Connecting Territories: Exploring People and Nature, 1700-1850

The book analyses from a comparative perspective the exploration of territories, the histories of their inhabitants, and local natural environments during the long eighteenth century. The eleven chapters look at European science at home and abroad as well as at global scientific practices and the involvement of a great variety of local actors in the processes of mapping and recording. Dealing with landlocked territories with no colonies (like Switzerland) and places embedded in colonial networks, the book reveals multifarious entanglements connecting these territories.

Contributors are: Sarah Baumgartner, Simona Boscani Leoni, Stefanie Gänger, Meike Knittel, Francesco Luzzini, Jon Mathieu, Barbara Orland, Irina Podgorny, Chetan Singh, and Martin Stuber.

Simona Boscani Leoni, Ph.D. (2003, EHESS Paris), is Swiss National Science Foundation-Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Bern and senior scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne. Most recently she edited: ＂Unglaubliche Bergwunder＂. Johann Jakob Scheuchzer und Graubünden. Ausgewählte Briefe, 1699-1707 (2019), an extended edition of this correspondence is online: https: //hallerNet.org.

Sarah Baumgartner, Ph.D. (2019, University of Bern). She holds an MA in History and a BSc in Geography. Her research interests include the history of scientific societies of the 18th century and early modern agriculture.

Meike Knittel, Ph.D. (2018, University of Bern), is a postdoctoral researcher at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and an associated researcher at the University of Bern’s Historical Institute. Her research focuses on natural history of collections and eighteenth-century botany.