Situating research travel

Historians, geographers, ethnographers and sociologists of science have mapped the geographies of knowledge production and circulation using various methodologies. They have, for example, considered sites of study, workplaces, correspondence networks and the career trajectories of academics.Footnote ¹² This study considers the wider networks that have shaped knowledge production in the modern research university by examining the places where university research was conducted, the linkages and connections travellers established between the university and other sites of study, and the difference these networks made to the science and scholarship carried out by academics.Footnote ¹³

Academic travel is defined here as those temporary and mostly circular journeys undertaken for research, to present a lecture or seminar, to attend a conference, or simply to network with colleagues. These forms of mobility have the capacity to transform the ideas, practices and values of both the travelling researchers and their hosting colleagues. We analyse three dimensions of academic travel that can both motivate these journeys and produce related outcomes, namely intellectual resources, such as scientific and cultural knowledge; social interactions with peers and others; and material aspects, including research sites, objects and infrastructure.Footnote ¹⁴

Travel for research and learning can be regarded as a specific form of academic travel, but, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, research-related travel occurred outside the university, mainly in the form of educational travel and scientific exploration.Footnote ¹⁵ The latter built upon previous discoveries that began to pursue a more systematic scientific agenda when James Cook first entered the Pacific in 1769, a moment that David Stoddart famously identified as the birth of modern scientific geography.Footnote ¹⁶ These oceanic explorations were complemented by early nineteenth-century terrestrial explorations, especially into Africa and subsequently to Central Asia, the polar regions and the Himalayas.Footnote ¹⁷ Scientific exploration was sponsored directly by the state, initially through naval and commercial ministries and later by specialized scientific societies such as the Royal Geographical Society founded in Britain in 1830.Footnote ¹⁸

Educational travel emerged in the context of the Grand Tour, an extended journey through the cultural centres of Europe that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries became an obligatory educational experience for young male aristocrats before they took their place in society.Footnote ¹⁹ Touring the European continent began to flourish when the new wealthy middle classes of the early nineteenth century were willing and able to invest their own money to acquire the cultural prestige and authority that travel into the heartlands of classic antiquity had brought to eighteenth-century gentlemen. This middle-class educational tourism, especially to the eastern Mediterranean, was facilitated by new rail and steamboat lines and eventually became organized by specialized tourist agencies such as the one Thomas Cook had run in Leicester since the 1840s. In 1855, when Cook organized his first overseas conducted tour, ‘the age of the Grand Tour was over and the age of tourism had arrived’.Footnote ²⁰

Neither of these earlier forms of research travel – educational tourism or scientific exploration – was linked to the universities. Since the foundation of universities in the European Middle Ages, academic travel had concentrated on career- and teaching-related moves as epitomized by the itineraries of late medieval and early modern scholars such as Erasmus of Rotterdam.Footnote ²¹ The main objective of students' and scholars' travels between cosmopolitan seats of learning, in which Latin served as the lingua franca, was the transmission and preservation of predominantly Greek and Arab scholarship.Footnote ²² Peter Burke has argued that since the twelfth century, when universities began to replace monasteries as the main centres of learning in Europe, new ideas generated by creative, often marginal individuals and groups were primarily discussed in new venues and institutions that became the formal, mainstream and conservative organizations of the next generation.Footnote ²³ Accordingly, the humanist movement of the sixteenth, the scientific revolution of the seventeenth, and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century produced new institutions that became the seats for humanist thinking, scientific practice and research work respectively.Footnote ²⁴ It was only in the nineteenth century that the emerging research universities superseded academies and scientific societies as the major centres for modern science and scholarship, which raises the question of the role that travel played in this process.Footnote ²⁵

Recent work in the history and geography of science has documented the journeys of well-known explorers and scientific travellers such as James Cook, Joseph Banks, Alexander von Humboldt and David Livingstone, and has also begun to examine wider cultures and hidden histories of exploration with an emphasis on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote ²⁶ A common feature of many of these biographical studies is their tracing of travellers' lives through the places they lived in. Aiming to complement this prevailing perspective, we will take a more systematic, structural and analytical approach when examining how travel emerged in the modern research university. Our approach is more systematic because it analyses the recorded travels of all academics working in one university over seven decades; it is structural because it compares travel cultures in different academic fields that reveal a variety of central places in the global flows of knowledge; and it is analytical as it relates the identified patterns to the changing organization of the University of Cambridge and to wider economic and social developments.

