A Social History of Knowledge II E-Book

Peter Burke

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 644

Beschreibung

Peter Burke follows up his magisterial Social History of Knowledge, picking up where the first volume left off around 1750 at the publication of the French Encyclopédie and following the story through to Wikipedia. Like the previous volume, it offers a social history (or a retrospective sociology of knowledge) in the sense that it focuses not on individuals but on groups, institutions, collective practices and general trends.

The book is divided into 3 parts. The first argues that activities which appear to be timeless - gathering knowledge, analysing, disseminating and employing it - are in fact time-bound and take different forms in different periods and places. The second part tries to counter the tendency to write a triumphalist history of the 'growth' of knowledge by discussing losses of knowledge and the price of specialization. The third part offers geographical, sociological and chronological overviews, contrasting the experience of centres and peripheries and arguing that each of the main trends of the period - professionalization, secularization, nationalization, democratization, etc, coexisted and interacted with its opposite.

As ever, Peter Burke presents a breath-taking range of scholarship in prose of exemplary clarity and accessibility. This highly anticipated second volume will be essential reading across the humanities and social sciences.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Dedication

Title page

Copyright page

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I: Knowledge Practices

1 Gathering Knowledges

Gathering Knowledge

The Second Age of Discovery

Scientific Expeditions

A Third Age of Discovery?

In Search of Past Cultures

The Discovery of Time

Surveys

The Accumulation of Specimens

Varieties of Fieldwork

Varieties of Observation

Listening and Interrogating

Questionnaires

Recording

Notes and Files

Storage

Conclusion

2 Analysing Knowledges

Classifying

Deciphering

Reconstructing

Evaluation

Dating

Counting and Measuring

Describing

Comparing

Explaining

Interpreting

Narrating

Theorizing

3 Disseminating Knowledges

Speaking

Displaying

Writing

The Periodical Press

Books

Visual Aids

4 Employing Knowledges

Retrieval

The Idea of Useful Knowledge

Knowledge in Business and Industry

Knowledge in War

Knowledge in Government

Knowledge in Empires

Knowledge in the Universities

Alternative Institutions

Convergence

Part II: The Price of Progress

5 Losing Knowledges

Hiding Knowledges

Destroying Knowledges

Discarding Knowledges

Libraries and Encyclopaedias

Discarding Ideas

Astrology

Phrenology

Parapsychology

Race and Eugenics

6 Dividing Knowledges

The Decline of the Polymath

The Rise of the Scientist

Societies, Journals and Congresses

Disciplines

Experts and Expertise

Fields

Interdisciplinarity

Teamwork

The Survival of an Endangered Species

Part III: A Social History in Three Dimensions

7 Geographies of Knowledge

Micro-spaces

Nationalizing Knowledge

The Commonwealth of Learning

Centres and Peripheries

Voices from the Edge

Migrants and Exiles

Denationalizing Knowledge

Globalizing Knowledge

8 Sociologies of Knowledge

Economics of Knowledge

The Politics of Knowledge

Big versus Small States

Scholars under Pressure

The Rise of Centralization

Knowledge and War

The American Government as Patron of Research

Varieties of Knowledge Worker

The Working Classes

Knowledgeable Women

Institutions and Innovation

Schools of Thought

9 Chronologies of Knowledge

The Knowledge Explosion

Secularization and Counter-Secularization

Short Trends

The Reform of Knowledge, 1750–1800

The Knowledge Revolution, 1800–50

The Rise of Disciplines, 1850–1900

The Crisis of Knowledge, 1900–1950

Technologizing Knowledge, 1940–1990

The Age of Reflexivities, 1990–

References

Index

To Emmanuel College

in gratitude for supporting my research for more than thirty years

Copyright © Peter Burke 2012

The right of Peter Burke to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2012 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5042-5

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5043-2 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5961-9 (Multi-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5962-6 (Single-user ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

