Knowledge Infrastructure and Knowledge Economy – serie

Locations of Knowledge in Dutch Contexts brings together scholars who shed light on the ways locations gave shape to scientific knowledge practices in the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This interdisciplinary volume uses four hundred years of Dutch history as a laboratory to investigate spatialized understandings of the history of knowledge. By conceptualizing locations of knowing as time-specific configurations of actors, artefacts, and activities, contributors to this volume not only examine cities as specific kind of locations, but also analyze the regionally and globally networked and transformative character of locations. Many of the locations which are studied in this volume are still visible until the present day. Contributors are Azadeh Achbari, Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, Alette Fleischer, Floor Haalboom, Marijn Hollestelle, Dirk van Miert, Ilja Nieuwland, Abel Streefland, Andreas Weber, Martin Weiss, Gerhard Wiesenfeldt, and Huib Zuidervaart.

In Knowledge, Patents, Power, Marius Buning tells the complex story of how the emergence of a Dutch patent regime is related to wider issues concerning governmental control and innovation. Buning analyses the institutional framework in which "innovative knowledge" could develop in the Dutch Republic from a variety of perspectives. This is not only a comprehensive study of patent law and its administrative and legal framework during the first four decades of the Dutch republic, it also opens up new perspectives on a wide range of issues in cultural and political history— from truth claims in early modern science to issues concerning mercantilism and Dutch seventeenth-century processes of state formation.

Where did we do science in the Enlightenment and why? This volume brings together leading historians of Early Modern science to explore the places, spaces, and exchanges of Enlightenment knowledge production. Adding to our understanding of the “geographies of knowledge”, it examines the relationship between “space” and “place”, institutions, “objects”, and “ideas”, showing the ways in which the location of science really matters.Contributors are Robert Iliffe, Victor Boantza, Margaret Carlyle, Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin, Trevor H. Levere, Alice Marples, Gordon McOuat, Larry Stewart, Marie Thébaud-Sorger, and Simon Werrett.