By focusing on one academic institution, we also aim to develop those approaches that examine academic travel from the perspective of institutional nodes rather than nation states.Footnote ²⁷ Considering all recorded travels in one institution specifically allows for a rare comparative perspective on disciplinary cultures of research and travel, including the natural, technical and social sciences as well as the often neglected arts and humanities (hereafter humanities).Footnote ²⁸ A useful framework for understanding how geographical imaginations have contributed to the formation of subject-specific intellectual landscapes on a global scale was suggested by Derek Gregory.Footnote ²⁹ Drawing upon Edward Said's work, he argued that the spaces of knowledge are shaped by ‘a double geography’ of ‘a hierarchy of spaces of knowledge production’ in which some locations are regarded as more central than others and ‘a hierarchy of sites of study in which some places are valorised as canonical or exotic, as exemplary sites of consuming interest, whereas others are marginalized as merely other, less interesting or less instructive instances of more general conditions that are better exemplified elsewhere’.Footnote ³⁰ This double geography of obligatory passage pointsFootnote ³¹ and popular sites of study has not only differed between disciplines and their sub-specialisms but also changed over time and space, thus contributing to complex global geographies of different research practices. In this essay, we argue that in our period of interest, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, geographical imaginations about field-specific research landscapes and their global hotspots only began to take shape through the emergence of travel as the crucial research technique in most if not all evolving disciplines.Footnote ³²

Drawing upon recent work in science studies, history of science and geography of science, our study presents the first systematic analysis of university archives to re-create the geography of research travel over seven decades.Footnote ³³ We have three objectives, which are, first, to comment on the role of travel in the development of professionalized research in the modern university; second, to illustrate the globalization of science and scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century through the emergence of highly mobile researchers; and third, to identify the impact of distinctive travel cultures on knowledge production in different disciplines.

The study is based on previously unused materials from the Cambridge University Archives, specifically the applications for leave of absence by academics employed by the university, as they are recorded in the minute books of the General Board of Studies (the General Board of the Faculties after 1926) for the academic years 1885–1886 to 1954–1955. The application process became increasingly formalized from the 1880s to the 1950s, but most applications were based on a letter to the Secretary of the General Board that outlined the reasons for the planned leave and briefly described the intended research. From the late 1920s, most applicants had already received consent from their head of department or the faculty board, so that the General Board was called on to approve arrangements agreed in the relevant departments and faculties.Footnote ³⁴

The archival records also include some of the original application letters, which were complemented by documents surviving in personal files and by biographical details taken from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. It is important to note that Cambridge academics had to apply for leave of absence during full term time but remained free to travel during vacations. This study thus captures not all academic travel from Cambridge but those travels during full term time that exceeded the residence requirements. Most importantly, this includes academic leaves of one to three terms, which enables us to trace the development of the research sabbatical in different disciplines.Footnote ³⁵ Despite the limitations of the archival data, it provides unique insights into the history and global geographies of academic travel that are difficult to access otherwise.Footnote ³⁶

The emergence of a modern research university

The idea of the modern research university was originally based on the successful integration of research and teaching at German universities. First outlined by Wilhelm von Humboldt with the foundation of Berlin University in 1810, the concept of the unity of research and teaching, or, in German, die Einheit von Forschung und Lehre, began to spread across the globe in the nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁷ In 1876, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore was founded as the first US research university with a graduate school, an American innovation derived from an idealized German role model.Footnote ³⁸ This prompted the development of graduate programmes at several universities in the United States that soon were comparable to those in the German system.Footnote ³⁹ Up to that point, doctoral training had required an extended stay in Germany so that the establishment of research universities in the United States notably changed the international flows of students and academics.Footnote ⁴⁰

These developments did not go unnoticed in Britain, where the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge had long resisted innovations from the Continent and largely remained finishing schools for the clergy throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴¹ Even in 1872–1873, Robert Phelps, the master of Sidney Sussex in Cambridge, accused ‘the reformers of drawing their inspiration from German universities’, arguing that ‘the university's only function was to conduct examinations, and that all teaching, including the support of laboratories, could be managed by the colleges’.Footnote ⁴² In the context of an increasing pressure for modernization through the improved German university model in the thriving US research universities, the motto that every British university of importance ‘must have facilities for science’ began to guide university policies only in the 1880s.Footnote ⁴³

