In his First Part of a Dictionary of Chemistry (1789), the Scottish chemist James Keir claimed, ‘The progress of Chemistry within the last twenty years has been more rapid than…any science in an equal period.’ Around the mid-eighteenth century onwards, it is no surprise then to see the principles and practices of chemistry applied to ‘every object of human pursuits, political, commercial, and philosophical.’ As recent historical studies have shown, analyzing and producing substances in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries encompassed a variety of different sites and practitioners.
This panel traces the ‘making and knowing’ that occurred outside of the brick-and-mortar educational and institutional chemical laboratories from 1750 to 1850. Intentionally engaging with current research in material culture, production and governance, and chemistry and the marketplace, these papers argue that fields, factories, and mines across Asia, Europe, and North America were vital spaces for chemical inquiry, material production, and commercial transformations. Government intervention in supporting the new chemistry varied according to region. Nevertheless, most chemists worked to gain respect for their novel methods of thought and practice that took them outside of the traditional laboratory—apparatus and skills were made portable for agricultural inquiry, chemical commodities were tested and improved in private manufactories, and new technologies of metal ore extraction were thoughtfully discussed and widely implemented. The chemistry of the field and factory was often constrained by local resources and knowledge, but it was also a subject informed by cosmopolitan networks of ideas and materials.
