Royal Society [ Institutions / Clubs & Societies ]
… ‘ not only by the Hands of learned and profiled Philosophers; but from the Shops of Mechanicks; from the Voyages of Merchants; [and] from the Ploughs of Husbandmen’ (Sprat 72). However, only 7% of the Fellows between 1660 and 1699 were merchants and tradesmen, and they were often, in the words of Michael Hunter, ‘exceptional in their class, having courtly connections, lodgings at Gresham College, or the like’ (Hunter, Science and Society , 7). 9 Numbers for merchants/tradesmen in the mid-eighteenth century are not clear, but Richard Sorrenson calculates that for the period …
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