Introduction: Early modern scientific networks: knowledge and community in a globalizing world, 1500-1800 (Paula Findlen) Part I: Brokers of knowledgeChapter 1: A scholarly intermediary between the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe (Robert Morrison)Chapter 2: How information travels: Jesuit networks, scientific knowledge, and the early modern Republic of Letters, 1540-1640 (Paula Findlen)Chapter 3: Deciphering the Ignatian Tree: the Catholic Horoscope of the Society of Jesus (Marcelo Aranda)Chapter 4: The early modern information factory: how Samuel Hartlib turned correspondence into knowledge (Carol Pal)Part II: Configuring scientific networksChapter 5: Letters and questionnaires: the correspondence of Henry Oldenburg and the early Royal Society of London's Inquiries for Natural History (Iordan Avramov)Chapter 6: Ingenuous investigators: Antonio Vallisneri's regional network and the making of natural knowledge in eighteenth-century Italy (Ivano Dal Prete)Chapter 7: Corresponding in war and peace: the challenge of rebooting Anglo-French scientific relations during the Peace of Amiens (Elise Lipkowitz)Part III: How knowledge travelsChapter 8: Giant bones and the Taunton Stone: American antiquities, world history, and the Protestant International (Lydia Barnett)Chapter 9: The tarot of Yu the Great: the search for civilization's origins between France and China in the Age of Enlightenment (Alexander Statman)Chapter 10: Spaces of circulation and empires of knowledge: ethnolinguistics and cartography in early colonial India (Kapil Raj)Part IV: The local and the globalChapter 11: Recentering centers of calculation: reconfiguring knowledge networks within global empires of trade (Matthew Sargent)Chapter 12: The Atlantic World medical complex (Londa Schiebinger)Epilogue: Scientific networks reconsideredChapter 14: Following ghosts: skinning science in early modern Eurasia (Carla Nappi)Chapter 15: Conceptualizing knowledge networks: agents and patterns of "flow" (Rachel Midura)Chapter 16: Afterword (Harold J. Cook)

Empires of Knowledge charts the emergence of different kinds of scientific networks - local and long-distance, informal and institutional, religious and secular - between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries as one of the important phenomena of the early modern world.