Rebekah Higgitt
Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin
with Noah Moxham
When you think of scientific activity in seventeenth century London your thoughts probably turn to learned societies and their experiments, like those conducted by the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, witnessed by gentleman natural philosophers. Our book Metropolitan Science suggests that such learned, and socially exclusive activities were only part of a rich urban culture of trials and experiments. To fully understand how knowledge and skilful practices advanced in early modern London we need to pay much greater attention to artisanal and mercantile activities, and their associated corporations and urban spaces. By exploring distinctive practices and knowledge cultures in the artisanal, mercantile, and governmental sites of London, Metropolitan Science offers a new perspective on the development of natural knowledge and artificial practice, or in other words, London’s scientific cultures.
Early modern London’s institutional buildings, workshops, laboratories, warehouses, and wharves were hives of productive, networked, industrious activity. If we were to take a snapshot of such spaces at the turn of the seventeenth century, we would see artisans, technicians, practitioners, and institutional officials engaged in the testing and evaluation of coinage, metals, spices, and gunpowder, among numerous other substances and products. We would also glimpse members of London’s corporations producing weapons, measuring instruments, dissecting bodies; they were mastering practical mathematics, surveying the navigable channels of the Thames and even sea-routes through Britain’s rapidly expanding global empire.
Metropolitan Science takes a close view of some of the most significant urban spaces for investigative and experimental activities, and the book is structured according to these site-based case-studies. Our chapters explore the Royal Mint and the Ordnance Office within the highly multifunctional site of the Tower of London; livery halls, specifically Goldsmiths’ Hall and Barber Surgeons’ Hall; the Corporation of Trinity House, a maritime guild responsible for regulating pilotage in the Thames, and East India House on Leadenhall Street, the headquarters of the East India Company. Taking this spatial perspective allows us to foreground the people, material cultures, information networks, and practices that together created dynamic urban knowledge cultures.
By decentring our customary focus from the elite, male, gentlemanly actors of early modern learned societies or universities, our book brings into view other groups of urban inhabitants and citizens who contributed to understandings of natural knowledge and artificial practice. Some of these Londoners were long-standing inhabitants, many others were second- or first-generation migrants, whose skills and knowledge proved vital to growing metropolitan knowledge cultures that developed to meet a broad range of economic and imperial objectives. Overall, Metropolitan Science shows that London’s cultures of knowledge and practice were shaped by collective as well as individual goals, and by the geographies of corporate activity in the city.
We are having a book launch for Metropolitan Science on 29th May, and you would be very welcome to join us! Please book your free place using the link below:
About the Authors:
Dr Rebekah Higgitt is a historian of science and Principal Curator of Science at National Museums Scotland. She has previously worked at the University of Kent and Royal Museums Greenwich.
Dr Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin is Lecturer in Early Modern History at Cardiff University. Her publications include Crafting Identities (2021) and Metropolitan Science (2024).