“Modern science – we are told
– is a product of Europe alone,” begins James Poskett in his new book Horizons:
a Global History of Science. “This story is a myth.”
Across
cultures and disciplines, how history has been recorded and taught is being
reassessed. Bids to rename buildings, replace statues and repatriate artefacts
looted by European Empires are gaining ever more traction. Yet science has
lagged behind in the discussion of its own history, with many claiming that
looking back is a distraction to the forward vision of discovery.
In
Horizons, Poskett – a science and technology historian at the University of
Warwick, UK – instead argues that the “future of science ultimately depends on
a better understanding of its global past”. He outlines a framework for an
international history of science that sheds light on the significant but
overlooked contributions of individuals around the world. In doing so, he
challenges the idea that international science is purely a thing of the 21st
century.
Organized
in four chronological parts, Horizons spans five centuries, from 1450 to the
aftermath of the Cold War (1990s). Each part explains a different era of
scientific history: scientific revolution (1450–1700), empire and enlightenment
(1650–1800), capitalism and conflict (1790–1914), and ideology and aftermath
(1914–2000).
Poskett
begins in the vast botanical gardens of the Aztec city Tenochtitlan, built in
1467. These gardens not only “predated European examples by almost a century”
but serve as proof of the detailed understanding the Aztec civilization had of
the natural world. He goes on to guide us through to the development of natural
history in the Spanish Empire, which conquered Tenochtitlan in 1521. But
Poskett does not pull his punches when describing the exploitative nature of
this cultural exchange: “Much of what we know about Tenochtitlan comes from
accounts written by the people who destroyed it.”
It is in
this same vein, straddling specific examples and broader political and
historical context, that Poskett traverses the next five centuries. Through
each section, he unravels a complex global and geopolitical landscape,
highlighting stories of translation, collaboration and struggle against
colonial aggression. Poskett’s account of history is in no way self-righteous –
his understanding of history is balanced and honest, both challenging empires
and understanding their role in cultural exchange.
In my
opinion, Horizons’ scope is impressive and handled with deft precision. The
book has no want of moments that taught me something new and surprising: from
the remarkable fact that the first German-to-English translations of Einstein’s
papers on relativity were written by physicists Meghnad Saha and Satyendra Nath
Bose in India, under British colonial rule; to Polynesian navigator Tupaia’s
beautifully rendered map of the Society Islands in 1769, which replaces
traditional compass direction with timings such as sunrise and sunset. Indeed,
any reader will come away with their perspective of history shifted.
In his
commitment to interesting individuals and scientific detail, however, Poskett’s
pace sometimes gets away from him. The volume of examples and fast pace of the
narrative means that the facts sometimes feel detached from the greater
message. At points I found myself unable to see the woods for the trees, taking
away anecdotes more than trends. Yet Poskett does try to counter this, with
clear introductions and summaries to each of his chapters. These at times feel
slightly repetitive and over-explained, like reading an essay or a set of
lecture notes, but they have the benefit of ensuring that the reader comes away
with a total understanding of his message.
The moments
where Poskett pauses to unfurl a single story in more detail were the ones that
captured me the most. An example being the story of Graman Kwasi (born around
1690), a young man captured from what is now Ghana and sold as a slave to the
Dutch. Kwasi’s knowledge of natural medicine led to an effective treatment of
malarial fever from which other remedies have spawned. These are the moments
that allow the reader to really sit with history and examine their own biases
about the past. How much more, for example, would we value the knowledge of the
natural world provided by Indigenous populations if we had correctly written it
into our history of science?
Poskett
must walk a very fine line between providing the reader with a rich series of
examples, across a range of scientific disciplines and traditions, while also
addressing a complicated and often contentious backdrop of geopolitical history
The rapid
pace does not undermine the accomplishment and relevance of Horizons. Poskett
must walk a very fine line, after all, between providing the reader with a rich
series of examples, across a range of scientific disciplines and traditions,
while also addressing a complicated and often contentious backdrop of
geopolitical history spanning five centuries. That Horizons, which is in this
sense hugely ambitious, achieves this in roughly 350 pages is remarkable.
At the end
of the book, Poskett summarizes the contemporary crises that modern science
faces: climate change, the resurgence of race science, and the “new cold war”.
He draws from root to branch how we have arrived where we are today, at a
standoff between nationalism and globalization.
