No abstract

Chemical agents have been employed in pest control for centuries, but during the second half of the nineteenth century their use intensified considerably. The increasing international commerce of seeds and crops, the expansion of monoculture across the planet, and the new modes of circulation provided by the new motorized transports (trains, cars, modern ships) led to a global spread of new pests, which explains, at least in part, the intensification of the use of chemical pesticides in agriculture. At the turn of the twentieth century, the use of arsenic compounds, copper salts and nicotine extracts was already a common practice in many parts of the world. Moreover, these agents were part of the processes of specialization and intensification in agriculture, which introduced new forms of land ownership and mechanized production and also expanded the modes of irrigation, the use of agrochemicals such as synthetic fertilizers and herbicides, and plant breeding techniques. Since the end of the World War II, synthetic pesticides have been essential elements of the intensification of agriculture and the so-called Introduction.

This strategy reduces the need for the transportation of discarded materials to landfill and the acquisition of new resources. In addition, the proposed methodology allows for a reduction in the environmental impact associated with urban development in expanding urban areas.

In recent historiography of science, circulation has been widely used to weave global narratives about the history of science. These have tended to focus on flows of people, objects and practices rather than investigating the spread of universal patterns of knowledge. The approach has also, to a great extent, concentrated on colonial contexts and treated ‘European science’ as a more or less homogeneous knowledge realm. Furthermore, these studies of circulation have usually been tied to a contextualist view of knowledge formation in which locality is taken as a set of specificities linked with particular locations. In this article we redirect the focus of the discussion on circulation to Europe, and reference spaces that are often absent from other scholarly accounts. We will ground our discussion on a comparative study of three travelling actors from the European periphery through whom we will introduce the notion of ‘moving locality’ in order to depict circulation as a knowledge production process per se.

The purpose of this paper is to reconsider the issue of the creativity of textbook writing by exploring the links between nineteenth-century French textbooks and the quest for a classification of elements. The first section presents the elegant combination of didactic and chemical constraints invented by eighteenth-century chemists: the order of learning - from the known to the unknown - and the order of things - from the simple to the complex - were one and the same. In section two we argue that the alleged coincidence did not help the authors of elementary textbooks required for the new schools set up by the French revolution. Hence the variety of classifications adopted in the early nineteenth century. A debate between natural and artificial classifications raised a tension in the 1830s without really dividing the chemical community. Rather it ended up with the adoption of a hybrid classification, combining the rival natural and artificial systems.