RJ has now opened the system for funding requisitions and final reports. More information
The theoretical point of departure of this project has been the insight that issues defined both as political and scientific problems must be analyzed in a framework allowing both natural and social phenomena. This implies that scientific claims and social contexts are co-produced and influence each other as well as beliefs about nature and society. The purpose of this project has been to study how such intimate relations between knowledge production and political decision-making have evolved historically.
From the outset, this project was to empirically depart from the activities of the Swedish Household Committee between 1793 and the first decade of the 19th century with the forming of the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture as a consequence. But during the research process, it has turned out that the debates about the promotion of agriculture throughout the 18th century had impact on the activities of the Household Committee as well as the formation of the academy of agriculture. The political and scientific work to establish a national organization for dissemination of knowledge was thus pursued long before the Household Committee and the empirical locus of the project has been adjusted accordingly to debates about the production and use of manure during the 18th century. This was a central problem to Swedish agriculture, which has hardly been addressed at all by historians in Sweden or elsewhere. The lack of manure was often addressed through traditional Aristotelian notions of earth qualities such as cold and hot, wet and dry. Substances considered to be important for agriculture were supposed to be generated in the soil or could be added to it. Also chemical reasoning was with only a few exceptions built on the notion that basic elements such as salt and water or soil and manure reacted with each other under different circumstances. Other notions relied on different types of soil such as sand or marl. This last type of soil became increasingly sought after during the second half of the 18th century since it was understood that it could be spread on arable land in order to raise productivity. Foreign influences on the domestic Swedish debate were common as were more home grown theories of how to improve soils. Common for all notions of how to raise the quality of soils, however, were that they resulted in concrete advice that implied very large work efforts as well as planning and organizational skills if they were to be followed.
In general, studies of foreign precursors to the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture have primarily stressed knowledge formation in agriculture and its economic effects. Simultaneously, studies of domestic Swedish initiatives prior to the academy have stressed the political processes and organizational solutions as well as alternatives discussed. The status of research thus mirrors en common belief in international border-crossing knowledge formation and nationally confined political decision-making. This is the first important result of this project.
Such a division between on one hand international knowledge production and national policy-making is contrary to the common theoretical assumptions made today about the interaction between political decisions and scientific knowledge. By analysing the thorough discussions on manure as well as the different actors engaged in it and the methods they proposed to manage manure in order to enrich soils, the establishment of the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture can be understood as a consequence of the activities of a more or less self-appointed group consisting of Swedish land owners, military commanders, medical doctors, clergymen and other gentlemen interested in agriculture and husbandry, people who had acquired the latest results described in the international literature while they could count on support in different domestic social and political arenas. This is the second result of the project.
There are different concepts that can be used to characterise such a group of people. They can, for example, be described as a type of early political expertise, proto-expertise, which was active in a time when the concept of expertise itself was not yet commonly used in Swedish. This would not happen until the 1860s and 70s. Another concept commonly used to describe social groups with authority relying on a knowledge monopoly sanctioned by institutionalized and accredited educational programs are professions.
Social research has hitherto, almost without exception, studied processes of professionalization departing from engineers and other vocations that can be connected to the development of industrialized society. But it thus seems that these professions could have precursors in agriculture in the form of a type of proto-professions. This is the third result of this project. Very little research has so far been pursued in order to establish such a claim regarding early profession-like groups, also if you consult literature on German or American conditions. The Swedish historian of ideas, Leif Runefelt, however, has shown how parish descriptions as a literary genre have mirrored a rather united collection of virtues that for good reasons can be assumed to be embraced by an early Swedish proto-expertise of agriculture.
This research project and its main result have been reported to the international research community through traditional channels such as conferences and publications. Until now, one article has been published in an international peer-review research journal in print and open access, in Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning and Policy (2013). A presentation was also accepted in the program of the conference "Between Autonomy and Engagement--Performances of Scientific Expertise (1860-1960)" in Leuwen, Belgium in May 2012 with the title "From Policy to Chemistry: The transformation of Proto-Expertise in Swedish Agriculture during the first half of the nineteenth century". Another presentation was made at at "European Social Science History Conference" in Vienna in April 2014. In addition, results from the project were presented at a national workshop on the history of agricultural sciences in Sweden at the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture in November 2012 and at the Swedish Historians' Meeting in May 2014. Presentations have also been made in more popular contexts such as at Alunbruksdagen at Andrarum 2011 and at the Swedish Chemists' Society 2014.
It should also be noted that there has been an interest at the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture to engage me in an anthology supported their a history unit and authored by a number of historians who presented different studies at a meeting for Scandinavian historians of science and technology organized in Lund in southern Sweden in May 2015. I was engaged as a commentator on the two panels organized and will also contribute to the collection of studies with a concluding chapter of comments. The plan is to publish the studies and comments during 2016.
Apart from this, the project results have not been published according to the original plans. The strategy now is to publish three additional articles, each covering one of the three results mentioned. This will be done during 2016.