List of Figures

1 Alexander von Humboldt, statue in Berlin by R. Begas (1883), Wikimedia Commons

2 HMS Challenger (1858), Wikimedia Commons

3 British officers of the 1897 Benin expedition with bronzes and ivories taken from the royal compound, British Museum

4 Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands (1918), LSE Archive

5 Portrait of Edward Lane with turban (1829), National Portrait Gallery

6 Hooker telescope, Mount Wilson (1917)

7 Interior of the reading room, at the Bibliothèque nationale, rue de Richelieu, Paris (1868), Wikimedia Commons

8 Hollerith punched card (1895), Library of Congress

9 Double helix model (1953), Science Museum (slide SCM/BIO/C1000271), reproduced in Chadarevian, Designs for Life, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 239

10 Playfair, pie chart, Turkish Empire (1801), Wikimedia Commons

11 Minard’s flow map of losses on the retreat from Moscow (1869), Wikimedia Commons

12 August Wilhelm von Hofmann, molecular model of methane (c.1860)

13 Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, Wikimedia Commons

14 University of Sussex, Falmer House (1962), Wikimedia Commons

15 Nordiska Museet, Stockholm (1873), Wikimedia Commons

16 Hubble Space Telescope, Wikipedia

17 CERN Large Hadron Collider (2008)

Acknowledgements

My greatest debts this time are institutional: especially to Emmanuel College Cambridge, where I do most of my work, and to Birkbeck College, London, where I was a visiting fellow at the Institute for the Humanities in autumn 2010, allowing me to present some of this book’s ideas in advance of publication. I am also grateful for invitations to lecture on aspects of this vast topic in Brussels, Groningen, Montreal, New York, Sheffield, Sussex and Trondheim, and to the organizers of the CRASSH workshop ‘The Organization of Knowledge in Victorian Britain’, held in Cambridge in 2002.

My thanks too go to a number of individuals: to Asa Briggs and to my wife Maria Lúcia, with both of whom I worked on projects that included the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, easing my way out of the early modern period. Maria Lúcia and my old friend Chris Stray both read the printout and made a number of valuable suggestions. For ideas, encouragement and references I should also like to thank Filippo De Vivo, Axel Körner, Jenny Platt and Hannu Salmi.

Introduction

‘There is no history of knowledge’, declared the management theorist and futurologist Peter Drucker in 1993, predicting that it would become an important area of study ‘within the next decades’.1 For once he was a little slow, for the rise of interest in the history of knowledge was already under way – witness books by historians with titles such as Knowledge is Power (1989), Fields of Knowledge (1992) or Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge (1996).2

When I wrote A Social History of Knowledge from Gutenberg to Diderot (2000) I still thought of myself as taking an individual initiative that drew upon a long-standing interest in the Hungarian Karl Mannheim, a pioneer in the ‘sociology of knowledge’.3 However, it is retrospectively obvious that I was one among a number of scholars stimulated, consciously or unconsciously, by the current debates about the ‘knowledge society’ which had provoked Drucker’s prediction (below, p. 218). In 1998, two writers on the subject already referred to a ‘knowledge boom’.4 Since the year 2000, the trend has become still stronger, reflected not only in publications but also in research programmes, especially though not exclusively in the German-speaking world.

This book can be read either by itself or as a continuation of Knowledge from Gutenberg to Diderot (I hope before long to produce a revised version of both volumes under the title From Gutenberg to Google). Its origins were in personal curiosity, in an attempt to answer the question, ‘by what paths did we reach our present state of collective knowledge?’ At a time when retirement liberated me from professional ‘periods’ and ‘fields’, it was easier than before to indulge this curiosity.

Continuing Gutenberg to Diderot, this volume offers a general view of changes in the world of learning from the Encyclopédie (1751–66) to Wikipedia (2001). Its main themes are processes, among them quantification, secularization, professionalization, specialization, democratization, globalization and technologization.

However, countervailing trends should not be forgotten. Indeed, if this essay has a single thesis, it is the importance of the coexistence and interaction of trends in opposite directions, an equilibrium of antagonisms that tips over into disequilibrium from time to time (below, pp. 176, 211, 250). The nationalization of knowledge coexists with its internationalization, secularization with counter-secularization, professionalization with amateurization, standardization with custom-made products, specialization with interdisciplinary projects and democratization with moves to counter or restrict it. Even the accumulation of knowledge is offset to some degree by its loss (below, ch. 5). Only technologization seems to march onwards without encountering serious opposition.

