America
  topic: keywords
subject: Global history
  topic: keywords
subject: Geography of knowledge
  topic: keywords
creator: Andres Vélez-Posada
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Andres Vélez-Posada https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-12-20
publication date: 2024-12-20
doi: 10.55283/jhk.18612

Global Knowledge Rituals
type: item
description: This study investigates the establishment and significance of United Nations (UN) Day, October 24, in Swedish primary and secondary schools from 1948 to 1963 . This article conceptualizes the celebrations as knowledge rituals, educative events that foreground practices of knowledge-sharing, reinforcing social bonds and enhancing collective understanding. UN Day knowledge rituals combined ceremonial elements—such as songs, recitals, and flag ceremonies—with the sharing of knowledge about global issues. The investigation shows that celebrations became widespread in Sweden during the 1950s, and that the United Nations Association of Sweden played a pivotal role in the process of establishing UN Day as a knowledge ritual. Initially highlighting UN peacekeeping activities, the scope of UN Day celebrations broadened during the 1950s to address complex global issues such as poverty, education, and health. Knowledge about global problems was given particular attention during UN Day displays. A fter the death of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961, his legacy became central to UN Day commemorations in Sweden, further strengthening interest in UN initiatives. The results of this study put the prevailing notion of the 1960s as a period of global awakening into perspective, emphasizing the importance of the preceding “Global Fifties” in Swedish education.
subject: Research Articles
  topic: section
subject: United Nations Day
  topic: keywords
subject: knowledge rituals
  topic: keywords
subject: global knowledge
  topic: keywords
subject: global consciousness
  topic: keywords
subject: Sweden
  topic: keywords
creator: Björn Lundberg
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Björn Lundberg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2025-07-11
publication date: 2025-07-11
starting page: 245
ending page: 268
doi: 10.55283/jhk.18135

For a Multiple Decentering of the History of Knowledge
type: item
description: In this overview, I argue that the history of knowledge needs a decentering, not only with regard to geography and to the disciplines under scrutiny, but also with regard to the relations between knowledge ‘proper’ (i.e., discursive and secular knowledge) and religious or mystical forms of knowledge. Given the importance that religious practices and institutions have historically had for the development of different forms of knowledge, the changing religious articulation of the very notion of knowledge deserves more systematic attention. I will also argue that categories like ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth,’ and norms of correctness, display a more radical historical contingency and variability than is allowed for in many exercises in the history of knowledge.
subject: Forum
  topic: section
subject: Epistemology
  topic: keywords
subject: Ethnocentrism
  topic: keywords
subject: Non-Western traditions of knowledge
  topic: keywords
subject: Normativity
  topic: keywords
subject: Historicity
  topic: keywords
creator: Michiel Leezenberg
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Michiel Leezenberg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-12-20
publication date: 2024-12-20
doi: 10.55283/jhk.18552

Notes from Global Asia
type: item
description: Recent developments in the field of global Asia and the global South are paying attention to alternative ways of knowing and historicizing how they circulate. Such work helps the field produce critical geographies in our writing of the history of knowledge that decenter persistent Eurocentric narratives of the origins of science. They help avoid comparative and even civilizational frameworks that continue to shape our understanding of the modern world. To write a global history of knowledge that is both broad and deep in scale, scholars need to examine far-flung global networks that facilitate the movement of ideas and materials, along with conducting a deep and careful understanding of local contexts and regional specificity. By considering how circulating “global” knowledge and mobile objects “anchor” and manifest locally, the field reduces the risk of flattening the “global” and sacrificing specificity, depth, knowledge of locale(s) and regional expertise.
subject: Forum
  topic: section
creator: Eugenia Lean
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Eugenia Lean https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
date: 2024-12-20
publication date: 2024-12-20
doi: 10.55283/jhk.18452