In the last three decades many historians of science have sought to account for the emergence of modern science and technology in sites that did not participate in the shaping of apparently original ideas. They have extensively used a model of the transfer of scientific ideas and practices from centres of scientific activity to a passively receptive periphery. This paper contributes to the discussion of an alternative historiographic approach, one that employs the notion of appropriation to direct attention towards the receptive modes and devices of a local culture. A historiography built around the notion of appropriation deals less with the question of the faithful transfer of scientific ideas than with the particular features of the discourse produced by local scholars as the best way to overcome or conform to the constraints of the receptive culture. The case examined to describe this culturally and intellectually intricate process is the profound transformation undergone by the Newtonian concept of vis inertiae in the work of Eugenios Voulgaris (1716–1806), one of the most important Greek scholars of the eighteenth century.

The 1830s and 1840s witnessed a European movement to accumulate data about the terrestrial environment, enterprises including the German and British geomagnetic crusades. This movement was not limited to geomagnetic studies but notably included an important meteorological component. By focusing on observation practices in sedentary and expeditionary contexts, this paper shows how the developing fields of geomagnetism and meteorology were then intimately interlinked. It analyses the circulation and cross-connections of the practices and discourses shared by these two research fields. Departing from a Humboldtian historiography, the paper especially stresses the role of Adolphe Quetelet, director of the Brussels Observatory, whose importance in the development of the earth sciences has until now been largely neglected. It reassesses the involvement of the French scientific community in the British and German geomagnetic crusades, moving beyond the well-known account of Arago's opposition to these undertakings. It is hoped thereby to contribute to a better historical understanding of the renewal of the earth sciences in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

This article revisits the question of the social valence of William James's account of the self. As biographers have long noted, James worried much about the crisis of the autonomous, unitary and well-bounded self. This article suggests that, despite his anxieties, James perceived that those features of the self opened up new possibilities both for the individual and for society. By locating the Jamesian self in the context of period techniques for the cultivation of the self, religious and occult practices, and mystical-cum-political discourse, I argue that for James the crisis of the modern self represented a means both of rooting individuals firmly in the community and of endowing them with a form of agency stronger than those promised by traditional doctrines of the simple, self-directed and well-bounded self. Thus, I argue, James's conception of the self and the techniques of the self that he advocated were part and parcel of an attempt to rethink the relationship between individual and community and to promote a new type of society, one composed of spontaneous pluralistic, open and intimate communities.

This paper explores the transition to synthetic dyestuffs through a principal focus on developments within the last major holdout of the natural-dye industry, the blue colourant indigo. It starts by looking closely at existing practices of cultivation and manufacture of the natural dye in colonial India in the second half of the nineteenth century. It also develops a case study based on targeted efforts scientifically to improve plant-derived indigo in laboratories and experiment stations in colonial India and imperial England. Experts attempted to increase yields and enhance the purity of the natural dye to meet the competition of the cheaper and purer synthetic indigo launched on the international market in 1897 by two German firms, BASF and Hoechst. The paper explains the patronage of science by European planters, the colonial state and the metropolitan government and analyses the nature of science that emerged in the colonial–imperial nexus.

Focusing on Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies as a case, this article uses economies of research tool exchange to develop a new way of characterizing cross-disciplinary research. Throughout its life from 1960 to 1972, the Center for Cognitive Studies hosted scholars from several disciplines. However, there were two different research cultures at the Center. With its directors and patrons committed to a philosophy that equated creative science with eclectic search for and invention of new tools, the Center's initial interdisciplinary research culture emphasized the exchange of ideas and methods. Several years later, once its work was well under way, the Center's culture became multidisciplinary. Rather than emphasizing the sharing, invention, location, discussion and stabilization of new research techniques, the Center's multidisciplinary economy involved researchers working in parallel.