The transformation of the University of Cambridge from an ancient centre of learning into a modern research university gradually proceeded through three comprehensive university reforms that implemented recommendations of the Royal Commissions on Oxford and Cambridge launched in 1852, 1872 and 1919. The creation of a research environment similar to the situation in German universities was hesitantly pursued through the opening of the Cavendish Laboratory in 1874 and the provision of a doctorate of science (ScD) and a doctorate of letters (LittD) in 1882, but these degrees were awarded on the grounds of past achievements and thus pre-dated PhDs earned by research that were introduced in Cambridge in 1919.Footnote ⁴⁴ A new system of college taxation, recommended by the Royal Commission of 1872, and large private endowments enabled further significant investments in new posts and facilities in the sciences during the late nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁵

The second major university reform, implemented with the new University Statutes in 1882, contributed to the professionalization of university life by providing the first regulations on residence requirements for professors and readers during full term time. Coming into effect at the beginning of the 1885–1886 academic year, professors and readers were now obliged to apply to the General Board for leave of absence during those periods that exceeded the strictly defined rules of residence.Footnote ⁴⁶ These new regulations aimed to increase the availability of professors and readers for students and colleagues and had no significant effect on research travel. The records show that in the four decades from 1885–1886 to 1924–1925, the eve of the next university reform, the General Board granted on average only 2.1 academic leaves per year, and no more than nine in any one year, although the number of professors alone had risen from thirty-nine in 1885–1886 to fifty-eight in 1924–1925. Over these forty years, only twenty of eighty-four academic leaves were dedicated to research (24 per cent).Footnote ⁴⁷

The emphasis on research in the university was significantly strengthened through the third university reform. Most importantly, the concept of the ‘research leave’, or ‘sabbatical leave’, was introduced at Cambridge in 1926. Known from US universities since 1880, when Harvard University established the first system of research leave, this innovation, involving the entitlement to one term without teaching and administrative duties for every six terms of service (or every seventh year off), applied to all Cambridge university teaching officers.Footnote ⁴⁸ Based on a new leave-of-absence fund, research leave was granted with full stipend if all other duties in Cambridge were effectively given up. Occasionally, host universities and institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust and the Nuffield Foundation contributed to travelling expenses, but at least 80 per cent of all research leaves were fully university funded.Footnote ⁴⁹

The institutionalization of the research leave led to a qualitative difference in the number of granted academic leaves per year, which underlines the close association between the growing significance of research and study leave (Figure 1). About three quarters of all granted academic leaves involved travel abroad so that the history of academic leave is basically a history of academic travel.

Figure 1.

Granted academic leaves of absence in the University of Cambridge, 1885–1886 to 1954–1955. Sources: CUA, GB, Min III.1 to Min III.7 and GB, Boxes 301 to 308.

Compared to German and American institutions, British universities identified the need for developing a research culture rather belatedly. In the case of Cambridge, the university administration abruptly changed the cultures of science and scholarship in the late 1920s by introducing the research-leave scheme and thus making travel the key research technique. While there is no published information available about the establishment of sabbatical schemes in other British universities, anecdotal and archival evidence from Oxford and Cambridge suggests that Cambridge set an early precedent in Britain. Cambridge scholars referred to the example of US universities when discussing regulations and applications for research leave, while the University of Oxford implemented formal regulations only in 1948 and repeatedly cited the Cambridge policies as their role model when designing a comparable sabbatical leave scheme in 1955.Footnote ⁵⁰

The introduction of regular research leave in the University of Cambridge had direct implications for the travel behaviour of Cambridge academics as most of the few recorded academic leaves in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries aimed at lecturing abroad. It was only after the university reform in 1926 that the purpose of about half of all granted academic leaves was either research and travel (with a recorded purpose and destination) or unspecified research leave (without a recorded purpose and destination; see Figure 2a). Therefore we argue that the introduction of the research leave not only contributed to the professionalization of research in the ancient university but also was pivotal to Cambridge's transformation into a modern research university.

Figure 2.

Main purpose of granted academic leaves in the University of Cambridge, 1885–1886 to 1954–1955. Sources: CUA, GB, Min III.1 to Min III.7 and GB, Boxes 301 to 308.

