Spaces of Global Knowledge: Exhibition, Encounter and Exchange in an Age of Empire [Hardcover]

Global knowledge was constructed, communicated and contested during the long nineteenth century in numerous ways and places. This book focuses on the life-geographies, material practices and varied contributions to knowledge, be they medical or botanical, cartographic or cultural, of actors whose lives crisscrossed an increasingly connected world. Integrating detailed archival research with broader thematic and conceptual reflection, the individual case studies use local specificity to shed light on global structures and processes, revealing the latter to be lived and experienced phenomena rather than abstract historiographical categories. This volume makes an original and compelling contribution to a growing body of scholarship on the global history of knowledge. Given its wide geographic, disciplinary and thematic range this book will appeal to a broad readership including historical geographers and specialists in history of science and medicine, imperial history, museum studies, and book history.Contents: Introduction: placing global knowledge in the nineteenth century, Diarmid A. Finnegan and Jonathan Jeffrey Wright. Part 1 Encounters and Identity: Global knowledge in a local world: Charlotte Wheeler Cuffe's encounters with Burma 1901-1902, Nuala C. Johnson; Archaeology, empire and the field: exploring the ancient sites of Cyprus, 1865-1876, Polina Nikolaou; Webs of science, webs of commerce: the life-worlds of a merchant naturalist, Diarmid A. Finnegan; Scientific practice and the scientific self in Rupert's Land, c. 1770-1830: fur trade networks of knowledge exchange, Angela Byrne. Part 2 Collection and Display: Sampling the South Seas: collecting and interrogating scientific specimens on mid-nineteenth-century voyages of pacific exploration, Sarah Louise Millar; Curating global knowledge: the Museum of Economic Botany at Kew Gardens, Caroline Cornish; 'A depot for the productions of the four quarters of the globe': empire, collecting and the Belfast Museul£Ã