I

It has become commonplace in the history of science to argue that scholars and scholarly institutions were, geographically and politically speaking, international, that is, in communication with their peers and counterparts across the globe by the late 1800s and early 1900s. Indeed, the field has long concurred that modern science was characterized by increasing ‘connectivity’ and ‘the spread of knowledge, its global ubiquity and circulation’ – and in the later nineteenth century in particular by the emergence of long-term, institutionalized international research collaborations.Footnote ⁶ Even though science undeniably became a matter of national prestige and relevance in the wake of the French Revolution, historians tend to agree that by the last decades of the nineteenth century, it was international in its very nationalism, with national achievements being measured by international standards.Footnote ⁷ The Age of Empire is generally regarded as a time of a remarkable ‘flowering of institutional “scientific internationalism”’, in the form of international scientific conferences, liaising disciplinary societies, academic exchanges, and scientific publishing in new linguae francae; the level of commotion is impressive indeed, with no less than 3,000 international functions counted between 1840 and 1914.Footnote ⁸ As Lorraine Daston recently put it, science in the late 1800s was ‘a world project’.Footnote ⁹

All of this is accurate, to be sure. Associations like the American Philosophical Society, for instance, received, by the 1870s and 1880s, ‘donations for the library’, ‘letters of envoy’, and acknowledgement from the ‘Museum at Mexico’,Footnote ¹⁰ the Paris Anthropological Society (Société d’Anthropologie de Paris),Footnote ¹¹ the Tashkent Observatory in Russia (Observatoire Astronomique et Physique de Tashkend),Footnote ¹² the Mining Bureau at Melbourne,Footnote ¹³ the South African Philosophical Society in Cape Town,Footnote ¹⁴ the Observatory at Harvard College,Footnote ¹⁵ and the Asiatic Society of Japan.Footnote ¹⁶ As did learned societies, observatories, and museums in other parts of the world, many of which counted among their connections numerous foreign correspondents, donors, and contacts. Britain’s Royal Society, the oldest and one of the world’s foremost scientific societies in the period, elected 144 foreign members in addition to 16 non-British Fellows between 1870 and 1920.Footnote ¹⁷ Even the much less visible, more confined Berlin Society of Friends of Nature Research (Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunde zu Berlin) counted some 213 members based abroad between 1773 and 1919,Footnote ¹⁸ while the aforementioned South African Philosophical Society received journals, annals, and exhibition catalogues from Moscow, Cincinnati, and Vienna.Footnote ¹⁹ Lima’s Geographical Society (Sociedad Geográfica de Lima), in turn, likewise a relatively small, ‘useful knowledge’ society, counted among its correspondents and honorary members geographers such as Robert Jannasch, president of Berlin’s Central Association for Commercial Geography (Centralverein für Handelsgeographie), the Anglo-Irish consul Thomas J. Hutchinson, and Roland Napoléon Bonaparte, president of the Paris Geographical Society (Société de Géographie).Footnote ²⁰ The yet more specialist Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia counted ninety-two corresponding members based abroad by 1889, drafted from all over the world: thirteen from England, Scotland, and Wales, ten from Italy, six from France, Canada, and the territories of the German empire respectively, seven from Austria, four from Mexico, and the remainder – one or two respectively – from Spain, the Ottoman empire, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Hungary, British India, Greece, Australia, Russia, and British Guiana.Footnote ²¹ By 1892, Mexico’s National Museum exchanged publications with twenty-seven associations, from the nearby Guatemalan National Institute to the Leopoldina Academy in Halle and the Society of Naturalists in Kiew.Footnote ²² Accounts of the lives and endeavours of the worldly, peripatetic intellectuals, scholars, and ‘brokers’ behind these numbers – be they Finnish, Cameroonian, Indian, or Peruvian – are by now legion in global intellectual history and history of science.Footnote ²³