“We need to
begin by getting the history right,” Poskett concludes. And as he claims in his
introduction, Horizons is simply an attempt to reframe our narrative of history
in a way that really informs us of the structures of power, national identity
and colonial history that have led us to where we are today. To this end, I
think he has succeeded. Horizons is an excellent reference text and corrective,
a solid kernel around which a new understanding of history can grow.
The
uncharted territories of scientific history : Anita Chandran reviews Horizons:
a Global History of Science by James Poskett. By Anita Chandran. Physics World,
November 7, 2022
We are told that modern science was invented in Europe, the product of great minds like Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. But this is wrong. Science is not, and has never been, a uniquely European endeavour.
In this radical
retelling of the history of science, Dr James Poskett challenges the
Eurocentric narrative in conversation with Mary-Ann Ochota.
Copernicus
relied on mathematical techniques borrowed from Arabic and Persian texts. When
Newton set out the laws of motion, he relied on astronomical observations made
in Asia and Africa. And when Darwin was writing On the Origin of Species, he
consulted a 16th-century Chinese encyclopedia.
Histfest -
Horizons: A Global History of Science. The British Library, May 13, 2022.
In his new book, "Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science(opens in new tab)" (Mariner Books, 2022), James Poskett, a historian of science and technology at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, focuses on how science has always been a global endeavor and how that story was overshadowed by a biased Westernized version. Although the book spans several scientific fields, astronomy and physics play key roles in the story he tells, with cameos from key figures such as Ptolemy and Isaac Newton.
Space.com
sat down with Poskett to discuss his new book and the insight it offers into
the history of astronomy and physics. This interview has been edited for length
and clarity.
Space.com:
How did the book come about?
James
Poskett: I trained as a historian of science and became very frustrated and
slightly angry, I guess, at the version of the history of science that I'd been
taught that was extremely Eurocentric. I was much more interested in thinking
critically about globalization, and also thinking quite critically about things
like anti-racism, the legacies of slavery, the legacies of empire. That led me
to want to write a book that much more directly addresses those concerns and
speaks to the concerns of present science and technology.
Space.com:
Can you talk about how you decided to structure the book?
Poskett:
The book is a celebration of scientists from around the world, for sure. You
read the book, you learn lots about individuals, their lives. But I didn't just
want it to be a laundry list of people who were forgotten; I wanted it to be
this bigger narrative. And so the organization reflects that bigger argument
that to understand the history of science and, indeed, to understand science
today, we need to think in terms of world historical change. I think framing
the organization of the book around that helps the reader follow along. When
they're reading about an individual, they're also aware that that person is
part of this bigger cultural and political shift that's happening at the time.
Space.com:
How did you go about deciding which examples to include in the book?
Poskett:
Partly, it was just a question of balance: I could have written every chapter
about China quite easily. There are stories to be told about every period in
China — and similarly, for many other places — so it was making sure that as
you go through the book, there's this balance of examples.
The book
presents science as part of world history, but also as the product of
individual lives. I wanted to bring out the texture of these people's lives:
what they did, how they felt, what kind of struggles they were dealing with.
That often determined who I picked, because I needed the detail. It was all
very well, knowing that someone made a scientific contribution and they had
some fancy equation, but on its own, that's not too interesting for the general
public.
Space.com:
Any incidents you loved but ended up needing to cut?
Poskett: I think the one thing that I didn't include, just because of structure and space, is the dispute between Galileo and the Jesuit astronomers who had gone to China. ... It's very easy when you write a book like this to be tempted to start with the people you know, but the whole point of the book is to get away from that. So Galileo basically isn't in the book. Lots of other famous people are, but I thought, "If I'm going to cut someone and I'm writing a book like this, I should cut Galileo, not the people you've not heard of."
Space.com:
Are there any key examples that stand out to you from the chapters relating to
astronomy and physics?
Poskett:
There's two really important moments for the history of space — one earlier,
one later.
The earlier
one is the history of the understanding of the solar system in the Renaissance
period. I show that the people who we usually associate with that important
change — people like the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus — were really
heavily reliant on, and quite happy to acknowledge, the fact that they were
drawing on earlier, and also contemporary, ideas coming from the Islamic world.
