Anglo-Swedish scholarly correspondence from the mid-eighteenth century contains repeated mentions of two merchants, Abraham Spalding and Gustavus Brander. The letters describe how these men facilitated the exchange of knowledge over the Baltic Sea and the North Sea by shipping letters, books and other scientific objects, as well as by enabling long-distance financial transactions. Through the case of Spalding and Brander, this article examines the material basis for early modern scholarly exchange. Using the concept of logistics to highlight and relate several mercantile practices, it examines ways of making scholarly knowledge move, and analyses merchants’ potential motives for offering their services to scholarly communities. As logisticians in the Republic of Letters, these merchants could turn their commercial infrastructure into a generator of cultural status valid in both London and Stockholm. Using mercantile services, scholarly knowledge could in turn traverse the region in reliable, cost-effective and secure ways. The case of Spalding and Brander thus highlights how contacts between scholarly communities intersected with other contemporary modes of transnational exchange, and it shows how scholarly exchange relied on relationships based on norms different from the communalism often used to characterize the early modern Republic of Letters. Thus the article suggests new ways of studying early modern scholarly exchange in practice.
This article explores diverging ways of accounting for methodological questions in the history writing digital history on one hand, and Swedish history of ideas (idéhistoria) on the other. By highlighting differences in how the two fields treat these central historiographical issues, I aim better to understand some of the difficulties of conducting and publishing research in the history of ideas, based on digital-history methods.
The study is separated into two sections: first, I make a qualitative analysis of texts containing reflexive discussions on method, produced during the early discipline-forming phases of each field. Then, I do a distant reading of peer-reviewed articles in Lychnos published 2005–2020, as well as of a recent edited volume in digital history. This analysis provides an overview of recent discussion of method in these two fields, while it at the same time serves as an example of such methods shape the way we write history.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.