Histories of aspects of knowledge, like histories of much else, are generally written within a national framework that often gives readers an exaggerated impression of the achievements of citizens of that country. Take the case of polar exploration: in this context, the British think of Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton, the Americans of Robert Peary, the Russians of Otto Shmidt, the Norwegians of Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen, the Swedes of Alfred Nathorst, the Finns of Adolf Nordenskiöld and the Danes and Greenlanders of Knud Rasmussen.5 In an attempt to compensate for national biases, this study adopts an explicitly comparative approach.

The book focuses on the West, trying not to confine itself to the ‘Big Five’ – Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the USA – but to bring the rest of Europe and also Latin America into the story, at least from time to time. For example, a small country such as the Netherlands has produced a considerable number of studies about the history of its own knowledges – colonial knowledge, the history of science, the history of museums, and so on.6

Many excellent monographs have been published on aspects of the vast topic surveyed here, especially in the case of the history of science. Most of these monographs are confined to the history of a single academic discipline. Here, however, I adopt a comparative approach in order to escape disciplinary biases as well as the national biases mentioned above. What follows is an attempt at a general synthesis, a work of distillation or, more exactly, of what a historian of science called ‘raiding, rearranging and sometimes revising the works of my fellow historians’.7 Plugging holes is another aspect of the task, since some topics have received much less scholarly attention than others. So is making connections between developments in different places or in different fields.

The point is to present a big picture of a kind that is often invisible to specialists, a picture that includes a general description of specialization itself. This big picture of the period c.1750–2000 will be defined by contrast to the early modern period, c.1450–1750, on which I have worked for most of my academic life. However, continuities between early and late modern will not be forgotten, among them contemporary awareness of the problem of what is now known as ‘information overload’.8 My hope is to encourage dialogue between two kinds of scholar who do not often speak to each other: historians of the early modern and late modern periods.9

The book’s title raises two questions that require a preliminary discussion. What is social history? What is knowledge?

Social Histories

In the first place, the term ‘social’ is obviously a problematic one. It is employed here primarily to distinguish what follows from a general intellectual history of the period 1750–2000.

The individual thinkers that loom large in intellectual histories will not be left out – they did indeed make a difference, and nearly eight hundred of them will be mentioned in the following pages – possibly too many for some readers, but a counterpoise to the faceless abstraction of general trends. All the same, the protagonists of this study are what sociologists call ‘knowledge-bearing groups’, especially but not exclusively small, face-to-face groups, and ‘knowledge-generating institutions’, understood as groups of people who meet regularly in pursuit of common aims, following rules that produce different social roles, from bishop to professor and from prime minister to CEO.10

Where the Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecki wrote of ‘the social role of the man of knowledge’, this essay will be concerned with the many social roles of knowledgeable people, roles produced by such knowledge organizations as universities, archives, libraries, museums, think tanks, learned societies and scientific journals. The processes by which knowledge is institutionalized will also be discussed.11

Ideas will not be omitted from this study – institutions cannot be understood without them – but their external rather than their internal history will be privileged, intellectual environments rather than intellectual problems. The emphasis will fall on the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, for example, of which Albert Einstein was once a member, rather than on his theories of relativity, and on Edward Thompson’s critique of the University of Warwick rather than on his study of the making of the English working class.

Attention will also be paid to small face-to-face groups, whether as teams or as competitors, since these groups often do the work for which a single individual receives the credit. Despite the myth of the heroic explorer, for instance, by the late nineteenth century, if not before, ‘the agents of exploration were groups, not individuals’.12 Again, in the course of the period, laboratory research was increasingly carried out by teams.