Research travel and the formation of modern disciplines

The increase in systematic travel from the University of Cambridge was linked to the development of distinctive travel cultures. By travel cultures we mean a ‘variety of practices at work in the production and consumption of voyages and travels’ aiming at the creation and dissemination of academic knowledge.Footnote ⁵¹ These travel cultures included typical material, social, literary, bodily and reproductive practices that were implicated in different types of academic work and shaped not only the global geographies of academic travel but also disciplinary identities.Footnote ⁵²

A comparison between disciplines shows that motivations for travel other than research played very different roles. Lecturing, for example, was particularly frequent in the historical and philosophical sciences, while keeping up to date with the latest research at conferences was most important in the collaborative and increasingly competitive physical and biological sciences (Figure 2b). The comparative perspective also suggests that a variety of academic practices were closely related to research. For example, visiting appointments that were mainly held in the United States were important reasons for travel in mathematics and the social sciences and often linked to both research and teaching. Consultancy work, featuring prominently in the agricultural and social sciences, often directly informed research in these applied fields of inquiry, whereas invitations to lectures and conferences were often used to embark on research-related information tours, especially when targeting the well-equipped laboratories and libraries of the United States. The archival evidence suggests that most unspecified research leaves, which were prominent in fields dominated by individual scholarship, were spent in Cambridge with the aims of uninterrupted research or writing a book. Keeping this overlap of research and other academic practices in mind, the main focus of the following analysis will be on 366 academic leaves for research and travel that were primarily devoted to the production of new knowledge. These research leaves accounted for 35 per cent of all recorded academic leaves from Cambridge in the period of interest and matched their spectrum of disciplines (Figure 2b).Footnote ⁵³

The structure of disciplines discussed in this essay largely results from the existing departmental classifications at the time, but it is important to note that this disciplinary order was constantly in flux and that some departments were only founded in the 1920s or even much later than that.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the following, we aim to flesh out how travel not only shaped disciplinary identities but constitutively brought them into being by gradually enrolling scientists and scholars from different fields into the new travel paradigm, a process that itself transformed how and where research was conducted (Table 1).

Table 1.

Applications of Cambridge academics for research leaves abroad by academic field, 1885–1886 to 1954–1955. Abbreviations: mos = months, wks = weeks, p/o = part of, NZ = New Zealand. Sources: CUA, GB, Min III.1 to Min III.7 and GB, Box 301 to 308

* First specified entry; the first entry was in 1925–1926 when John Littlewood applied for research leave of three months but did not specify where he would take this leave.

Polite learning

The first official research leave at the University of Cambridge was granted in March 1886 to Sir Roland Knyvet Wilson, reader in Indian law since 1887, for visiting India and obtaining knowledge of the practical working of Indian law.Footnote ⁵⁵ Up to the First World War, research leaves of Cambridge academics concentrated on the humanities (Figure 3a). Whether it was Edward Granville Browne, who had been appointed university lecturer in Persian in 1888 and aimed to use two months of travel for research in Cyprus and Syria, or Solomon Schechter, reader in Talmudic since 1892, who planned to examine Hebrew manuscripts in Italian libraries, a few scholars reached out from Cambridge to study the cultures, archives and sites about which they wrote and taught.Footnote ⁵⁶

Figure 3.

Disciplinary profiles of granted academic leaves in the University of Cambridge by decade. Sources: CUA, GB, Min III.1 to Min III.7 and GB, Boxes 301 to 308.

Modern research travel in Cambridge thus originated from a university-funded continuation of the educational tourism of more or less amateur scholars, linguists, archaeologists and classicists, who had previously spent either their own money or supporting funds from government research councils on visiting the places of interest to their studies.Footnote ⁵⁷ These places were mainly to be found in the classical arenas of the Mediterranean, as exemplified by Cambridge scholars who contributed to the contemporary cultural production of European history and heritage by studying libraries, museums and sites in Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Syria and Egypt.Footnote ⁵⁸

The highly diverse research practices in language and cultural studies, including fields such as Anglo-Saxon, Assyriology, Slavonic studies, Classics, archaeology and the modern languages, were all characterized by close ties to a particular region, place or site of interest that required extended stays in order to acquire language skills and cultural knowledge (Figure 4a). This is emphasized in a letter by Edward Granville Browne, the newly elected Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic (1902), who stressed the expected benefits of a planned research leave in Egypt during the Lent Term of 1903 for himself and his students:

Five decades later, studying the language and documents of a particular culture remained an important reason for extended research leaves abroad, but in an increasingly professionalized research environment the aim was now to produce specific published output. This is best expressed by Donald Lawrence Keene, lecturer in Japanese and Korean at Cambridge (1949–1955) and later renowned professor of Japanese literature and culture at Columbia University, who was keen to spend the academic year 1953–1954 in Japan:

From the 1880s to the 1950s, the cultures of polite learning that spearheaded the emergence of institutionalized travel in the University of Cambridge had been transformed under the influence of new travel cultures that contributed to the evolution of scientific research. As the main outcome of this process, humanistic knowledge production became more targeted and output-orientated. Improved transport and a growing international outlook of university-based scholarship also widened the geographical reach of polite learning to include Pakistan, India, China and Japan in the post-war decade.

