Networks and peripheries: Jean-François Persoz (1805-1868) and the 'Republic of chemist-Dyers'
Résumé
The existence of a Traité théorique et pratique de l'impression des tissus (1846) in the collection of the old library of the Industrial Engineering School in Barcelona is evidence of a process of technology transfer between France and Spain, specifically between Paris and Barcelona, in the nineteenth century. It may also be taken to suggest that the art of printing and colouring textiles emerged and developed in France, the "centre", and that it was later transferred to an area on the "periphery", in this case industrial Catalonia. Seeing the process in this way reinforces the simplistic view that conceives scientific centres as active and innovative, and peripheries as passive and uncreative. However, it seems clear that models of this kind should be refined and criticized; indeed, this is one of the main aims of the international research group "Science and Technology in the European Periphery" (STEP). Its founding statement, drawn up after its first meeting in Barcelona in 1999, appraised the centre-periphery question in the following terms: Although a simple bipolar distinction between center and periphery is useful for broadly delineating the situation, it is incapable of capturing many salient details. There are many centers and many peripheries, and they change in time, spaces, and disciplines. Depending on the subject one is discussing-a place may at one and the same time be both center and periphery. A center may, over time, change into a periphery, and vice versa. And a single country may contain both centers and peripheries, thereby making purely national distinctions of dubious use. To examine such issues requires discussing the ways in which ideas that originate in a specific cultural and historical setting are introduced into a different milieu with its
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