When Science and State Collide: Revisiting Dolomieu's Imprisonment and the Ideals of Cosmopolitan Science during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars

This paper uses the stories of two natural history collections – that of the Dutch Stadholder and of the French naturalist J.J. Houtou de la Billardiere – that were seized as booty of war in 1795 and 1796, respectively, to explore changing concepts of cosmopolitanism in science during the Revolutionary period.  The paper argues that contrasting French and British responses to these seized collections reveal the emergence of changing and contrasting French and British conceptions of scientific cosmopolitanism during the Revolutionary era, a phenomenon that played a key role in the larger shift in the era’s scientific community from a world of 18thC cosmopolitan science to a world of 19thC world of scientific internationalism.