Figure 4.

Destinations of research leaves by Cambridge academics in the humanities and social sciences, 1885–1886 to 1954–1955. Sources: CUA, GB, Min III.1 to Min III.7 and GB, Boxes 301 to 308.

Social environments

New travel cultures in different areas of research gradually emerged in historical and philosophical studies as well as in a range of social, economic and political inquiries that constituted the disciplinary cores of law, sociology, economics, politics and anthropology.Footnote ⁶¹ In these diverse research practices, access to specific documents and social environments became pivotal.

Cambridge historians and philosophers frequently worked at home during their research leave (usually completing a book), travelled to continental Europe, or used libraries and archives in the United States (Figure 4b). Involving argumentative–interpretative research practices that required rare books and archival material from a particular temporal and regional context, the work of historians and philosophers was bound to culturally transformed places that were not necessarily linked to powerful research institutions but were, rather, constituted by traces of human activity as preserved in libraries, archives and museums. Their geographical focus on Europe before the Second World War (every fourth research leave) and on Europe and the United States in the post-war decade (every third research leave) resulted from a profoundly European research tradition that considered both regions as epitomizing modernity, thereby neglecting the history and philosophy of other regions.Footnote ⁶² Interestingly, both historical and philosophical studies and cultural and language studies emphasized Europe in their global geographies of research travel from the 1880s to the 1950s, but they differed in the post-1945 decade through the greater United States-centrism of the former and the stronger preference for far-flung places, especially in Asia, of the latter. This reflects not only wider changes in global geopolitics but also the ongoing specialization of research, facilitated by a new phase in the globalization of scholarship due to rapid developments in long-distance transport and communication.

As part of an emerging disciplinary division of labour in the early twentieth century, it was the task of anthropologists to work on cultures outside Europe and North America, many of which lacked written records and thus required fieldwork and observation. In 1914, the same year Bronisław Malinowski, the protagonist of participant observation in ethnographic fieldwork, went on his famous trip to Papua and the Trobriand Islands, Alfred Cort Haddon, who had been appointed to a readership in ethnology at Cambridge in 1909 and was widely known for having organized and led the celebrated Cambridge anthropological expedition of 1898–1899 to the Torres Strait and New Guinea, returned to his field sites in the Far East. He had been invited by the Australian government to undertake an ethnological investigation in Papua and planned to study the distribution of different canoe types.Footnote ⁶³ However, after attending the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Australia, he faced complications when

Based on this trip and his previous ethnographic fieldwork in 1888 and 1898, Haddon also published a regional ethnography in six volumes that appeared in print between 1901 and 1935 and ‘remains the seminal work in Torres Strait studies’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Despite Haddon's intensive ethnographic fieldwork and the impressive output of this research, almost forty years passed before the next Cambridge anthropologist went on fieldwork during a research leave and before the ‘more advanced approaches’, primarily that of Malinowski at the London School of Economics, ‘flourished in Cambridge under Sir Edmund Leach’.Footnote ⁶⁶

In the social, economic and political sciences, the idea of travelling for research was only hesitantly accepted. After Wilson's trip to India in 1887, Walter Thomas Layton, lecturer in economics since 1908 and a contemporary on the university staff with John Maynard Keynes, was granted leave for travelling in the 1914–1915 academic year, but this plan was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War and Layton's move to the Ministry of Munitions.Footnote ⁶⁷ Another decade passed before the next social-science scholar applied for research leave. This was Sir Dennis Holme Robertson, at the time lecturer in economics (since 1924) and later professor of political economy (1944–1957), who wished to spend the Michaelmas and Lent terms of 1926–1927 travelling in India and other eastern countries, ‘with the object not of pursuing any specialised piece of research, but of learning what I can about as many things as possible’.Footnote ⁶⁸ For this journey, which marked the beginning of frequent research travel in the social sciences and took the economist through Russia on the Trans-Siberian railway before he returned via India and Egypt, Robertson thus adopted an educational approach inspired by the humanistic tradition of polite learning. A few years later, he accepted an invitation from the Indian government ‘to collaborate in an inquiry into Indian economic conditions and the present statistical organisation of India’,Footnote ⁶⁹ which not only demonstrates the potentially beneficial impact of educational travel on future international collaborations but also exemplifies a strong link between consultancy work and research in the social sciences.

