‘In the beginning was economic geography’ – a science studies approach to disciplinary history

Abstract

Science studies are an increasingly prominent interdisciplinary body of work. Now a diverse literature, one of its most consistent and common themes is a reluctance to accept the standard model of scientific explanation (‘internalism’) that conceives scientific knowledge, and the disciplines with which it is associated, as the product of a rationality that is progressively realized over time. Instead, science studies emphasize the importance of local circumstances in shaping knowledge, which, in turn, makes such knowledge messy and context-dependent. The purposes of this paper are twofold. The first is to provide a selective review of science studies. In particular, the paper recognizes three subtraditions within the larger genre: Mertonian institutionalism, the sociology of scientific knowledge, and cultural studies of science. The second purpose is to begin developing a case study in order to apply such literature, that of the institutional origins of economic geography during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and linked to a series of wider social processes around commercial trade and imperialism. To make the case study manageable, I concentrate on only two authors and their respective key books: the Scottish geographer George Chisholm, who wrote the first English-language economic geography textbook, A handbook of commercial geography (1889); and the American geographer J. Russell Smith, author of the first US college text in economic geography, Industrial and commercial geography (1913).