How you put
the sun at the center and model the planets — that's a history that you can't
just tell from the perspective of Europe or indeed the Christian world. That's
a story that stretches to places like Persia. In the same chapter, I talk about
the advanced astronomical observations made by astronomers in the Ottoman
Empire and Istanbul, astronomers in the Songhai Empire in what's today modern
Mali and Timbuktu, and particularly the astronomers and mathematicians at the
court of Jai Singh II in Mughal India, where there's these incredible
observatories that you can still go to.
It's not
saying that Copernicus wasn't important; of course he was. But there was this
whole world of astronomical knowledge that was being blended together, in
particularly the 16th and 17th centuries, that gave us what is really the basis
of modern astronomy.
There's
another key phase in the early 20th century, when you're getting the use of new
ideas from special and general relativity and quantum mechanics. This isn't a
story just of European and American astronomers and astrophysicists; this is
very much a story that scientists from around the world are involved in.
One example
is an Indian scientist called Meghnad Saha, who was born in what then was part
of British India. He is particularly known today for something called the Saha
ionization equation. This was an equation, effectively, to be able to determine
the chemical composition of stars from their spectra. He doesn't feature much
in the mainstream history of science, because he was marginalized at the time —
partly because he was Indian, so there was a history of racism here, but also
because he actually was actively opposing the colonial government.
In addition
to his own research, he helped translate Einstein's works from German into
English in India because he sees that as part of the new world, as a way to
break the shackles of this old, imperial Victorian world in which he was born.
He sees quantum mechanics and general relativity as a way to break with the
past. So there's a kind of connecting up with his radical politics and his
radical but extremely important scientific ideas.
Space.com: Of the traveling you did to research the book, what experience stood out to you the most?
Poskett: I
think the Jantar Mantar stood out the most to me, a series of observatories
across north India that were built by this Indian ruler, Jai Singh II. The one
in Jaipur is the most famous. It's the biggest; it's spectacular; it's built
out of this red sandstone; it's the most impressive. They're stone instruments,
mainly, with metal attachments for various things. The scale is incredible —
this really was the big science of the 17th, 18th centuries. And the bigness
allowed a level of precision that was not possible before, in terms of
calculating the movement of the stars to create, particularly, calendars and
the star catalogs.
The
interesting thing about Jai Singh is, he was a Hindu, but he ruled within the
Mughal Empire, which was an Islamic empire. So the combination of Islamic,
Hindu and actually Christian European cultures that was brought together is
literally, in some cases, inscribed on the instruments. You get both the
Islamic and Latin numbers that we're familiar with in the West, but also you
get the numbers written in Sanskrit on the instruments as well. It's really
satisfying as a historian to see that combination of cultures literally
inscribed on the scientific instrument that is still there that you can visit.
Space.com:
How do you think our understanding of the history of science got so warped?
Poskett:
It's a remarkably recent story — I call it a myth — and it wouldn't have really
rang true to many people before the middle of the 20th century. In the 19th
century, at the height of European imperialism, that's when scientists and
historians in Europe start to articulate this idea that maybe Asia and the rest
of the world had this ancient or medieval glorious past, but it's since decayed
and these places need to be modern, like Europe. And then they kind of project
this back onto the past and think that Europe had always been modern and the
rest of the world had not.
Interestingly,
this relates back to the Jantar Mantar. When the British first encounter the
Jantar Mantar in the 18th century, they recognize it's amazing; they think,
"Wow, these are incredible scientific instruments, amazing." And then
they basically say, "These must have been built thousands of years ago,
because there's no way the contemporary inhabitants of India could have built
them." Yet they're looking at something that's like 50 years old at that
time. When they find contemporary impressive science in other cultures,
Europeans — particularly in the context of colonialism — often say that must be
ancient, and in fact, they're wrong.
Space.com:
What role does the Cold War play in all this?
Poskett: In
the Cold War, it becomes really, really important politically for the West to
present itself as the place which is the most advanced and has got history on
its side. Science and technology are at the heart of the Cold War, particularly
after the launch of Sputnik. In the '40s and '50s, the Soviet Union is actually
way ahead, and this scares the hell out of the West, the Americans
particularly. There's not, like, a propaganda department that sets this up as a
plan, but it becomes increasingly important for scientists in the U.S., in
Britain, to tell themselves, to teach their students and to tell the world that
modern science was invented, in not just Europe but in Western Europe.