The wider move towards a more scientific understanding of research travel across all disciplines after the university reform of 1926 is evident in the particular empirical foci of subsequent research leaves by social scientists. For example, Henry Arthur Hollond, at the time reader in English law and later Rouse Ball Professor of English Law (1943–1950), worked in the library of the Harvard Law School for six months in 1937–1938, while Denis William Brogan, who had been elected to the professorship of political science in 1939, observed the American presidential elections of 1948 and 1952 for a period of three months each.Footnote ⁷⁰ Others proposed to study political conditions in central and south-east Europe (1934), the practice of the French civil courts (1949), and the capital market in Australia (1953–1954), or planned to work for the government of Uganda and for the East African Institute of Social Research at Makerere College (1954).Footnote ⁷¹ The research practices that developed into the social sciences were so heterogeneous that they resembled a mélange of different travel cultures. Initially linked to polite learning, they concentrated mainly on documentary research and social-scientific fieldwork, but embraced psychological laboratory work after the Second World War as well.Footnote ⁷² Their uniting feature was gaining access to sources and environments for the study of contemporary social lifeworlds.

Most research travellers in the social, economic and political sciences went to the United States as a destination that combined renowned spaces of knowledge production with attractive research facilities and popular sites of study (Figure 4c, Table 2). Remarkably, the southern hemisphere attracted only five Cambridge research travellers from across the humanities and the social sciences between 1885–1886 and 1954–1955 (3 per cent), which suggests a distinct north–south divide in the production of humanistic knowledge at the time.Footnote ⁷³ All types of academic travel from Cambridge from the 1880s to the 1950s neglected Latin America outside British possessions, thus underlining the important influence of political interests and language on transnational academic exchange. Whereas French academics actively pursued teaching missions in Latin America, where the elites were ‘in a subordinate position, were fascinated by French culture, and were often able to speak French’,Footnote ⁷⁴ Cambridge academics flocked to the United States and Canada, particularly when techno-scientific research flourished there after the Second World War.

Table 2.

Destinations of research leaves in the University of Cambridge by discipline, 1885–1886 to 1954–1955 (percentage of research leaves). Sources: CUA, GB, Min III.1 to Min III.7 and GB, Boxes 301 to 308

Scientific fieldwork

As discussed at the beginning of this essay, the implementation of a scientific approach to university-based research travel in Cambridge began to flourish after Arthur Eddington's famous eclipse expedition to the west coast of Africa in 1919 (Table 1).Footnote ⁷⁵ In the early twentieth century, observations of stars close to the sun could only be made during a total eclipse. Therefore Eddington had to travel to a specific site along the path of the eclipse in order to take his valuable pictures. With the aim of raising the chances of observing this eclipse if meteorological or technical difficulties emerged at one site, the second expedition was sent to another point along the eclipse's trajectory located in northern Brazil. The political situations on Principe Island, a Portuguese colony, and in Brazil were both favourable for travelling there, and the necessary photographic equipment was successfully brought over from England. Cloudy skies initially complicated the measurements at both sites but as the clouds diminished at totality, the required configuration of the field site, necessary for completing the experiment, was eventually achieved.Footnote ⁷⁶

The significant impact of Eddington's and his colleagues' expeditions on scientific progress and public debate, resulting from the findings' interpretation as the first verification of Einstein's ideas on general relativity, drew attention to the unique value of travel as a research technique and boosted the interest in and acceptance of extended travel for scientific fieldwork in the physical and biological sciences. Two years later, Albert Seward, professor of botany at Cambridge since 1906, applied for research leave in order to accompany a botanical expedition to Greenland for three weeks in the Easter Term of 1921, while Joseph Barcroft, who was a reader in physiology at the time and became professor of physiology in 1925, wished to lead the Royal Society Expedition for the study of life at high altitudes in the Peruvian Andes during part of the Michaelmas Term of 1921–1922.Footnote ⁷⁷

All three examples illustrate that scientific fieldwork abroad often targeted remote places as it was rarely dependent on research infrastructure at the site of interest. This does not mean that researchers travelling to places outside Europe did not receive support from local people. On the contrary, recent work on exploration in Africa and elsewhere has revealed the extent to which scientific travellers were dependent on local guides, interpreters and porters and their local knowledge for doing the work, but instead of being ‘exclusively scientific domains’, field sites were rather ‘public spaces’, whose borders could not be ‘rigorously guarded’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Accordingly, the field sites at which Cambridge academics observed further eclipses; studied specific locations; and collected plants, stones and other specimen were widely dispersed across the globe (Figure 5). While the United States and continental Europe were of minor importance for this type of research travel, most destinations were located in the British Empire and other regions, thus confirming the idea that ‘colonial expansion was crucial for the development of sciences such as botany and geology, in which the collection and comparison of specimens was paramount’.Footnote ⁷⁹

Figure 5.

