Joining Forces: Labor History and the History of Science

Abstract

The study of work is flourishing in a corner of our discipline where few readers of Labor tread. In recent years, historians of science have begun to think about "science in action": that is, science as constituted by, and constituent of, work. Much of this work is situated in sites that aren't conventionally identified as "scientific" and carried out by actors who are not conventionally viewed as "scientists." Historians of science have turned their attention, for example, to the infrastructural labor that supports research, asking who carried the intrepid geologist's suitcases, washed the chemist's glassware, or watched the kids so that someone else could have an "aha" moment at the microscope. So too have they trained their focus on the scientific work done by distillers to develop product substitutions that evaded excise duties, by shipyard managers who introduced new standards to compartmentalize "mental" and "manual" labor, and by miners at Potosi who developed new ways to extract silver from ores. Historians of science have credited artisanal and agricultural laborers with investigative/ constructive practices and forms of knowledge about the natural world that are more typically remembered as belonging to famous scientists and their "discoveries." They have embedded Taylorist fantasies of workplace discipline in the broader evolution of the human sciences and created deep intellectual genealogies for the "scientific racism" that has historically structured who does a society's most backbreaking labor. 1 Historians of science have done all these things quite effectively, albeit with only the loosest engagement with the prevailing scholarship in the field of labor history. Citations to Labor, International Labor and Working-Class History, and Labour/ Le Travail are few and far between on the pages of Isis, History of Science, and other