In short, what follows is a social history in the manner of earlier social histories of archaeology, for instance, of anthropology, cartography or medicine.13 Alternatively, the book may be described as a historical sociology of knowledge. Like the sociologists, it emphasizes the fact that knowledge is situated, in contrast to the traditional view of scholars as remote from the world, in laboratories, observatories, libraries and other ivory towers. Scholars do need ‘a space of their own’ in order to work without distraction, but this remoteness is only relative. They take the world, including politics, into the lab with them, while their results are often used, as chapter 4 describes, for worldly purposes.

The book might therefore have been entitled, like one of its sections, ‘a political history of knowledge’, were it not for the fact that its aim is wider, with the term ‘social’ acting as an umbrella covering economic and political history as well as social history in a narrower sense. Another possibility was to call the book ‘a historical ecology of knowledge’, given its concern with competition for resources, with differentiation and with favourable environments or niches for particular institutions, disciplines, or kinds of scholar such as the polymath (below, pp. 161ff.).14

A third possible title was ‘a cultural history of knowledge’. The phrase ‘cultures of knowledge’ (or ‘epistemic cultures’, in German Wissenskulturen) is increasingly current and it is surely useful, reinforcing as it does the idea of knowledges in the plural.15 What follows is often concerned with practices such as observing, mapping or taking notes, practices that may equally well be described as cultural or social. All the same, the emphasis on institutions seems to require the term ‘social’, which has the additional advantage of evoking the tradition of the sociology of knowledge, now nearly a century old.

Knowledges

The second question, ‘what is knowledge?’ sounds uncomfortably close to the question asked by ‘jesting Pilate’, who, according to Francis Bacon, ‘would not stay for an answer’: what is truth? A first step might be to distinguish knowledge from what the Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski called ‘the brute material of information’.16 ‘We are drowning in information’, we are told, but ‘starved of knowledge’. We may become ‘information giants’, but risk becoming ‘knowledge dwarfs’.17

Borrowing a famous metaphor from another anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, it may be useful to think of information as raw, while knowledge has been cooked. Of course, information is only relatively raw, since the ‘data’ are not objectively ‘given’ at all, but perceived by human minds that are full of assumptions and prejudices. However, knowledge is ‘cooked’ in the sense of being processed. The processes, discussed at length in chapter 2, include verification, criticism, measurement, comparison and systematization.

Knowledges or knowledge traditions should be imagined in the plural, as they already were by the philosopher Michel Foucault in the 1970s, although they are still often regarded as singular, a familiar part being taken for the whole. To quote Drucker again, ‘We have moved from knowledge to knowledges’.18 London taxi-drivers who speak of ‘the knowledge’ when they mean the topography of the capital are far from the only people to share the assumption maliciously attributed to Benjamin Jowett (Master of Balliol College Oxford) that ‘what I don’t know isn’t knowledge’.19 Knowledges may be divided into explicit and implicit (or tacit), pure and applied, local and universal. Although histories of skills are rarely written, ‘Knowing how’ clearly deserves a place alongside ‘knowing that’.20 In similar fashion, dominated or subjugated knowledges (savoirs assujettis) deserve a place alongside rather than underneath dominant ones.21 There is a political aspect to the question, ‘what is knowledge?’ Who has the authority to decide what is knowledge?

This book is concerned mainly with academic knowledge, as it is with knowledge in the West. A more exact title would therefore be ‘a social history of western academic knowledge’. The problem is that, besides being rather cumbrous, such a title gives the false impression that this kind of knowledge will be treated in isolation.

In fact, interaction between different knowledges is a central theme of this study. Hence the recurrent references to detectives and spies, for instance, or to governments and corporations, as well as the discussion of the links between new academic disciplines such as chemistry, economics or geology and the practical knowledge of apothecaries, merchants, miners, and so on. For example, Adam Smith was a member of the Political Economy Club in Glasgow, and his famous Wealth of Nations (1776) benefited from the author’s conversations with its merchant members. Indeed, it has been argued that the development of economics in Britain happened ‘largely without benefit of academic or other forms of official recognition’.22

Again, the frontier between academic and intelligence work was often crossed, especially though not exclusively in wartime. In the USA, the wartime Office of Strategic Services recruited a number of professors (below, p. 119). In Britain, Peter Russell, best known for his distinguished contribution to Spanish studies, joined the secret services in the 1930s, while the art historian Anthony Blunt worked for both MI5 and its Soviet equivalent, the NKVD.