While many individuals as well as learned societies and scientific associations undeniably maintained relationships with counterparts on other continents, these ‘global’ connections were not necessarily everyone’s priority. Most scholars were involved in networks that were national, continental, imperial, or, indeed, quite simply geared towards the Western European and North American centres rather than evenly ‘global’ in scope.Footnote ²⁴ Some of the most important European scholars of the late 1800s and 1900s never travelled.Footnote ²⁵ More importantly, there is also no denying the fact that, quantitatively speaking, associates from outside north-western Europe and North America remained a minority, on the fringes of most of the period’s scientific forums and networks. Most academic networks and learned societies were overwhelmingly national in their membership and subregional in their outlook. The Royal Society’s 144 non-British Fellows constituted a small, 17 per cent minority compared to 817 British Fellows.Footnote ²⁶ The Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunde zu Berlin, too, between 1773 and 1919, did count 213 members based abroad, but out of a total of 1,250. None of this is surprising, to be sure, since both were local, or national societies, but it is worth noting that the large majority of the 213 foreign-based members of the Berlin society, for instance, some 77 per cent, were located in neighbouring or – comparatively – nearby states like Denmark, France, or the Austro-Hungarian empire.Footnote ²⁷ The same goes for the Royal Society, in which German and French Fellows accounted for roughly half of the 160 non-British members.Footnote ²⁸ Other learned societies adopted a continentalist outlook by design. Santiago de Chile’s American Archaeological Society (Sociedad Arqueolójica (sic) Americana), for instance, a short-lived endeavour which counted among its members some of Chile’s most prominent citizens, was conceived as a Pan-American association – since ‘we, the Americans’, were better placed to study the ‘ancient American races’ ‘than superficial foreign observers’Footnote ²⁹ – and was implemented as a pan-Andean one, with correspondents and honorary members based mainly in its two neighbouring countries, Peru and Argentina.Footnote ³⁰ Even the aforementioned Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia counted seventy-one resident members which, in addition to the seventy-two US-based corresponding members, would have outnumbered the foreign corresponding members by about one and a half to one (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Foreign members & Non-British Fellows of Britain’s Royal Society.

Data from the digital database of past Fellows of the Royal Society: www.royalsociety.org, last accessed 30 Jan. 2024. © Jonathan Ostellino.

Again, a national priority and centre of gravity is not surprising for the period. What is more relevant is that, while impressive in its geographical coverage, many associates from afar were compatriots – European missionaries, colonial officials, or foreign merchants. The Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia’s correspondent in British Guiana, for instance, was Everard Ferdinand im Thurn, its Constantinople-based member the Reverend Albert S. Long, and its contact in Smyrna, a certain George Post.Footnote ³¹ The same applies to the Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunde zu Berlin. Those few members who were not based in Europe but in India and South America were often German-speaking missionaries and migrants.Footnote ³² The pattern is not unusual. Several of the associations that contributed to the American Philosophical Society’s wide network, for instance, were settler colonial, British, or even American foundations. The Mining Bureau at Melbourne, the South African Philosophical Society in Cape Town and the Asiatic Society of Japan were all initiated by English-speaking settlers, missionaries, merchants, and diplomats, bound to one another by ties of language, politics, and culture.Footnote ³³ This also goes for the Royal Society. Its thirty-two non-European Fellows were made up of nineteen Americans and twelve Fellows from various parts of the British empire – Australia, Canada, India, South Africa, and New Zealand; the only non-European elected Fellow who did not hail from the British empire or a former British colony between 1870 and 1920 was the Japanese bacteriologist Kitasato Shibasaburō.Footnote ³⁴ A similar pattern is detectable for the most important ‘foreign’ correspondents, donors, and associates of museums, exhibitions, and learned societies in imperial Germany: the physician Franz (Francisco) Fonck, Rudolf(o) Philippi, or Carl(os) Martin were all German-speaking migrants who had settled in Spanish America.Footnote ³⁵ In that regard, these late nineteenth-century societies were not unlike those active a century earlier. The members of France’s Sociéte Royale de la Médicine had already elected a substantial cadre of correspondents from France’s colonies in the Antilles, South America, and the Indian Ocean after 1777: thirty-two, in addition to twenty-eight contact persons overseas. Except for two foreign doctors from Brazil and Chile, however, they were all French, most of them royal physicians or official naturalists posted to the colonies.Footnote ³⁶ In view of the fact that the scientific projects of the late 1800s and early 1900s – in astrophotography, chemistry, or geodesy – were strikingly inclusive in some respects, requiring worldwide networks of observers and scientists,Footnote ³⁷ they were remarkably exclusive in others.

