Abstract
The programme proposed here structures a new initiative to examine the history of chemistry in the Netherlands during the second half of the eighteenth century. It does so first by replacing the traditional investigative division between (scientific) knowledge content and (applied) material practice with a unified research field organized around five overlapping categories of chemical activity. These categories are: 1] Chemistry, travel & trade - The Netherlands as international entrepot, along with an analysis of how chemical knowledge and know-how travelled; 2] Chemistry and domestic industry - domestic production of consumer goods that tied together pedagogy, international competition and social reform; 3] Chemistry and sustenance - production of food, drink and medicine to feed the body, along with educational efforts to feed the mind; 4] Chemistry and beauty - examines relations between chemistry and consumption patterns, fashion and aesthetics; 5] Chemistry and agriculture - harnessing chemistry for agricultural improvement, to use eighteenth-century terminology. Together these categories encompass the activities that tied chemical knowledge, processes and practitioners to broader social, cultural, economic and political developments within the Netherlands and global networks within which the Dutch operated. Research will then be further divided into two sub-themes to ensure analytical depth and effective results. The first uses the broadly construed subject of chemistry education to organize research related to these five categories. By examining the structure, content and context of chemistry education offered by Dutch universities and athenaeums, municipalities, private societies, independent teachers and apprenticeships, it will map the ways in which chemical knowledge and procedures were taught across a spectrum of sites. This will help us better understand what the term 'theory' was taken to mean, especially in relation to chemical practice, and how chemical education more generally related to activities in the realms of production and consumption. The second sub-theme approaches these five categories by focusing on the related issues of entrepreneurism and governance. The key here is to examine the ways in which both private and governmental initiatives (whether aimed at financial, social or cultural profit) stimulated and constrained activities in the realms of production and consumption while harnessing chemistry to broader social, cultural and political projects and goals. It thereby ties an examination of involvement with chemistry to broader issues of Dutch history, such as the perception of cultural and economic decline, the rise of (oeconomic) patriotism, international competition and dislocation, revolution and reorganization. In addition to a number of academic publications, this programme will culminate in an international conference, a public exhibition and an accompanying publication for the general public.