Edmund Rack: master of knowledge, scientific societies and social networks in eighteenth-century Bath

Abstract This article presents Bath as an urban crucible for global visitors, ideas and cultural brokers like Edmund Rack, a Quaker and former shopkeeper (1735/36–87). Rack seized opportunities to use his social networks to forge a scientific community in Bath. A study of members of Rack’s Bath Philosophical Society shows science was a pathway to social mobility for dissenters, physicians and men of marginal backgrounds. Scientific knowledge became the property of non-elites, whose interests over-rode socio-economic differences. The impact of knowledge brokers and Bath on eighteenth-century social and urban history is, thus, seen anew in its local, national and global contexts.