II

Yet more importantly, wherever learned societies and scientific associations did recruit scholars from outside northern Europe and North America, that divergency commonly went along with utter consistency in the social strata they recruited their associates from. By 1889, the list of ‘corresponding members’ and ‘donors’ of the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia, for instance, included, among its few non-North American and non-European members, men like Antonio Peñafiel from Mexico, Syad Mohammed Hadi from Sultanpur in India, and Tatsui Baba from Tokyo in Japan.Footnote ³⁸ While Antonio Peñafiel was a prolific, and prominent, Mexican physician, statistician, and scientist,Footnote ³⁹ Syad Mohammed Hadi presumably was the ‘distinguished’, and well-travelled ‘representative of a native educational society for the purpose of arranging for the reception of East Indian apprentices; and students’ in Philadelphia ‘manufactories and technical schools’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Baba Tatsui, in turn, was an English-educated Meiji reformist intellectual who sought to remake Japan in the Western image.Footnote ⁴¹ Antonio Peñafiel, Syad Mohammed Hadi, and Baba Tatsui are telling examples of the particular kind of non-Western scholars who would have found admittance to the period’s scientific community. To be sure, none of these men were born into what could be called bourgeois or middle-class circumstances; indeed, their family backgrounds could not be more different – ranging from aristocratic, samurai, and upper-caste descent to comparatively humble, rural origins. By the 1880s, however, all of them had adopted Western bourgeois academic conventions, professions, and ideas about technological progress, western education, self-improvement, their biographies mirroring the shifting social ground of the late 1800s, with the tightening of imperial structures and the worldwide decline of nobilities.Footnote ⁴² Not all of them were, like Baba Tatsui, foreign educated, to be sure. And yet, these men invariably were products and, frequently also, like Syad Mohammed Hadi, advocates of Western education and reform. Indeed, the Cambridge-educated Burmese archaeologists, worldly Ottoman Syrian religious scholars, Göttingen-trained Indian Sanskritists, and well-travelled Peruvian physicians who were heard in the period’s international scientific circuits were nearly all both recipients and advocates of Western education and reform in their own countries.Footnote ⁴³ As Julia Rodriguez has shown for the case of the Argentine criminologists prominently involved in the international scientific community of the late 1800s and early 1900s, they were not only men from the privileged class who possessed the linguistic skills and resources for travel; they largely hailed, like their northern counterparts, ‘from the liberal and reformist wing of the elite and upper middle-class intelligentsia’ and ‘sought to advance democratic, progressive reforms in public health, education, and the law’.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Mexican, Indian, or Japanese scholars who were permitted to join the period’s scientific community were not only usually reformers; they also were either professional scientists or, if they were amateurs, had particular professions that were, as Carol E. Harrison has argued, associated with ‘scientific ability’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Just like their Prussian, British, or French counterparts, they were often engineers, industrialists, and doctors – like Peñafiel, the Singapore-born and Edinburgh-trained Chinese doctor Lim Boon Keng,Footnote ⁴⁶ or the well-travelled Lima antiquary and physician José Mariano Macedo.Footnote ⁴⁷ Others were lawyers, priests like the Paris-educated Japanese priest Fujishima Ryōon,Footnote ⁴⁸ journalists like the Lebanese Christian orientalist Ibrahim al-Yaziji, government functionaries, or, indeed, several of these at once. Among the American Philosophical Society’s most assiduous members and donors, for instance, was Mariano [de la] Bárcena, a Mexican naturalist who served as interim governor of Jalisco and director of the Meteorological Observatory.Footnote ⁴⁹ The relationship between class and science was in many ways a circular one. A ‘commitment to education’, science, and ‘competence’ conferred, as historians of France have put it, ‘droit de bourgeoisie’,Footnote ⁵⁰ and vice versa: ‘droit de bourgeoisie’ also became a road of entry for men who did not, by other standards, belong in the international scientific community.