All this adds up, basically, to create a much narrower sense of the history of science than even existed at the start of the 20th century. If you'd asked early professional historians of science in even the 1920s, in the aftermath of the first World War, when there was a hope that there would be a new international, cosmopolitan world, they would have presented a much more global, cosmopolitan version of the history of science to you.
You get
this slightly unholy combination of political forces in the middle of the 20th
century. The short version is the Cold War, decolonization and empire gave us a
warped view of the history of science.
Space.com:
Why is keeping that outdated view an issue?
Poskett: We
live in a different political time — which is problematic in different ways — but
we don't live in the Cold War of the 1960s and '70s anymore. Now, the Cold War
is over; people are suddenly realizing the histories we were told in the Cold
War aren't actually fit for purpose. They don't help us explain the world we
live in. Maybe they were helpful for particular political purposes in the Cold
War — fair enough — but it's 2022, not 1952.
I think
it's quite hard to maintain this old history of science when we're seeing a
scientific present where it's actually China, the UAE, as well as obviously the
U.S., sending missions to Mars; where India and Turkey are investing in space
programs. How do we make sense of that with a history of science that says
science and astronomy are basically a European thing?
Space.com:
How do you hope readers might rethink astronomy given what's in the book?
Poskett: A
broader point of the book is to recognize that this Eurocentric narrative has
had a negative effect on diversity in science, particularly in places like
Europe and the United States. There's still a long way to go in terms of
recognizing that astronomy and space science have always been diverse sciences.
The other
aspect is, a lot of my book is actually a history of colonialism, empire,
slavery, capitalism, decolonization. I'm of the view that the past really
matters for tackling the present. So it's just not good enough to say,
"OK, we're going to have a diversity initiative to increase diversity in
astronomical sciences." To make science more diverse, we've got to
recognize that there's a long history that has produced the structures that
need to be undone. So, for instance, particularly in the U.S., but in different
ways in places like Britain, recognizing that the history of slavery has
marginalized particularly African Americans and Black British citizens from the
sciences — actually recognizing that and working out how to actively address
that legacy is part of how we should connect the history and the present.
There's
another political side to this, which is, yes, other countries are investing in
space science, but this isn't a happy, celebratory story, necessarily. These
countries are investing in the context of growing polarization and of growing
nationalism, often quite ethnic-focused nationalism. And so whilst it's
certainly true that we should be celebrating a more inclusive and global space
science, the furious investment in space science by states like China and India
and Turkey is as much for defensive purposes, if not explicitly, then
implicitly. In that way, it's very much like the Cold War.
The future of space science, particularly space exploration, is globalized but also nationalist. I think keeping an eye on that is going to be really important if the world isn't going to become even more fractured than it is at the minute. Space has always been a place in which people and nations contest politics. Science happens in the world, so it's wrapped up with everything else that we do in the world, for better or worse.
In 'Horizons,' a discarded global view of science shines. By Meghan Bartels. Space, May 2, 2022
For some
time, Anglo-American historians have been obsessed with the G word. The word is
not ‘God’ but ‘global’. Using it, we have learned to tell a self-comforting
story. Until recently, we begin, we were all narrow-minded Eurocentricists who
thought that the history of the ‘West’ (best left undefined) was the only
history there was to recall. Thankfully, the story goes on, our neo-imperialist
eyes have been opened. Now we write ‘global history’, which takes into account
the past of all of humanity. The triumphalism of the historians who tell this
story has often been deafening. A decade ago, one head of a leading history
department thundered, ‘If you are not doing an explicitly … global project, you
now have to explain why you are not.’ (Pity the poor young scholar who wants to
write a new history of witch-burnings in rural France.)
Who could
possibly disagree with such an exultant narrative? After all, it is a priori
obvious that the more we know about the whole world, the better our histories
will be. Of course, there is the small problem that knowing about the whole
world is rather difficult. First and foremost, one needs to learn a lot of
languages. Then one needs to absorb the many rich national historiographical
traditions of the places one studies, ideally in collaboration with historians
from those places. One would therefore expect to find that the Anglo-American
historians who have been most vocal about the need for global histories have
been busy learning Akkadian, Mandarin and Swahili, or initiating collaborations
with historians from Japan, Peru and Nigeria.
