Global Science: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
Science operates on a global stage, but this is not a recent phenomenon. Our research group explores the relationship between global history and science studies. Science here is broadly construed. Histories of natural knowledge, technology and medicine all fall under the remit of this group. By adopting this approach we look to invite discussion on the relationship between the politics of globalisation and the making of the very category of ‘science’. What counts as science is precisely the product of a series of uneven historical encounters. Often the transit of scientific material, from books to barometers, relied on the lopsided development of colonialism and global capitalism. We therefore hope to trace, not only the movement of science across borders, but also the limits of the apparent globalisation of scientific knowledge.
In 2013-2014 we bring together speakers from history, geography and anthropology. By drawing on academics from across disciplines, we offer a new base for the growing network of academics working on global histories of science.
The Modernity of Calculus in India and Beyond: Nineteenth-Century Beginnings, Late Twentieth-Century Debates
Professor Dhruv Raina (Jawaharlal Nehru University) Respondent: Professor Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge)
Abstract
From the perspective of the historiography of mathematics this presentation deals with two seemingly unrelated concerns in the history of calculus in South Asia separated by a period of several hundred years. The first has to do with the processes leading up to the introduction of calculus into school and college curricula in 19th century India and its relation to similar processes in England in and around the same time. The second has to do with the relatively recent priority dispute concerning the origins of calculus. This time around the authorship is shifted way from either Newton or Leibniz, to the 14th century `Kerala school of mathematics’. To be fair, the claim in not so much about the origins of calculus, but of certain elements of calculus, that could possibly have reached Europe through the Jesuits - even though the evidence is still lacking. I shall argue that these two debates share a common concern that could be referred to as the modernity of calculus, or put differently the understanding that the birth of calculus inaugurated a new stage in the history of mathematics and the sciences. The birth of modernity then is closely linked with, among other things, that of calculus. In the course of the discussion it will be argued why the former may throw some light on the latter. If time permits, this may entail a discussion on the literary and social technologies of the European Jesuits of the seventeenth century in order to contextualize the kind of knowledge and the collection practices of Jesuits in the 17th and 18th centuries. This may have something to say about the history of global science or the global history of science depending on the frame chosen.
Diederick Raven (Utrecht University) Respondent: Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge)
Abstract
The Needham question, why the Scientific Revolution didn’t take place in China, is without a doubt the grandest of all questions to be around in the challenging field of comparative historical sociology. In this presentation I will put forward an anthropological perspective on it. I will first of all deal briefly with the logic of a negative question – something not happening – and suggest that the best we do with it is ignore it. That doesn’t imply that the Needham Problematik – what explains the different why of how the knowledge regimes in China, Islam and Europe developed over time – should be thrown as well but merely we need a new why of formulating it. My formulation is in terms of why there is this marked difference in regina scientiarium in China (history), Islam (figh, jurisprudence) and Europe (theology) and why only Europe changed its queen science – from theology to mathematical physics. I will sketch the rough outline of my answer in terms of the marked differences in what three civilisations involved understand by knowledge, that is to say I will answer the Needham question in a classical anthropological fashion by detailing the differences between 智, Zhi, ‘Ilm, علم and ἐπιστήμη. All three notions are rendered as knowledge into English but what is meant by it differs greatly. Any answer to a Needham kind of question should take this difference into account. Based on this framework I will argue that the roots of science are Christian – the short answer is that the Greek assumption built into to notion of ἐπιστήμη aren’t compatible with key Christian assumption such as the creation of the world by God.
Alison Bashford (University of Cambridge) Respondent: Richard McKay (University of Cambridge)
Abstract
In what way is the history of quarantine part of global history? Is it better understood within the history of globalisation? Is it always local history too, and does that matter? In this talk Alison Bashford introduces one of her current projects, Stories from the Sandstone, which explores local and global landscapes of quarantine. Maritime quarantine is one historical practice through which all the large oceanic spaces – and seas like the Mediterranean and Baltic – can be brought into a single historical frame. It was a practice that linked new world and old world histories, over which imperial powers struggled, and that produced modern nations out of older empires.
Alison Bashford is the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History. She is editor of Medicine at the Border: disease, globalization and security, 1850 to the present and author, most recently of Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth.
Precarious Projects: Conversions of Biomedical Knowledge in an East African City
Ruth Prince (University of Cambridge) Discussant: Jesse Olszynko-Gryn (University of Cambridge)
Abstract
This paper explores the orientations of lay people in Kenya to science - specifically to biomedical knowledge about HIV - and their struggles to convert this knowledge into meaningful futures. In east Africa, the global response to the HIV-AIDS epidemic has resulted in a highly ‘projectified’ landscape of intervention, in which access to knowledge about HIV is intimately associated with participation in a internationally-funded treatment or research project. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Kisumu, this paper follows the circulation of biomedical knowledge through such projects and its conversion in ways beyond those imagined by policy-makers, as it meets the aspirations of city-dwellers and enters into local livelihoods. I explore the implications of this knowledge for those who seek to attach themselves to it and shape their identities and futures in relation to it.
Eóin Phillips (University of Cambridge)
Sujit Sivasundaram (University of Cambridge)
Abstract
This talk will seek to explore the potential problems and gains that might be had by thinking about the history of the sciences from a 'global' perspective. It will suggest that while the idea of the 'global' gives us room to trace material flows of goods/knowledge, the trend to conceptualise and represent 'global' movement as homogenising and 'flat' should be treated with caution. Instead, this talk will point to the importance of a global history of science in providing the conceptual room - with all its spatio-temporal possibilities - to explore the connection between physical movement of humans and materials and the role of feeling, reflection and contradiction that often attended attempts to make an enterprise 'global', but which can so easily be made silent by naturalising the idea of the global.