This newest annual edition of Osiris brings together a variety of scholars to consider a topic of increasing interest in the history of science: expertise. Focusing specifically on the role expertise has played in the support, legitimation, and growth of the state since early modern times, Expertise and the Early Modern State reveals how scientific expertise and practical knowledge were crucial to the construction of early modern empires and economies. The state, on the other hand, performed a similar function for scientists, giving them much of the status and resources they needed to further their work. A penetrating, multifaceted investigation, Osiris 25 will be required reading for historians of science and early modern political development.

Eric H. Ash, “Introduction: Expertise and the Early Modern State”

 

I. Expertise and the State: advising, domestic policy, and political economy

 

Darin Hayton, Haverford College. “Expertise ex stellis: Comets, Horoscopes and Politics in Renaissance Hungary.”

Steven A. Walton, Penn State University. “State Building through Building for the State: Foreign and Domestic Expertise in Tudor Fortification.”

Simon Werrett, University of Washington. “The Schumacher Affair: Reconfiguring Academic Expertise across Dynasties in Eighteenth-Century Russia.”

Michael Mahoney, Princeton University. “Organizing Expertise: Engineering and Public Works under Colbert, 1662-83.”

Andre Wakefield, Pitzer College. “Leibniz and the Wind Machines.”

Anna Maerker, Oxford Brookes University. “Political Order and the Ambivalence of Expertise: Count Rumford and Welfare Reform in Eighteenth-Century-Bavaria.”

 William J. Ashworth, Liverpool University. “Quality and the Roots of ‘Expertise’ in Eighteenth-Century Britain.”

II. Encounters abroad: diplomacy, exploration, & empire

Margaret Meserve, University of Notre Dame. “Nestor Ignored: Francesco Filelfo’s Advice to Princes on the Crusade against the Turks.”

Antonio Barrera, Colgate University. “Experts, Nature, and the Making of Atlantic Empires.”

Jane H. Murphy, Colorado College. “Ahmad Damanhuri (1689-1778) and the Utility of Early Modern Expertise in Ottoman Egypt”

Júnia Ferreira Furtado, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais/Brazil.  “Enlightenment Science and Iconoclasm: The Brazilian Naturalist José Vieira Couto”