Alas, here
is where the problems begin. Since doing all this takes a very long time – far
longer than the most ambitious historians can wait before advancing in their
academic careers – short cuts have had to be adopted. The most common is simply
to pontificate about the need for global history without actually doing it. The
second is to (re)write the history of the British Empire as ‘global history’.
In this way, one can talk about a world outside of the ‘West’ without straying
from the easily ploughed soil of English-language sources, often readily
available in British and American libraries or online.
Accordingly,
global history has often turned out to be more Anglophone than its supposedly
‘Eurocentric’ counterpart, where the expectation is that one knows at least
some French, German and Italian, and is familiar with sources in those
languages. No less worryingly, the practitioners of global history have been
suspiciously clustered in elite Anglo-American universities. In response, some
brave souls have dared to suggest that global history could do with a little
more self-reflection lest it become ‘merely a buzzword among historians, more a
label than a practice … more a fashion of the moment than a durable approach to
the serious study of history’ (words written as early as 2006). Such legitimate
concerns have often been met with howls of indignation, implied or open
accusations of racism and everything else that we have come to expect in an age
of social media and hyper-polarisation.
One might
think that the history of science would be relatively immune to such polemics.
After all, anyone with even a basic knowledge of the subject must be aware that
science has never been solely a Western enterprise. An ancient Mesopotamian
astronomer contributed more to ‘science’ (in its modern meaning) than twenty
Greek philosophers. China had an Astronomical Bureau that lasted for two
millennia (nothing comparable existed in Europe). Medieval Islamic
mathematicians, astronomers and physicians were producing spectacularly
advanced ideas at a time when the education of European elites often did not
extend beyond basic literacy and horse riding. Of course, there has long been
talk of a ‘Scientific Revolution’ that occurred in early modern Europe, often
said to have culminated in the theories of Isaac Newton. Personally, I do not
believe in such a revolution, but I do not consider those who do to be moral
scoundrels.
James
Poskett complains that ‘we are told’ that modern science ‘is a product of
Europe alone’. He seeks here to combat this ‘myth’. As should be clear, he is
himself indulging in a spot of myth-building. Thankfully, once this rhetoric is
out of the way, Poskett settles down to tell a lively story of global
collaboration in the study of nature from 1500 to the present day. Horizons
shares the strengths and weaknesses of other global histories. His own primary
area of expertise is British imperial history. Accordingly, many of his
examples concern the contribution made by colonised peoples to European science
rather than the history of non-Western science itself. As one would expect,
those contributions varied depending on the levels of expertise that were
required. The best sections are those that make no references to Europeans at
all. For example, the discussion of Li Shizhen’s natural history The Compendium
of Materia Medica (1596) not only demonstrates the richness of early modern
Chinese medicine, botany and pharmacology but also explains, clearly and
elegantly, how these were grounded in the ancient Chinese separation of the
world into five phases, a separation that is no less interesting or
sophisticated than the well-known Greek matter theories that were dominant in
16th-century Europe.
In fact,
botany and natural history provide many of the most interesting of Poskett’s
examples, since the Europeans on whom he focuses were very aware that their
native plants were only a small proportion of those that existed in the world
and sought to remedy the situation. For example, at the end of the 17th century
the German naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian travelled to Surinam, where she
learned about the medicinal properties of plants from enslaved women. Some of
these plants were then depicted in Merian’s Metamorphosis of the Insects of
Suriname (1705), a lavishly illustrated tome that was used by all the most
important European naturalists, including Carl Linnaeus. In this case, Poskett
is undoubtedly correct to conclude that ‘the growth of Atlantic slavery in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had a profound effect on the development
of European society’ – including in the realm of science.
In other
cases, however, Poskett reaches similarly strong conclusions on the basis of
far more slender evidence. The most egregious example comes in the discussion
of Newton’s discovery of universal gravitation. Poskett rightly points out that
Newton’s theory explained an observation made by Jean Richer in the French
colony of Cayenne, where he found that a pendulum clock ran slower than in
Paris. For Newton, here was another data point to add to the evidence that the
Earth was not perfectly spherical – hence the varying force of gravity across
its surface. But to conclude from this that ‘Newton was able to make a major
scientific breakthrough only by virtue of his connections to the wider world of
empire, slavery, and war’ is the kind of hyperbolic overstatement that gives
global history a bad name. Newton discovered universal gravitation in his rooms
in Cambridge, and his primary collaborators and interlocutors were English and
European. Not everything has to be global.