There can also be little doubt that the Japanese, Peruvian, and Lebanese scholars who were admitted as peers to the collective pursuit of science were men familiar with the codes of Western bourgeois and upper-class sociability that were so central to the period’s scientific community: the proper ‘demeanour’, and ‘the manner in which [scientific] claims [ought to be] delivered’.Footnote ⁵¹ Historians have shown that from around 1900, Asian literati increasingly made their appearance in the committee meetings, anniversary lectures, and obituaries of the ‘orientalist’ learned societies of Calcutta, Rangoon, or Bangkok and that their access was premised, other than upon their expertise in Southeast Asian societies, languages, and culture, upon their fluency in British bourgeois sociability and academic conventions.Footnote ⁵² Indeed, in London and Lima, Uppsala, Paris, or Singapore alike, scientific debate would often have taken place at soirées, during sociable weekend excursions and over dinner parties, which were as much part of the period’s scientific culture as of its bourgeoisie’s social fabric.Footnote ⁵³ Admittance to London’s Chemical Club, in which the gatherings consisted in ‘formal dinners’, ‘after which papers were read and discussed’, a Lima society banquet, or the Singapore Straits Philosophical Society, which had among its members British civil servants, soldiers, missionaries, and ‘educated Chinese’,Footnote ⁵⁴ would by design have been contingent upon a claimant’s social belonging: their socio-economic position in life, to be sure – the ability to afford membership fees, a library, or leisure travel – but also a ‘charming and agreeable manner’, as one British contemporary put it in relation to a Burmese colleague, the proper attire, ‘education’, and a ‘cultured’, gentlemanly conduct.Footnote ⁵⁵ The participants of such gatherings, societies, and clubs were surely of diverse provenance – Chinese, British, and Peruvian alike – and many of them no doubt drew not only on indigenous learned traditions but also on divergent indigenous notions of a ‘scholarly persona’ – Iberian, Confucian, or Islamic ideals of the ‘man of letters’, or the gentleman-scholar.Footnote ⁵⁶ They also, however, invariably had the social standing, ‘manner’, and demeanour to be admitted to Western bourgeois gatherings. The circuits in which these men travelled, as Penny Edwards describes in the case of the Calcutta- and Cambridge-educated Chinese archaeologist Taw Sein Ko, ‘were elite, class-bound itineraries’, into which not only their ‘adoption of certain European prescriptions for “advancement”’ but also their ‘status…would have bought [the]m entry’.Footnote ⁵⁷ There can be little doubt that the very male, and very bourgeois, camaraderie and ‘after-hours conviviality’ that marked these meetings made them exclusive in many respects.Footnote ⁵⁸ Interestingly enough, however, it also made them inclusive for those who, like the Indian scientist and pioneer of electro-magnetic waves J. C. Bose – who was adamant that his delayed official recognition in 1920 by the Royal Society was ‘in no way due to [his] being a foreigner’ but his defiance of the period’s disciplinary logic (his intrusion into plant, and later animal physiology) – were able to move comfortably within these Western, bourgeois formats. Indeed, J. C. Bose, one of two Indians elected Fellows of the Royal Society between 1870 and 1920, thought social clubs ‘and the institution of public dinners’ one of the ‘great Western invention[s]’, as he put it in his acceptance speech for an Honorary Membership of the Rotary Club.Footnote ⁵⁹ It would seem that for some Spanish American, Asian, and Middle Eastern scholars at least, bourgeois manners, professional identity, or a Western-style education could even – temporarily and conditionally – overwrite racial belonging. The Straits Confucian Association, for instance, which had men like the British-educated Straits Chinese Lim Boon Keng at its heart, was dedicated to the ‘diffusion of scientific and useful knowledge’, and open to all young men, ‘irrespective of race or Creed subject only to the observance of gentlemanly behaviour’, as its 1914 ‘Rules’ codifies.Footnote ⁶⁰ Likewise, with those Peruvian scholars who were invited to send papers to international congresses, join scientific clubs, or receive foreign researchers, indigenous ancestry, though occasionally remarked upon, was conspicuously inconsequential to both their associates and themselves.Footnote ⁶¹ This will come as no revelation to historians of Spanish America, who have long contended that a bourgeois habitus, a measure of worldliness, and ‘gentlemanly behaviour’ could often be more relevant to ‘racial’ identity and social belonging than physical characteristics.Footnote ⁶² As Tim Harper describes in the case of Singapore, there was apparently a ‘world of sociability’, ‘defined by conversation and letters’, ‘between the colonial élite and local society…in which strict hierarchies became more ambivalent’.Footnote ⁶³ Historians have argued that even during the heyday of scientific racism and empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which in theory consigned men and women of colour to an ‘immutably inferior position’, the possibility of mutability quietly persisted for some.Footnote ⁶⁴ Though it was commonly seen in terms of a threat – the danger of a white man’s degeneration in a tropical climate or at the hands of native servantsFootnote ⁶⁵ – the prospect of malleability and the selective porousness of racial boundaries also allowed for ‘race’ to become not quite irrelevant but surmountable. The scientific community of the late 1800s was a social world permeable enough to include those who had mastered the rituals of learned sociability – with the collective pursuit of science overwriting not just a person’s ‘creed’ but even race. At least in some measure, this also holds true for gender. In principle, the scientific sociability of the ‘gentleman’s club’ was almost exclusively male, as historians have argued, with ‘the very practice of association in the public sphere’ excluding most women from its boundaries.Footnote ⁶⁶ Indeed, the examples of North American, French, or Polish women who were able to carve out a place within scientific inquiry by the late 1800s and early 1900s are rare,Footnote ⁶⁷ and those of female scholars from China, Peru, or India an idiosyncrasy – a testament to the power of intersectionality. Whatever admittance they did find was through social conduits, however: personal relationships, foreign education, or class belongingFootnote ⁶⁸ – think of the Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya, born into a noble Polish–German family, who studied in Heidelberg, Berlin, and GöttingenFootnote ⁶⁹ – but occasionally also precisely through their compliance with bourgeois matronly virtues such as diligence, domesticity, and dexterity. As Maria Mitchell, Professor of Astronomy at Vassar College, argued, woman was ‘needed in scientific work’ because of ‘her nice perceptions of minute details, all her delicate observation of colour, of form, of shape, of change, and her capability of patient routine [which] would be of immense value in the collection of scientific facts’.Footnote ⁷⁰

