The "New Science" and the Sea - Academies, Learned Societies and Marine Knowledge in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Academies and learned societies were the main tools for the application of the “new science” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This paper aims to contribute to the research on marine science, nautical knowledge and empire building by studying academies and learned societies in their role of bureaus of investigation of the colonial reality. As a fact, institutions such as the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris and the Royal Society of London played an important role as mediators in the development of various models of “science policies”. This paper focuses on the implication of these institutions in overseas scientific exploration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It stresses the specific importance of “academic” voyages for the development of navigational techniques, from Huygens and Hooke to Maskelyne and Harrison. This comparative study thus tries to show how through these new centers of knowledge production a scholarly interest for day-to-day nautical practices influenced the scientized perfection of navigational techniques.