The First Page: Metropolitan Science

THE FIRST PAGE

Metropolitan Science. London Sites and Cultures
of Knowledge and Practice, c. 1600-1800

by Rebekah Higgitt & Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin with Noah Moxham

22 May 2025

The First Page presents the first page of books that are launched as part of the IAS Book Launch Programme. On 29 May 2025, Rebekah Higgitt and Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin will present their book, Metropolitan Science. London Sites and Cultures of Knowledge and Practice, c. 1600-1800, in which they offer a new perspective on the development of a scientific culture by looking at distinctive practices in artisanal, mercantile, and governmental sites of London.

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Introduction

London, c. 1600–1800

Early modern London’s institutional buildings, workshops, laboratories, warehouses and wharves were hives of productive, networked, industrious activity. A snapshot of such spaces at the turn of the seventeenth century would reveal artisans, practitioners and institutional officials engaged in the testing and evaluation of coinage, molten metals, gunpowder and spices among many other products and substances. Members of London’s corporations were producing weapons, measuring instruments and medicines; they were mastering practical mathematics, surveying the navigable channels of the Thames and even sea-routes throughout Britain’s rapidly expanding global empire.

While British science often traces its roots to the foundation of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge in 1660, this book explores a different set of institutional sites to understand how knowledge and skilful, experimental practices developed in early modern London. These were the collective, industrious, practical and commercial contexts of a city that lacked a university but combined a growing population, manufacture, overseas trade, government and court. They included new incorporations – joint stock enterprises like the East India Company or guilds representing emergent crafts – and others that expanded as London’s international significance and imperial dominance grew, such as the Royal Mint and the Office of Ordnance. Across the city, such institutions collected information from nearby and around the world, and developed techniques to meet individual and institutional objectives. Moving beyond histories of institutions or of natural and experimental philosophy, this book shows how these collective cultures shaped knowledge production and the city.

Understanding how, why and where Londoners gained knowledge about nature and put it to use between the end of the sixteenth century and dawn of the nineteenth can helpfully begin with a rehearsal of the city’s extraordinary demographic and geographic changes. These were both actual and relative: a population more than doubling in the seventeenth century, from about 200,000 to 575,000, moved London from being the third most populous city to the largest in Europe. Geographically, it expanded in all directions, into the counties of Essex, Middlesex, Surrey and Kent. It came to incorporate the centre of royal and parliamentary power in Westminster as …

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REBEKAH HIGGITT is Principal Curator of Science at National Museums Scotland and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her publications include Recreating Newton (2007), Finding Longitude (2014) and Metropolitan Science (2024).

JASMINE KILBURN-TOPPIN is Lecturer in early Modern History at Cardiff University. Her publications include Crafting Identities (2021) and Metropolitan Science (2024).

On 29 May 2025 Rebekah Higgitt and Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin will launch their book with a panel discussion at the Institute of Advanced Studies. More information.

Metropolitan Science. London Sites and Cultures of Knowledge and Practice, c. 1600-1800′ is published by Bloomsbury.

Lead Image by Thomas Bowles via Wikicommons.