Turning to geography, despite its focus on Europe and the Americas, the book discusses other parts of the world, such as nineteenth-century Egypt, China and Japan. Such a discussion is necessary because western knowledge spread outside the West in this period – although the term ‘spread’, implying that what moves does not change, is not the most appropriate one. It is more realistic to think in terms of an active reception in which individuals and groups beyond the West appropriated and adapted western knowledge for their own purposes. In the second place, the world beyond the West needs to be discussed because there was traffic in the opposite direction, the importance of which has been recognized – in the West – only relatively recently. Explorers, for example, in this period as in early modern times, depended on indigenous guides and maps. So did botanists, linguists and other scholars, even if they presented the resulting ‘discoveries’ as their own.23

It is obvious that the subject is a vast one, difficult to confine in a volume of some hundred thousand words, and I can only hope that readers will not feel that I have contributed to information overload as well as discussing it. A brief outline of a vast topic, it privileges relatively sudden discoveries at the expense of the slow and patient accumulation of knowledge that leads gradually to major shifts of interpretation. It is equally clear that this book is written from a personal point of view. My own knowledge of knowledge is, to say the least, uneven, and I have often been torn between a desire to do justice to the natural sciences and an attraction to case studies in fields that I know better, from art history to anthropology. The approach is all the more personal because I have lived through and been involved in changes in knowledge regimes over the last half century, 20 per cent of the period covered by the book, viewing these changes from the perspective of one discipline – history – and three sites: the universities of Oxford, Sussex and Cambridge.

In other words, what follows, despite its length, should be regarded as an essay, impressionistic in its methods and provisional in its conclusions, making no pretence to cover the ground of its vast subject but rather to offer a bird’s-eye view. In a sense it is a sequence of essays. The first four chapters focus on the processes of gathering, analysing, disseminating and employing knowledges, emphasizing the historicity of activities that are often assumed to be unchanging. Chapters 5 and 6 attempt to counter the common assumption of the continuous progress of knowledge, or ‘advancement of learning’, recognizing the problematic aspect of accumulation. Chapters 7 and 8 examine the history of knowledge from geographical, economic, political and sociological points of view, while the final chapter makes more explicit the book’s essential concern with change over time.

Specialization has affected the historiography of knowledge as well as its history. The history of science, for instance, is an autonomous department in many universities. Again, an International Intelligence History Association has been founded (1993), together with a Journal of Intelligence History (2001). The secondary literature on the history of knowledge is itself organized for the most part either by nations or by disciplines. By contrast, the aim and indeed the justification for this essay is to cross frontiers – national, social and disciplinary – bearing in mind E. M. Forster’s advice ‘Only connect’, and trying to evade what Aby Warburg called the intellectual ‘border police’ in the hope of producing a polyphonic history of knowledges, a history viewed from multiple perspectives.

Although this book is not concerned with recommending a particular attitude to knowledge, let alone a policy, readers should be warned that its author is a pluralist in the sense of believing that knowledges in the plural, like opinions, are desirable, since understanding emerges from intellectual dialogue and even conflict.