None of
this is to argue that Newton was completely disconnected from the atrocities of
colonialism: late in his life he invested in the South Sea Company. But this
had nothing to do with his earlier scientific work, and to call a whole chapter
‘Newton’s slaves’ is tendentious at best. The sad reality is that, as with many
other spheres of activity, scientific flourishing often occurs in societies
that have grown rich through empire, without that science necessarily being
intrinsically connected to colonialism. Such societies have appropriated the
knowledge and talent of those they have colonised, and their rulers and elites
have used their riches to sponsor science and bask in the prestige of its
achievements. This was as much the case in Athens in the fifth century BC, Han
dynasty China, the medieval Islamic world and the Soviet Union in the mid-20th
century as it was in Europe between the 16th and 20th centuries. All of these
societies made huge contributions to the field that is today known as
‘science’. If the ideas that developed in Europe happen to look more ‘modern’,
it is simply because many of them emerged nearer to the present than those that
emerged elsewhere, and not because of any European or Western intellectual
superiority (this is one of many reasons why ‘modern’ is a useless category of
historical analysis).
I can
warmly recommend Poskett’s rich and lucid book, with the caveat that it should
be read with an awareness of the academic politics just discussed. When Poskett
concludes that ‘there is no reason to think that the next big scientific
discovery will come out of a laboratory in Europe or the United States’, he is
certainly correct. Whether as many people would disagree with him as he thinks
is another question. And when he hopes that global histories of science might
encourage more international scientific collaboration, he – and we – might do
better to look at our humanistic disciplines and our own practices. Poskett’s
bibliography, consisting of several hundred items, contains only five works not
written in English (and they are all in French). Perhaps all our talk of ‘going
global’ is just another form of Anglo-American cultural imperialism after all.
The G Word. By Dmitri Levitin. Literary Review, May 2022.
It is easy
to sympathize with Zera Ya’icob when reading recent scholarship on the origins
of modern science, which is riven by two orthodoxies in particular. One
orthodoxy is that modern science was invented in early modern Europe. Important
contributions came from other times and places, of course, but the decisive
move toward modern science happened in Western Europe in the 17th century. The
task of the historian of science is to understand how and why. If you disagree
with this narrative, you may be accused of relativism, postmodernism, political
correctness, or of not doing your job.
The second
orthodoxy is that the first orthodoxy is wrong: science is global, not
European. It took shape over many centuries, with the help of many cultures. To
think otherwise is to buy into a myth about the inevitable rise of the West.
The notion of “the West” is itself the product of recent geopolitics. The idea
that science is Western is not just wrong, but wrong-headed. It is like a bad
cold, or the Cold War. We just need to get over it.
Who would be the judge of such an argument? The two schools not only make different claims but make them in starkly different ways. The first school is old but cohesive. The second is young but diffuse, made up of many stories rather than one story. It is easy to see why. Writing a history of European science is hard enough, with five centuries to cover and many scientific disciplines to master. Writing a history that takes in the rest of the world is a political and methodological minefield. Doing this in a way that appeals to the general reader looks like a fool’s game.
James
Poskett, a historian of science and technology, is no fool. His new book,
Horizons, is superb. It runs from 1400 to 2000, from the construction of the
Samarkand Observatory to the completion of the Human Genome Project. It covers
the human sciences as well as the natural sciences, taking in medicine and
engineering along the way and covering a great range of people, places, and
predicaments. We learn about an Ottoman astronomer captured by pirates in the
16th century; a Tahitian chief charting the Pacific Ocean in the 18th century;
a geneticist working to save his life in communist China. Inevitably, there are
gaps: Australia, the Holy Roman Empire, economics, most of the earth sciences,
experimental science before 1800, Africa after 1800. The book is under 400
pages after all (without footnotes), and so it does not purport to be complete,
which would indeed be foolish.
Horizons is
global not only in its geographical scope but also in its narrative technique.
