An empire of magnetism : global science and the British magnetic enterprise in the age of imperialism /Edward J. Gillin

"During the 1840s and 1850s, the British government financed a worldwide investigation into how the Earth's magnetic phenomena operated, consisting of a network of naval expeditions and colonial observatories. Questions surrounding terrestrial magnetism were not just philosophical, but also engendered urgent concerns over the accurate navigation on which Britain's commercial and colonial power depended. With the guidance of a powerful lobby of scientific and social elites, the British state was able to mobilize the extensive resources of its empire to the collection of magnetic data through carefully coordinated observations. Yet, as An Empire of Magnetism argues, the experimental instruments and techniques required to conduct this work were to be found amid Britain's booming industry, where the harnessing of coal and iron, and use of steam power, shaped a scientific culture prominently concerned with the relationship between heat, pressure, and motion. In particular, it was philosophical apparatus fashioned within the mines of Cornwall that the government conscripted within this worldwide magnetic investigation. These locally produced experimental techniques and technologies proved capable of transformation into a system for obtaining magnetic measurements over great expanses of time and space. As this book demonstrates, this not only resulted in the most eminent global science of the age, but also became inseparable from the proliferation of empire as British naval crews and natural philosophers surveyed previously unknown regions in the search for magnetic data. This vast scientific enterprise had crucial implications for the formation of the 'modern state', its use of empirical knowledge, and the expansion of nineteenth-century empire."--Provided by the publisher.