Notes

1 Drucker (1993), 30.

2 Brown (1989); Ringer (1992); Cohn (1996).

3 Mannheim (1952). Cf. Kettler et al. (1984).

4 Davenport and Prusak (1998), ix.

5 On the exploration of the Arctic, Bravo and Sörlin (2002).

6 Otterspeer (1989); Berkel et al. (1999); Jong (2004).

7 Pickstone (2000), 21.

8 Blair (2010), 1–10.

9 Cf. Konvitz (1987); Brown (1989); Waquet (2003, 2008).

10 Rueschemeyer and Skocpol (1996), 3.

11 Znaniecki (1940); McNeely with Wolverton (2008); McNeely (2009); Thackray and Merton (1972), 473.

12 Fabian (2000), 25.

13 Hudson (1981); Kuklick (1993); Harley (2001); Lane (2001). Cf. Ringer (2000).

14 Oleson and Voss (1979), 440–55.

15 Knorr-Cetina (1999).

16 Quoted in Young (2004), 369.

17 Naisbitt and Aburdene (1990); Mittelstrass (1992). Cf. Davenport and Prusak (1998), 1–24.

18 Drucker (1993), 41. Cf. Messer-Davidow et al. (1993); Foucault (1997); Worsley (1997).

19 Burke (2000), 18.

20 Ryle (1949); Thelen (2004).

21 Foucault (1997), 8.

22 Furner and Supple (1990), 46. On the club, Phillipson (2010), 40, 129.

23 Raj (2007); Short (2009).

Part I: Knowledge Practices

1

Gathering Knowledges

A social history of knowledge obviously needs to be concerned with the ways in which different groups of people acquire, process, spread and employ knowledge, a sequence that in the world of intelligence – in other words, spying – is sometimes divided into four main stages: collection, analysis, dissemination and action (or, for short, CADA).1 It is of course impossible to separate these stages completely.2 Collecting or observing is not done with an empty head. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz put it, ‘In the study of culture, analysis penetrates into the very body of the object’, a point that has been reiterated if not exaggerated by scholars who speak of the ‘cultural construction’ of almost everything.3 Dissemination often involves analysis.4 The stages may seem to be timeless: each of them is situated in time as well as space.

These four stages will be discussed in order in part I of this book, introducing further distinctions along the way. This chapter focuses on the first stage, the process of collecting or gathering knowledge.

Gathering Knowledge

Vivid metaphors such as ‘collecting’ or ‘gathering’ knowledge conjure up an obviously oversimplified picture, as if knowledge could be picked up like shells from the seashore or pulled from bushes and trees like fruit or netted like butterflies. A similar point might be made about the metaphor of ‘hunting’ or ‘capturing’ (a favourite in today’s management studies).5 These terms are used here as no more than shorthand for a series of processes that include exploring, observing, surveying and experimenting, not to mention buying, looting and, not least, asking questions and listening to local informants.

In academic language, these processes are described as doing ‘research’. Employed on occasion before 1750, the term became increasingly common in book titles from the mid-eighteenth century onwards in a number of European languages – recherches, ricerche, Forschung, and so on – to describe investigations in a variety of intellectual fields, among them anatomy, astronomy, political economy, demography, geography, physics, chemistry, palaeontology, medicine, history and oriental studies. To cite only a few famous examples:

1768de Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les américains1788–the journal Asiatic Researches1794Lamarck, Recherches sur les principaux faits physiques1799Davy, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical1812Cuvier, Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles1838Cournot, Recherches sur les principes mathématiques de la théorie des richesses

The examples mentioned above concern research carried out in archives, museums and laboratories, but others involved what we now call ‘fieldwork’, as in the obvious case of exploration. John Barrow, secretary to the British Admiralty, who was in a position to commission expeditions, published an account of some of them under the title Voyages of Discovery and Research in the Arctic Regions (1846). Explorers offer memorable examples of knowledge-gathering that have prompted reflections on the process by which knowledge is produced.6

The Second Age of Discovery

The amount of new knowledge gathered or collected in the first century of our period, 1750–1850, was staggering, especially the knowledge collected by Europeans about the fauna, flora, geography and history of other parts of the world. No wonder then that some historians speak of a ‘second great age of discovery’ in this period.7

The first age of discovery, from Vasco da Gama and Columbus onwards, had been marked by the extensive exploration of coasts. The second age extended the exploration of coasts to the South Seas and elsewhere, but it also involved the intensive exploration of the interior of Africa, North and South America, Australia, Siberia, Central Asia and elsewhere, filling in what Joseph Conrad famously called the ‘blank spaces’ on the map. One of these explorers, Alexander von Humboldt (figure ), whose name will recur in these pages, has been described as ‘the German Columbus’.