Poskett uses concrete examples to reveal connections and similarities between
parts of the world that are usually studied separately. The Ottoman astronomer
Taqi al-Din spent much of his youth bouncing around the Mediterranean Sea, from
Cairo to Rome to Istanbul. He bounced around intellectually as well,
translating Arabic works into Latin while he was in Rome and introducing
European clocks to a new observatory in Istanbul. Some scientists stayed put,
including Isaac Newton, a global mathematician who never left England. There he
sat, spider-like, at the center of a web of travelers that stretched from
Senegal to Peru. Other scientists were more like flies than spiders, trapped in
global webs. The physicist Lev Landau made one of his most important
theoretical breakthroughs while spending a year in one of Stalin’s prisons. The
physician Graman Kwasi was equally remarkable. Born in West Africa around 1690,
Kwasi discovered a treatment for malarial fever while working as a slave on a
sugar plantation in the Dutch colony of Suriname.
But
Horizons is not just a collection of global biographies. These are embedded in
a grand narrative about the last 600 years of world history. First comes the
expansion of Islamic empires in the vicinity of the Silk Road. Next comes
European imperialism: the colonization of the Americas, the transatlantic slave
trade, and the exploration of the great expanses of Siberia and the Pacific
Ocean. European empires became industrial in the 19th century, fueling
nationalistic wars in the process. The 20th century was the age of ideology:
fascists, communists, and anticolonialists staked their claims in the first
half of the century; and decolonization and the Cold War dominated the second
half. The book ends in the present, with the world in the grip of a new Cold
War between China and the United States. The war in Ukraine, which broke out
while I was writing this review, adds a tragic twist to the narrative.
Poskett
links these geopolitical developments to intellectual ones, and much of his
book’s originality lies in these linkages. The chapter on 19th-century biology,
for example, is not simply a survey of the global reception of Charles Darwin’s
theory of evolution by natural selection. It is an argument for the connection
between biology, war, and nationalism, a connection captured in the phrase
“struggle for existence.” Biology was a battlefield, with naturalists using
martial metaphors in their theories and gathering specimens in the course of
military expeditions. This was true across the globe: in Napoleonic Egypt, in
the newly independent Argentina, in a Japan wracked by civil war, and in
modernizing China. The titles of other chapters hint at similar arguments:
“Newton’s slaves,” “Industrial experiments,” “Genetic states,” and so on. This
is not just a history of science. It is a history of the modern world seen
through the lens of science.
At the same
time, it is the story of “the scientists who have been written out of history,”
in Poskett’s words. Their excision was a product of the imperial history that
drove so much of modern science. Overcoming this history means many things. It
means writing the East into the history of modern science rather than
consigning it to an ancient or medieval past. It means closing the gap between
Islamic astronomers such as Taqi al-Din and European ones such as Nicolaus
Copernicus. It means seeing that Cold War science was about Japan, Mexico, and
Israel, not just about the USA and the USSR. It means realizing that imperial
science was often done by the victims of empire, such as the Peruvian Indians
whose labor helped to prove Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. These
people were “barely distinguishable from beasts,” according to the French
astronomer Charles-Marie de la Condamine. Yet the Frenchman relied on the
astronomical expertise of these “beasts” in some of the most precise
measurements done in the 18th century.
Indigenous
knowledge is a major part of the book, but Poskett is no relativist. He does
not say that science is just one form of knowledge among many other forms of
knowledge. By “science” he means canonical topics like universal gravitation,
natural selection, botanical classification, and molecular biology. The point
is that the canon itself is global. As a result, Poskett is not afraid to
praise the canon. He writes in terms of discoveries, breakthroughs, ingenious
instruments, and keen scientific minds. He does not shy away from comparative
judgments. The Aztecs were “particularly advanced” among American peoples in
precolonial times; Russia “seemed stuck in the past” in the 17th century. This
is a celebration of science as well as a critique of empire.
All this
makes for a good story. But is it true? Or is it just another myth? There is no
simple answer to this question. Horizons has several lines of argument, some
more convincing than others. Poskett certainly shows that modern science was
made by many people outside Europe who are undervalued in existing histories.
He also shows that world history and global exchange are an excellent framework
for understanding past science.
But he
sometimes goes further. He writes that the Eurocentric story told by past
historians is “a myth.” He also charges these historians with “European
exceptionalism.” This suggests that there was nothing exceptional about Europe
in the history of modern science. A different thesis is that Europe was
exceptional, but mainly because of the wealth and power brought about by
empire. A third thesis is that science develops when cultures come together and
not when they stay apart.
