Instruments, Travel and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century

Book Cover......Page 1
Title......Page 4
Contents......Page 5
List of figures......Page 8
Notes on contributors......Page 10
Acknowledgements......Page 12
Introduction......Page 14
Golden means: assay instruments and the geography of precision in the Guinea trade......Page 33
The project for a map of Languedoc in eighteenth-century France at the contested intersection between astronomy and geography: the problem of co-ordination between philosophers, instruments and observ......Page 64
The travels and trials of Mr Harrison's timekeeper......Page 88
Landscape with numbers: natural history, travel and instruments in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries......Page 109
Appropriating invention: the reception of the voltaic battery in Europe......Page 139
When human travellers become instruments: the Indo-British exploration of Central Asia in the nineteenth century......Page 169
The manufacture of species: Kew Gardens, the Empire, and the standardisation of taxonomic practices in late nineteenth-century botany......Page 202
Exploring the margins of precision......Page 229
Travelling light......Page 256
Travelling knowledge: narratives, assemblage and encounters......Page 286
Index......Page 308