Chemical agents have been employed in pest control for centuries, but during the second half of the nineteenth century their use intensified considerably. The increasing international commerce of seeds and crops, the expansion of monoculture across the planet, and the new modes of circulation provided by the new motorized transports (trains, cars, modern ships) led to a global spread of new pests, which explains, at least in part, the intensification of the use of chemical pesticides in agriculture. At the turn of the twentieth century, the use of arsenic compounds, copper salts and nicotine extracts was already a common practice in many parts of the world. Moreover, these agents were part of the processes of specialization and intensification in agriculture, which introduced new forms of land ownership and mechanized production and also expanded the modes of irrigation, the use of agrochemicals such as synthetic fertilizers and herbicides, and plant breeding techniques. Since the end of the World War II, synthetic pesticides have been essential elements of the intensification of agriculture and the so-called Introduction.
This strategy reduces the need for the transportation of discarded materials to landfill and the acquisition of new resources. In addition, the proposed methodology allows for a reduction in the environmental impact associated with urban development in expanding urban areas.
In recent historiography of science, circulation has been widely used to weave global narratives about the history of science. These have tended to focus on flows of people, objects and practices rather than investigating the spread of universal patterns of knowledge. The approach has also, to a great extent, concentrated on colonial contexts and treated ‘European science’ as a more or less homogeneous knowledge realm. Furthermore, these studies of circulation have usually been tied to a contextualist view of knowledge formation in which locality is taken as a set of specificities linked with particular locations. In this article we redirect the focus of the discussion on circulation to Europe, and reference spaces that are often absent from other scholarly accounts. We will ground our discussion on a comparative study of three travelling actors from the European periphery through whom we will introduce the notion of ‘moving locality’ in order to depict circulation as a knowledge production process per se.
The purpose of this paper is to reconsider the issue of the creativity of textbook writing by exploring the links between nineteenth-century French textbooks and the quest for a classification of elements. The first section presents the elegant combination of didactic and chemical constraints invented by eighteenth-century chemists: the order of learning - from the known to the unknown - and the order of things - from the simple to the complex - were one and the same. In section two we argue that the alleged coincidence did not help the authors of elementary textbooks required for the new schools set up by the French revolution. Hence the variety of classifications adopted in the early nineteenth century. A debate between natural and artificial classifications raised a tension in the 1830s without really dividing the chemical community. Rather it ended up with the adoption of a hybrid classification, combining the rival natural and artificial systems.
Lead arsenate was introduced on a massive scale in agriculture in Spain in the early 1940s. With the support of a network of agricultural engineers, the new Francoist state encouraged the production and use of lead arsenate as the main weapon against a newly arrived pest, the Colorado potato beetle. In this paper I discuss arsenical pesticides as sociotechnological products which played a pivotal role in the joint production of both chemical-based agriculture and the emerging Francoist regime in Spain during the 1940s. I review the campaigns organized by agriculture engineers and the making of the new National Register for Phytosanitary Products in 1942. The new regulations promoted research in pesticide quality control but also contributed to concealing the health hazards. This invisibilization of the risks took shape in the confluence of interests of the emerging Francoist state, the new pesticide industry, and the large network of agricultural engineers.
This article attempts to show the complexity of the academic sociology in natural sciences in Spain during Las ciencias naturaLes entre Madrid y BarceLonaLa sociología académica de las ciencias naturales durante el primer tercio del siglo XX en España muestra un entramado que gira fundamentalmente en torno a dos escenarios geográficos, Madrid y Barcelona. El hecho de que la Universidad Central, la Sociedad Española de Historia Natural, el Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (MNCN) y el Real Jardín Botánico tuvieran su sede en la capital madrileña hizo de esta última el centro de las disputas más importantes a la hora de decidir el reparto del poder académico en la organización de las ciencias naturales en España. La aparición de la Junta para Ampliación de Estudios y la creación de su Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Físico-Naturales no hizo sino reforzar esa tendencia, ante la realidad impuesta por unos presupuestos insuficientes para sostener una política de financiación científica a nivel nacional, viéndose la Junta obligada a concentrar sus esfuerzos allí donde se presentaban mayores posibilidades de éxito. En Madrid, durante ese primer tercio de siglo XX, Ignacio Bolívar, director del MNCN, y la JAE representaban las ansias de modernización científica a la europea que bebían de la tradición krausista y su tímida institucionalización en la Sociedad Española de Historia Natural, reforzadas por un regeneracionismo patriótico que atravesó la mayor parte de los proyectos científicos de las décadas anteriores a la Guerra Civil. Ahora bien, el programa de Bolívar encontró resistencias tanto por parte de los grupos SAPIENTIA ET DOCTRINA. NATURAL SCIENCES AND ACADEMIC INFLUENCE IN SPAIN, 1900-1936 RESUMEN: Este trabajo quiere presentar la complejidad de la sociología académica de las ciencias naturales en España a lo largo del primer tercio del siglo XX. En torno a los dos polos geográficos más significativos de la ciencia española durante esos años, Madrid y Barcelona, las disputas académicas adquirieron una especial relevancia por varias razones. Ambos espacios académicos rivalizaban por la primacia en la dirección de los trabajos naturalistas dentro de España, aunque en Barcelona el peso del catalanismo político fue ganando cada vez más importancia. Tanta o más relevancia adquirió la competencia entre los naturalistas que creían posible un desarrollo armónico de ciencia y fe en el seno de las ciencias naturales y los practicantes de un naturalismo racionalista y moderno alejado de toda subordinación a dogmas religiosos. El caso concreto que aquí nos ocupa permite reflejar algunos aspectos de esta complejidad macrohistórica.PALABRAS CLAVE: Sociología académica; catalanismo político; ciencia y fe.
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