One might argue that at least in some academic fields – antiquarianism, philology, or ethnology, to name but a few – Mexican, Chinese, or Lebanese scholars’ superior knowledge would have sufficed to render their presence at academic conferences and in learned conversations quite indispensable. While there can be little doubt that their ability to serve as mediators and to draw on sophisticated native knowledge traditions – be they Islamic, creole, or Buddhist – would often have assisted their inclusion, neither of these would have sufficed to grant them scholarly credit or visibility.Footnote ⁷¹ As historians have long argued, modern science, despite its reliance and dependence on them, has largely either silenced, pushed aside, and denied its debt to the vast majority of its native ‘informants’ and ‘assistants’ or reduced their contributions to vernacular ‘raw material’ to be translated into ‘expertise’, ‘a universal key’.Footnote ⁷² This was not because these informers were seen to be deceitful. Contrary to what social histories of science have commonly argued – that gentlemanly status was a prerequisite for a person’s ‘word…to be relied upon’Footnote ⁷³ – the ‘simple’, ‘humble’ folks were often granted truthfulness on account of their very simplicity. Long into the nineteenth century, there persisted an enduring discourse, especially in natural histories, that advocated reliance on the observations of ordinary, poor, and illiterate knowers: wise women, peasants, or ‘wild Indians’ who, in their very illiteracy, poverty, and closeness to base matter, were credited with the ability to observe nature more directly and accurately than ‘civilized man’.Footnote ⁷⁴ It was precisely their association with particularity and locality, however, and with inferiority and simplicity, that both made them valuable as informants and their participation in the period’s scientific community as peers inconceivable. For the nineteenth and twentieth centuries allocated that community of worldly bourgeois men, and modern Western science more broadly, the prerogative of universality and abstraction, precisely in distinction from its many informants, assistants, and objects of study, whose knowledge came to be considered as reliant on evidence ‘directly available to the senses’ and unalienable, ‘bound’ to the lives of the people who generated it.Footnote ⁷⁵ To be termed a scholar, a ‘man of science’, or a ‘pioneer’ in his field, as people like Taw Sein Ko, Simón Yrigoyen, or Ibrahim al-Yaziji well were,Footnote ⁷⁶ was contingent upon qualities exactly opposite to particularity and simplicity. It was premised upon a Western education and the association with bourgeois sophistication, progress, and modernity, which, in turn, conferred the authority to generalize, abstract, and articulate creditable ‘metonymic relationships’ between the specific and the universal.Footnote ⁷⁷ For Lebanese philologists, Japanese students of Buddhism, and Peruvian antiquaries to be referred to as on par with Leiden Orientalists and Berlin naturalists, both by themselves and by other contemporaries, was contingent upon social epithets more than anything else. Rather than truthfulness or possession of facts, national origin, or skin colour, what set the man of science apart from the informant was class.