Destinations of research leaves by Cambridge academics in the natural sciences, 1885–1886 to 1954–1955. Sources: CUA, GB, Min III.1 to Min III.7 and GB, Boxes 301 to 308.

Laboratory science

Fieldwork accounted for at least a quarter of research travel in the physical and biological sciences. More than half of these scientists spent their research leaves working in laboratories and field stations. Robert Kohler identified the border between laboratory and field sciences as ‘one of the most important in the cultural geography of modern sciences. It cuts across a range of biological and physical sciences and demarcates differences of standing and credibility, physical location, and modes of scientific practices’.Footnote ⁸⁰ While ‘natural places are particular and variable places, none quite like another, each the result of a unique local history, never the same from one moment to the next, unpredictable, unrepeatable, beyond human control … Labs are separate, a world apart from the world’.Footnote ⁸¹

In this essay, we argue that the relatively late emergence of a travel culture in the laboratory sciences, a process that can be dated in Cambridge to the late 1920s and early 1930s, results from the conventional view of laboratory work as being ‘ubiquitous’. As David N. Livingstone pointed out,

The moment when laboratory scientists from Cambridge began to travel to research centres in the United States, in continental Europe and in a few other places across the world thus marks their acknowledgement of a distinct geography of science, in which each site of knowledge production offers unique resources, ideas and collaborators that are often worth exploring in person.Footnote ⁸³ In both field and laboratory sciences, a similar number of Cambridge academics travelled abroad but their research leaves targeted very different locations (Table 3). Most importantly, these geographies suggest that the higher prestige and credibility of laboratory work can paradoxically not only be attributed to its reputation as an apparently universal and placeless practice but also to its very location within the global centres of knowledge production.

Table 3.

Destinations of research leaves by Cambridge academics in the physical and biological sciences, 1885–1886 to 1954–1955 (percentage of research leaves). Sources: CUA, GB, Min III.1 to Min III.7 and GB, Boxes 301 to 308

Highly specialized laboratory equipment and expertise required an immense input of money, training, machines and other resources that were mainly available in the richer regions of the world (Figure 5b). The predominance of research leaves in United States laboratories resulted from a variety of factors, such as growing Anglo-American ties based on a common English language; outstanding scientific achievements; the increasing power, prestige and influence of United States science; and the availability of up-to-date research facilities. For example, before Sir Denys Wilkinson became professor at Oxford and founded that institution's Nuclear Physics Laboratory in 1957, he lectured at Cambridge and spent his sabbatical of 1954–1955 at two major particle accelerators in the United States:Footnote ⁸⁴

The availability of specific research infrastructure was so crucial to working in an overseas laboratory for an extended period that some research leaves, such as that of Russian-born David Shoenberg, who worked as a lecturer (1944–1952), then reader (1952–1973) and later professor of physics (1973–1978) at the Cavendish Laboratory, were postponed for a year or even longer:

Difficulties with obtaining visas also influenced the planning of research leaves abroad and favoured European and US research laboratories.

Dr William Alfred Wooster, renowned crystallographer at Cambridge (1927–1960), had to change the plans outlined below and eventually spent his sabbatical of 1936 (January to September) in Norway, Sweden and Finland:Footnote ⁸⁷

Compared to the field sciences, where the original site of study and the centre of knowledge production often differed, these two places merged in the setting of laboratory experiments. Field stations that appeared first in the form of marine laboratories during the 1870s were interesting hybrids in so far as these places ‘express in their arrangement and natural surroundings the idea that laboratory objects and practices had become too enclosed and needed to be reconnected with the world of nature’.Footnote ⁸⁹ In the early 1950s, three zoologists from Cambridge worked at the Laboratory of the East African Fisheries Research Organization at Jinja (Uganda) for between six and twelve months.Footnote ⁹⁰ Established by the British colonial government in 1947 and continuing its work as the National Fisheries Resources Research Institute of Uganda in the twenty-first century, this field station was designed to observe the development of fishery in Lake Victoria and to produce new knowledge about tropical waters more generally.Footnote ⁹¹

Despite the existence of such hybrid spaces, the comparison of fieldwork and laboratory research in the physical and biological sciences has shown that the former, involving the exploration of physical territories and the collection of samples by the scientists themselves, was confined to the physical reality of particular field sites. As these practices did not require any special on-site infrastructure (other than the equipment the researchers brought along), travel destinations for fieldwork in the physical and biological sciences were scattered in various, and often remote, places across the globe. Laboratory work also depended on the materiality of a particular site, but the highly specialized equipment required ongoing investment of economic and cultural capital in situ, thus leading to regional clusters of attractive travel destinations in the most affluent places of the global north, namely the United States and Europe (Table 3).

