Globalna zgodovina fizike sveta

slovenian

2025

volume 46, issue 1

meteorology   mining   physics

ZRC SAZU
(Obvezni izvod spletne publikacije)

This contribution revisits a nineteenth-century research program coined by Susan Faye Cannon as “Humboldtian science,” named for the Prussian savant Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). The now-standard account of Humboldtian science developed by Michael Dettelbach in the 1990s describes a set of quantitative, law-seeking, car-tographic sciences that involve widespread collaboration of savants and imperial bu-reaucrats, ranging from meteorology and magnetism to geology and plant geography. New perspectives from colonial and global history show the “Humboldtian” project as a diffuse system of inquiry shaped by widespread geographies of empire and extraction, particularly global mining industries. What Humboldt called “global physics” had deep roots in Prussian expansionism and ore mining in the 1790s. It was then coordinated across empires east and west, in the commodity frontiers of Ibero-America and Russo-Siberia. This article revisits Humboldt to open a connected history of sciences that ser-ved aggressive states and empires, in and outside of Europe.

24.02.2026