New Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and Agriculture

This volume explores problems in the history of science at the intersection of life sciences and agriculture, from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Taking a comparative national perspective, the book examines agricultural practices in a broad sense, including the practices and disciplines devoted to land management, forestry, soil science, and the improvement and management of crops and livestock. The life sciences considered include genetics, microbiology, ecology, entomology, forestry, and deal with US, European, Russian, Japanese, Indonesian, Chinese contexts. The book shows that the investigation of the border zone of life sciences and agriculture raises many interesting questions about how science develops. In particular it challenges one to re-examine and take seriously the intimate connection between scientific development and the practical goals of managing and improving – perhaps even recreating – the living world to serve human ends. Without close attention to this zone it is not possible to understand the emergence of new disciplines and transformation of old disciplines, to evaluate the role and impact of such major figures of science as Humboldt and Mendel, or to appreciate how much of the history of modern biology has been driven by national ambitions and imperialist expansion in competition with rival nations.

Denise Phillips is an associate professor at the University of Tennessee, where she teaches history of science and early modern European history. She received her PhD in the History of Science from Harvard in 2004, and in recent years she has been the recipient of fellowships from the DAAD, the Fulbright Commission and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. Her first book, Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850, was published in 2012 with the University of Chicago Press. She is currently working on a study of the agricultural sciences in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Germany, with an emphasis on how the expansion of market-driven forms of agriculture shaped the goals and parameters of agricultural science. As part of this broader project, she is also interested in how learned traditions of natural history and natural philosophy interacted with discourses about agriculture, and in the ways that epistemic authority was secured within these fields.

Sharon Kingsland is professor in the Department of History of Science and Technology at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1981, and since then has conducted research on many aspects of the history of modern life sciences. One focus of her research has been the history of ecological science, which is the subject of two books. Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology (University of Chicago Press, 1985, 2nd edition 1995) explores the impact of mathematical modeling techniques in population ecology, in both academic and applied contexts, from the 1920s to the 1980s. The Evolution of American Ecology, 1890-2000 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), examines the reasons for the rapid emergence of ecology as a discipline in the United States and the subsequent development of ecology through the 20th century, culminating in the emergence of urban ecology as a new frontier in the 21st century. Exploring the history of ecology led her to consider more deeply the agricultural context of biological work and the relationship between basic and applied fields in life sciences.