Chair and organizer: Lissa Roberts, University of Twente

1] Chandra Mukerji, University of California at San Diego, “The Mindful Hands of Peasant Women: Design of the staircase lock at Fonseranes for the Canal du Midi”
2] Alette Fleischer, University of Twente, “Trick and truths:
Constructing a garden and examining nature in a 17th century Dutch grotto”
3] Lissa Roberts, University of Twente, “Generating knowledge and know-how:
Dutch-Japanese trade during the second half of the eighteenth century”
4] Ian Inkster, Nottingham Trent University, “Comparative and Global Reflections on Mindful Hands in Sites of Endeavour”

Abstract: At the time of SHOT’s establishment, it was usual to associate theoretical knowledge with science and to consider its production in terms of mental work.  Technology, on the other hand, was generally associated with practical, manual skill and the application of (scientific) knowledge.  We have come a long way since then, but the historiographical division between science and technology remains, despite broad recognition that the history of science is as much a history of skillful practice as it is of theory development and that the history of technology involves both contemplation and dexterous skill. This session represents the work of an international network of historians of science and technology who have come together to reconsider the historical relation between theory and practice during the period extending between the so-called scientific and industrial revolutions.  The first product of their collaboration is the recently published volume of essays, entitled The mindful hand: inquiry and invention from the late Renaissance to early industrialization (2007).

The goal of the book and of this session is to help reveal the complex history in which collaborative efforts of hand and mind were responsible for both material and knowledge production, while surrounding socio-political and institutional struggles sought to separate and reorder the processes, personnel and products of such economies.  The method involves selecting individual sites that served as points of intersection for networks of individuals, the productive coalescence of whose various talents and purposes both derived from and accounted for developments in the seemingly separate fields of material and knowledge production.  The specific sites chosen for this session include the construction of a portion of the Canal du Midi in seventeenth-century France, a garden grotto in seventeenth-century Netherlands and the artificial island of Deshima (in the harbour of Nagasaki) during the second half of the eighteenth century, where representatives of the Dutch East Indies Company were housed.  The first two help deconstruct the claim that the seventeenth century was characterized by a theory-centred scientific revolution, the consequences of which disciplined contemporary technological practice.  Rather, on-site collaboration between mental and manual manipulation furthered both engineering capabilities and the understanding of nature.  It remained for spokesmen of the socio-political and institutional order to nonetheless assert their thoughtful authority over these developments.  The third paper is situated more than a century later and a world away as it directs its attention to Dutch-Japanese trading relations, centred on the artificial island Deshima during the late eighteenth century.  Beginning with local interactions between members of the Dutch East Indies Company and their Japanese counterparts, this paper moves between Japan and Europe to examine the ways in which local cultures appropriatively interpreted relations between the work of the hand and mind in the related processes of material and knowledge production during the period usually associated with both the origins of modern industrialism and European imperialism.  Finally, the fourth paper reflects more generally on how the approach developed in The mindful hand, especially its focus on the local economies of mind and hand that shaped material and knowledge production, can be used profitably for appreciating the global context in which the history of science and technology needs to be set.