In the three decades from 1925–1926 to 1954–1955, the physical and biological sciences accounted for half of all research leaves (Figure 3a). Professors in the physical, biological and social sciences took more frequent research leaves than those in other disciplines, but these tended to be shorter than in mathematics and in the humanities, where more than half of those leaves were longer than three months.Footnote ⁹² When the travels of Cambridge academics became gradually dominated by the sciences, the scientific approach to research transformed other travel cultures as well, primarily by making them more goal- and output-orientated. The need to travel for other aspects of academic work also grew most strongly in the natural sciences, particularly for conference attendance, which was closely linked to a growing significance of international research collaborations and a highly competitive environment that required frequent access to the newest research findings produced elsewhere. The resulting distinct change in the disciplinary profile of academic leaves in Cambridge, from the three-quarters undertaken by humanities scholars and social scientists in the 1880s to the three-fifths arranged by natural and technical scientists in the 1950s, was part of a wider shift towards an emphasis on knowledge production in science, technology, engineering and medicine during the twentieth century (Figure 3b).Footnote ⁹³

Theoretical scientific research

The new travel regimes were largely motivated by unmediated access to specialized documents, social and cultural lifeworlds, natural and built environments, research infrastructure and collaborators. This raises the question whether mathematicians and other theoretical scientists began to travel as well, given that most of them worked on their own, using mainly pen and paper.

The records confirm that a travel culture eventually developed in the theoretical sciences, but this was a fairly late process, coming to fruition only in the second half of the 1930s. Dealing with highly specialized knowledge, ideas and formulae, attractive mathematical resources that provided incentives for travel were only to be found in a few selected places with highly trained and talented individuals who had previously had enough economic capital at their disposal to become experts in mathematics.Footnote ⁹⁴ These colleagues, who mostly served as partners for informal mathematical conversations, were the reason why, in a field characterized by conceptual rather than physical sites of study, research travel occurred at all:

The global geographies of research travel in mathematics were much more influenced by centres of academic excellence than in those fields in which the physicality of the site of study mattered. This concentration on a few knowledge centres was so high that half of the twenty-six mathematicians who were granted research leave between 1925–1926 and 1954–1955 went to the United States (Figure 5c). The only other overseas destinations were France, Australia and an undisclosed location with one research leave each.

The great appeal of a close interaction with renowned individuals and research groups is underlined by the fifteen visiting appointments of Cambridge mathematicians from 1928–1929 to 1954–1955. While all were held in the United States, ten involved either Princeton University or the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, where Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel and John von Neumann, among others, had worked since their emigration from central Europe in the 1930s.Footnote ⁹⁶ For example, the mathematical giant Godfrey Hardy, who had sustained a unique collaboration with his professorial colleague and Trinity College fellow John Littlewood at Cambridge, a collaboration that is said to have ‘dominated the English mathematical scene for the first half of the twentieth century’,Footnote ⁹⁷ spent a term at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1936. The equally distinguished theoretical physicist Paul Dirac, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics since 1932 and Nobel laureate of 1933, worked there for more than two academic years.Footnote ⁹⁸ Renowned for a certain unsociability, Dirac was characterized by a young visiting physicist from Poland as ‘one of the very few scientists who could work even on a lonely island if he had a library and [he] could perhaps even do without books and journals’.Footnote ⁹⁹ However, even if he kept working alone while living abroad, Dirac seemed to benefit from the ‘intense intellectual environment’ he experienced in the places he visited.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The research practices of mathematicians and theoretical physicists involved mainly (transportable) books and ideas as well as conceptual sites of study. Therefore their work could theoretically have been done in a variety of places, but this often meant that there was no need to travel at all, and, if there were, the prospects of shared conversations with like-minded colleagues and the acquisition of symbolic capital, or prestige, abroad were again only to be found in a few places spearheaded by the United States (Table 2).