John Gascoigne

• UNSW Sydney

Cambridge Core - History of Science and Technology - Science and the State - by John Gascoigne

The focus of this article is the way in which United States (US) whalers, and other Pacific voyagers, helped to consolidate an increasingly globalized understanding of the world ‒ with implications for both the US itself and Australasia. The US globalizing enterprises also resulted in greater contact between Europeans and a diverse range of peoples...

Placing the development of science in a global setting is an understandable preoccupation of historians of science—a natural response to the dynamics of an increasingly globalized age. Responding to this leaven of world history, Joyce Appleby’s attractively written book sets out to demonstrate how European contact with the new Worlds of both the At...

What explains the generous state sponsorship of the French Pacific voyages of scientific exploration in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy, and what links did these voyages have with the beginnings of a French Pacific empire from 1842? While it is argued that the early voyages owed much to state advancement of science, this goal re...

Defeated in the Atlantic during the Seven Years’ War, the French turned to the Pacific with the hope of finding new lands and markets that would redress the balance of power so grievously disturbed by the expansionist energies of perfidious Albion. France, however, faced the same problem as its rival in venturing into what was, from a European pers...

Cambridge Core - Regional and World History: General Interest - The Cambridge History of Australia - edited by Alison Bashford

This is a publication of the Q&A session that followed Quentin Skin­ner's lecture. He was asked to reflect on variations of dependence (as an alternative to using a general notion of dependence); to comment on the application of his (positive) notion of freedom to cases where the outcome of the struggle for freedom is a different kind of unfreedom;...

The significance of the connection between the discovery of the New World and scientific discovery has been one that has been remarked on since the time of Francis Bacon. The article assesses such claims made by Bacon and his contemporaries in the light of the recent historiography of the subject. In doing so it analyses a number of the notable fea...

News of Patrick Collinson’s death last September brought back a flood of memories of my honours year at the University of Sydney back in 1972. He was both the convenor of the honours course, ‘Churches, Sects and Societies’, as well as playing a part in supervising my honours thesis on the scientist, divine, and teacher of Isaac Newton, Isaac Barrow...

The Koyrean view of the Scientific Revolution as a conceptual change in the mathematical/astronomical sciences has cast a long shadow. The medical sciences, which had a much wider presence in the larger society, still tend to be placed in the outer orbit of the historiography of the Scientific Revolution which predominately revolves around the astr...

One of the great aims of the Enlightenment was to shine the light of science on those corners of the Earth that were little known to the European world. Australia and the Pacific provoked particular intellectual curiosity and excitement as parts of the globe yet to be drawn into the Enlightenment’s maps of nature. Eighteenth-century exploration of...

The British Empire in the period up to the mid nineteenth century was largely the creation of an old regime, the workings of which was based on traditional institutions. The very term ‘Empire’ was still, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, linked to the more local concerns of the British Isles though, after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in...

Stephen Peter Rosen. War and Human Nature. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 3005. Pp. 211. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by John A. Lynn

The fiftieth anniversary of this journal offers an opportunity to reflect on both its history and that of the larger field of religious history. At its foundation, the journal drew inspiration from the approach to the history of religion taken by Lucien Febvre and other French Annalistes, with their emphasis on including religion as an integral par...

Da CostaPalmira Fontes, The Singular and the Making of Knowledge at the Royal Society of London in the Eighteenth Century. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Pp. xvi+214. ISBN 978-1-4438-0357-1. £39.99 (hardback). - Volume 43 Issue 1 - John Gascoigne

:Contact with the Pacific provided Europeans with a distant laboratory in which to test some of their assumptions about the nature of humanity and, in particular, the forms of religion with which they were familiar. In the era before Cook, the scantily explored Pacific provided a colourful backdrop for those contrasting a universal simple religion...

The object of this essay will be to explore the character of Bacon's religious views within the larger context of his thought as a whole. By doing so it will examine some of the arguments put forward about the extent to which Bacon's fundamental positions on the signifi cance of science and the role that it could play in 'the relief of man's estate...

This paper focuses on the response of the Royal Society to the increasing contact with parts of the globe beyond Europe. Such contact was in accord with the programme of Baconian natural history that the early Royal Society espoused, but it also raised basic questions about the extent and nature of the pursuit of natural history. In particular, the...

GuestHarriet. Empire, Barbarism and Civilisation: Captain Cook, William Hodges and the Return to the Pacific. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xx+249. $99.00 (cloth). - Volume 48 Issue 1 - John Gascoigne

The relations between empires and Christianity have been the subject of considerable historiographical attention and it is the object of this paper to review the major issues in this recent literature to provide a context for the specialised papers which follow. Major issues on which discussion is focussed include the extent to which missionaries c...

Drawing on the work of Hartz on the character of settler societies the article demonstrates the continuing impact on Australian political culture and the relations between church and state of the circumstances of the nation's foundation. For, while the tradition of an Established Church was discarded, there remained, as in Britain, a residue of an...

Using Dava Sobel's best-sellling Longitude as its departure point, this essay considers the varying goals of the popular and the academic historian of science. It argues that, though there is common ground, there are major differences between the two in terms of style, use of evidence, approach to context, and thematic focus. Nonetheless, academics...

This historiographical review considers recent developments in the writing of imperial history, paying particular attention to the growing emphasis on cultural history. Such an emphasis reflects a close engagement with issues such as the formation of national identity in an imperial context and the ways in which systems of knowledge – including rel...

The eighteenth century inherited a long tradition deriving from Greek antiquity that maintained that Nature could be understood by the exercise of reason. This belief underlay centuries of university practice in which natural phenomena had been explained by the use of logical deduction from first principles largely, although not exclusively, derive...

L'A. s'inscrit dans une large entreprise revisioniste en relation avec l'interpretation de l'histoire anglaise. Il montre comment les idees de Hooker sur l'union de l'Eglise et de l'Etat ont ete reinterpretees au cours des siecles afin de les adapter aux circonstances politiques changeantes ainsi qu'aux differents contextes intellectuels. L'A. dega...

Nature is the international weekly journal of science: a magazine style journal that publishes full-length research papers in all disciplines of science, as well as News and Views, reviews, news, features, commentaries, web focuses and more, covering all branches of science and how science impacts upon all aspects of society and life.

On the map of knowledge which the eighteenth century inherited from long centuries of scholastic instruction and debate, natural philosophy or ‘physics’ occupied a large and prominent place. The university culture of the High Middle Ages had absorbed much of the Aristotelian canon into four main compartments: metaphysics – the study of being as suc...

1. An expanding state 2. The Royal Society and the emergence of science as an instrument of state policy 3. The levers of power 4. Neo-mercantilism and the landed interest 5. Science in the service of empire 6. Science in the service of the Republic of Letters 7. The expansion of empire Epilogue.