This book is another history of the making of physics in the nineteenth century, yet a singular one. Overall, a different focus on events and actors, and a more accurate and well-balanced periodization distinguishes it from previous accounts. My aim is not to offer a complement to previous histories of physics, but to pinpoint problems in its standard historiography, to propose solutions, and to contribute to the writing of a new history of physics in consonance with current historiographical challenges.

This book characterizes the making of physics as a discipline in the nineteenth century as a process driven by practices of school teaching and pedagogical writing, book production and distribution, and studying and reading, shaped by persistent international communication. The originality of this approach lies in its focus on education, book culture, international comparison and cross-national transit.

It is not by chance that the concept of discipline is a cultural product of nineteenth-century society. Historians have characterized disciplines in several ways which are often applied separately: a particular corpus of knowledge, a sequence of questions, problems and methods, an institutional framework, the profile of a community of practitioners, the invention of a genealogy, a tradition and a self-image, the establishment of a common language, a discourse and a distinctively recognizable literature, or the enforcement of power through a normative structure of social authority and control.