An Empire of Magnetism: Global Science and the British Magnetic Enterprise in the Age of Imperialism

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Edward J. Gillin (Lecturer in the History of Building Sciences and Technology, Lecturer in the History of Building Sciences and Technology, University College London)

An Empire of Magnetism

Global Science and the British Magnetic Enterprise in the Age of Imperialism

Edward J. Gillin (Lecturer in the History of Building Sciences and Technology, Lecturer in the History of Building Sciences and Technology, University College London)

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English

Oxford University Press
14 March 2024

British & Irish history; Colonialism & imperialism; History of science; Electricity, electromagnetism & magnetism; Geophysics

During the 1840s and 1850s, the British government financed a world-wide 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 engendered urgent concerns over

accurate navigation, on which Britain's commercial and colonial power relied. The British Magnetic Survey was celebrated at the time as the most extensive state-orchestrated scientific enterprise ever conducted. Yet although it was a fundamentally global endeavour, both in terms of its scale and its impact, the experimental instruments and techniques required were to be found amid Britain's booming local 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 was able to conscript within this world-wide magnetic investigation. These locally produced experimental techniques and technologies proved capable of transformation into a system for obtaining magnetic measurements from over great expanses of time and space.

As An Empire of Magnetism demonstrates, this not only sustained an immense world-wide scientific investigation, but became inseparable from the proliferation of empire, sustaining colonial expansion and unprecedented multi-cultural exchanges as British naval crews and natural philosophers surveyed previously unknown regions in the search for magnetic data. In so doing, Edward Gillin argues that the British Magnetic Survey had broader implications over the formation of the 'modern state', the expansion of nineteenth-century empire, and the development of global science.

By: Edward J. Gillin (Lecturer in the History of Building Sciences and Technology Lecturer in the History of Building Sciences and Technology University College London)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 240mm, Width: 163mm, Spine: 25mm
Weight: 1g
ISBN: 9780198890959
ISBN 10: 0198890958
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 14 March 2024
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Since completing his DPhil in History at the University of Oxford in 2015, Edward J. Gillin has worked at the universities of Cambridge and Leeds, and is now Lecturer in the History of Building Sciences and Technology at the University College London. A cultural historian of modern science and architecture, he won the 2016 Usher Prize from the Society for the History Technology, the SAHGB's 2015 Hawksmoor Essay Medal, and was named proxime accessit for the Royal Historical Society's 2018 Whitfield Prize. In 2020, he circumnavigated Africa with a genuine 1840s' Fox-type dipping needle.