III

Global history has long been under critique – both from within and outside the field – for its sense of proportion, or rather, its lack thereof: for overstating the significance of ‘influences’, both inward and outward, over internal causesFootnote ⁷⁸ and, in the same vein, for unduly privileging ‘unusually cosmopolitan individuals’ who were, after all, the exception rather than the rule even in modern history.Footnote ⁷⁹ These points are well taken; indeed, a penchant for overstating the weight of connections and cosmopolitans may well be a congenital disorder in a field devised for the quest of these very objects. Social history’s attentiveness to class, the quantitative and the social, in turn, shows great promise as an antidote. A global intellectual history and history of knowledge tempered with it would invariably weigh the relative importance of ‘influences’, seek to understand the social configuration of boundaries, and endeavour to comprehend the exact reach and meaning of ‘the global’ in the past. Nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism and internationalism, for that matter, it would seem, entailed the view that participation in the period’s scientific community ought not necessarily to be restricted to one country, ‘race’, or empire, to be composed of men – and, very exceptionally, women – from various parts of the world. This acceptance – however reluctant it may often have been – of diversity encompassed geographical, national, in some measure even ‘racial’ diversity; it did not, however, it would seem, extend to the social – somewhat astoundingly, the least porous, and permeable of them all by the late 1800s and early 1900s.Footnote ⁸⁰ In that regard, the late 1800s saw a particular kind of scientific internationalism, expressive of the coercive universality of Western civilizational norms by the 1880s – its call for particular kinds of education, civility, and technological sophistication as measures of modernityFootnote ⁸¹ – which manifested in a pressure toward uniformity and sameness, to the detriment of diversity and difference. Indeed, disparities in social class and ‘education’, civility, and ‘manners’, it appears, were harder to surmount than many we tend to associate primarily with the Age of Empire. A global social history of science and knowledge therefore reveals, rather than forthright ‘exclusion’ and ‘silencing’ of non-Europeans, complex epistemic hierarchies and geographies of knowledge. It exposes both ‘connections and their limits’Footnote ⁸² and a global scientific community that was both more permeable and less so than hitherto assumed.