[Athena] 14 mai Workshop Economies of Improvement

[Marie Thebaud-Sorger <thebaud.sorger AT free.fr>]

Chers Collègues,

Pour informations,
veuillez trouver ci-joint le programme de la journée d'étude
"Economies of Improvement: Technical innovations, the Sciences and the 
Public Sphere in the 18th century "
qui se tiendra à l'Institute of Advanced Studies de l'Université de 
Warwick (UK) le 14 mai 2010

Bien cordialement

Marie Thébaud-Sorger

Dr. Marie Thébaud-Sorger
Marie Curie Fellow
Department of History
University of Warwick
Coventry
CV4 7AL
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/people/research_assistants/sorger/ 


Economies of Improvement: Technical Innovations, the Sciences and the 
Public Sphere in the 18th century

This 1-day Workshop seeks to understand the range of motivation and 
social interaction which supported innovative activity during the 
C18th., and to highlight different forms of investment process. From 
this viewpoint, the market as such may be seen as embedded within a 
wider public sphere, whose resources could be variously mobilized. In 
addition, therefore, to a traditional economic understanding of business 
enterprise, the Workshop will analyze and characterize other modes of 
investment, whose nature could be as much civic, or cultural. 
Enlightenment conjoins individual emancipation and creative activity, 
material advance and public engagement, and further involves the 
emergence of cultures of technology in several key fields (including 
mechanics, chemistry, natural history, aspects of naval and military 
science, and colonial development). An economy partly motivated by the 
emergent notion of secular progress could also act as a powerful 
resource for markets claiming the interest of the public good as a 
counterbalance to the fictive economics of speculation. Our main 
challenge consists in crossing different fields (commercialization and 
consumption, enterprise, invention and the sciences, charity and 
philanthropy, subscription, governmental and other public body support). 
The researchers involved will help to explore new insights regarding the 
relation between cultures of civic improvement and those of science and 
technology, and can point the way to a reintegration of this notion of 
investment within the public sphere.

Programme

Introduction Marie Thébaud-Sorger (Warwick)__

Economy of innovation: the making of new markets, new knowledge, new 
objects

- Robert Iliffe (Sussex)
Material culture in the Scientific Revolution

-Sarah Easterby-Smith (Warwick)
Propagating commerce: plant breeding and market competition in London 
and Paris, c. 1770-1814

-Lissa Roberts (Twente)
Strategies of steam-engine entrepreneurs in the second half of 18-C France

Economic and industrial changes facing the public good

-Koji Yamamoto (King’s College, London)
Public Service in the Early Financial Revolution: the Case of the 
Company of the Mine-Adventurers of England, 1698-1710

- William J. Ashworth (Liverpool)
The British state and Industrialisation during the eighteenth century

-Maxine Berg (Warwick)
Industrial surveys in India in the 18thC

Innovation and the Sciences: Civil Benevolence and the Economics of the 
Public Sphere

- Emma Spary (UCL)
Parisian pharmacy and the reinvention of /économie/: three cases, 1760-1810

- Christelle Rabier (Paris)
For the Benefit of Mankind: Judging Medical Instruments at the Académie 
royale de chirurgie, 1750-1792

- John Christie (Leeds, Oxford, MPI Berlin)
Science and Technical Innovation in the Enlightenment Public Sphere: 
Practice and Theory in Enlightenment Scotland.

Conclusive remarks Christine MacLeod (Bristol)

Discussants: Charles Withers (Edinburgh), Peter Jones (Birmingham), Mark 
Knights (Warwick), Christine MacLeod(Bristol), Liliane Pérez (CDHTE-Paris)

Attachment: ProgrammeEconoMTS.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document