Epistemic Flows in the Nineteenth Century

Daniel Scott Smith, Duke University

The historiography and historical sociology of the nineteenth century emphasize it as an era of “isms”: nationalism, industrialism, imperialism, liberalism, socialism, conservatism, abolitionism, and suffragism, among others. These ideologies and social movements are often conceptualized ambivalently. Some accounts emphasize their ground-up, nationally rooted character, while others stress their explicitly internationalist origins. Both takes have good evidence, but little large-scale, empirical work has traced the flows of such -isms within and across the Western system as a whole. This paper leverages a new archival data source to give us a completer picture of the nineteenth-century -ism story: the Union of International Associations' (UIA) register of every international congress and conference that ever met throughout the nineteenth century, including when, where, and what about. These congresses were historically consequential for three reasons. First, they operated as sites to generate new epistemic accounts and social reforms. Second, since they moved locations from one country to the next, they were carriers of new ideas and people. Third, and related, they reconfigured the Western system as a relational network of such epistemic flows, where states varyingly trafficked in these new -isms and were more or less prominent in these networks. The paper empirically traces this interrelatedness and describes the Western system as just that: an institutional order superordinate to the nascent nation-state that nonetheless had consequential diffusion effects on local state structuration processes.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 63. Discursive Developments Across Disciplines and Ideologies