Alexander van Wickeren's new book offers a fine-grained, sophisticated account of the knowledge cultures that grew alongside the French and German tobacco industries from the late eighteenth century through the founding of the Kaiserreich. As his predominant analytical frame, the author chose to explore how knowledge-making intersects with the production of divergent spatialities, and this approach allows him to give a remarkably rich and nuanced account of the complex interactions between tobacco-related expertise and the various political, economic, and cultural networks with which it was entangled. The book's central focus is on the tobacco industry on the French and German sides of the Rhine, but the study's attention to the various national and global interactions entailed in this industry's growth gives the work a much wider footprint than that description might suggest. The book makes a number of valuable contributions to our understanding of practical and scientific knowledge-making in the nineteenth century.
Wissensräume im Wandel offers substantial evidence that we should reexamine any straightforward assumptions we might have about the nationalization of scientific communities in the post-Napoleonic era. As van Wickeren shows, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century a regionally interwoven community of tobacco-related experts emerged along the Rhine; it included people in Alsace and Baden. National frames of reference became more important over the course of the time period examined, but never fully displaced this interlocking regional network (although the regional network's boundaries also shifted, with the Upper Rhine becoming less integrated as the nineteenth century progressed). At times, these interlocking national and regional networks held divergent visions for the future of the tobacco industry, and they had different relationships to global networks as well. Agricultural experts in Paris, for example, hoped to reform French tobacco production along the lines of the famed Cuban cigar industry, while Alsatian experts paid more attention to the advice coming from their contacts in North America.
Van Wickeren pays careful attention to the boundary work that constructed different kinds of tobacco-related expertise, offering detailed reconstructions of how this expertise stood in varying relation to the manufacturing, commercial, and agricultural actors who had a stake in tobacco-related knowledge. Indeed, this study is the most satisfying account I have seen of the complicated ways in which various forms of scientific and practical expertise related to each other in this period. The book examines the effect that the new agricultural chemistry had on regional discussions of tobacco growing, but also qualifies the overly simple view that chemistry was always the science that agricultural improvers found most relevant; in the early part of the nineteenth century, botany played a far more prominent role.
Van Wickeren's careful analysis of botanical knowledge leads to another major strength of the book, the way in which it traces how commercially relevant kinds of knowledge registered in tobacco-related expertise. The author rightly points out that, despite the interest that historians of science have taken in natural history and global trading networks, they often have not done enough to analyze the concrete ways in which natural-historical expertise and commercial criteria interacted. What counted as “good tobacco” shifted considerably in the time period under consideration, in ways that also had implications for growing practices and acclimatization experiments.
In sum, this book significantly advances our understanding of practical and scientific knowledge cultures in the nineteenth century, and if a graduate student of mine wanted an example of spatial analysis done right, Alexander van Wickeren's study would be one of the first titles that would come to my mind.