These are
all comparative claims. They compare Europe with the rest of the world, empire
with other historical phenomena, and cultural exchange with cultural
separation. To evaluate these claims, we need to see both sides of the
comparison. The problem is that Horizons only shows one side of each
comparison.
Take the two chapters on the Enlightenment. These open with the statement that we can “better understand” Enlightenment science by thinking about the rise of European empires. There is ample evidence for this in the ensuing pages, which link Newtonian physics to the slave trade, the colonization of the Americas, and the exploration of the Pacific Ocean. But there is no evidence for the much stronger claim a few pages later: that the rise of European empires “best explains” the science of the Enlightenment. To defend this claim, Poskett would need to review all the other explanations for the growth of 18th-century science, from coffee houses to cameralism. But the other explanations are barely mentioned here.
The same
goes for cultural exchange. There are many illuminating examples of cultural
exchange in Horizons, often centered on artifacts such as maps, books, and
instruments. This creates the impression that science thrives on interactions
between diverse cultures. On closer inspection, many of these exchanges hint at
long periods of separation. European astronomy and Incan astronomy did meet in
1736, when La Condamine and his team took their measurements in Peru. But for
all we know, that was the first and last meeting between these two astronomical
cultures. Moreover, the periods of separation may help to explain why the
exchange was so fruitful. Cultural exchange works because cultures are
different, and they are different partly because they develop separately.
Another
one-sided comparison involves 17th-century Europe. Yes, there is a section
called “The Scientific Revolution, 1450–1700.” But as far as Europe is
concerned, the narrative leaps from 1543, when Copernicus declared that the
Earth goes around the sun, to 1687, when Newton explained why it does. The most
talked-about decades in the history of European science are passed over in
near-total silence. The chapter on Renaissance astronomy has nothing to say
about the invention of the telescope or the discovery that planets move in
elliptical orbits, two milestones that feature in any ordinary history of
Renaissance astronomy. This makes sense if the aim is to valorize non-European
scientists. But it makes no sense if the aim is to show that Europe was
unexceptional. Arguments against exceptionalism can’t just ignore the alleged
exceptions. And arguments for the link between science and empire can’t ignore
17th-century Europe. On the received view, Europe already led the world
scientifically in 1700, a century before it led the world in political or
economic terms. The received view may be false, but it deserves a better
falsification.
On current
evidence, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Europe was exceptional after
all. Chapter one of Horizons helps to explain why European natural history was
distinctive: it was transformed by the new knowledge generated by the
colonization of the Americas. Chapter two is a global survey of astronomy that
contains many surprises, but nothing quite as novel as telescopes and
elliptical orbits. The material on China does little to disturb the
conventional view that Europe raced ahead of China in terms of scientific
achievement after 1500, and that China has only just caught up. The chapters on
the 19th and 20th centuries cover an amazingly diverse group of scientists who
had one thing in common: they all — or nearly all — learned much of their science
from institutions that were either in Europe or were modeled on institutions in
Europe. Europe is a black hole in Horizons. It is barely visible, but
everything seems to gravitate around it.
Why does
this matter? Why do we feel the need to show that modern science owes as much
to Tokyo and Timbuktu as it does to Paris and London? After all, there is no
rush to show that all cultures have made equally important contributions to
slavery, for example. This is presumably because we value science but not
slavery. We assume that science is a mark of rationality and a source of
material progress, a sort of IQ test for world cultures.
Horizons
doesn’t exactly support this assumption. It suggests that the main functions of
science over the last 600 years have been to wage war, build empires, and
rationalize racial prejudice. The book also suggests that any improvements that
science has made to our understanding of the natural world are a historical
accident. The narrative is driven by the interactions between individuals,
nations, and empires. The narrative is not driven by the interactions between
theory, experience, and mathematics. In the index there is a large entry on
“empire,” but no entry on “empiricism.” Horizons has a lot to say about the
politics of science, but little to say about the epistemology of science, and
what it says about the former does not flatter science. This is a celebration
of science that does not explain why science is worth celebrating.
Horizons
shows the immense potential of global histories of science, but it also shows
the continued need for other approaches. We need histories of science in
Europe, because we need to know what happened inside the black hole. We need
epistemic histories of science, because the value of science depends on its
ability to understand the natural world. We also need relativist histories of
science, because science is not the only way to be rational, and not always the
best way. And we need national and regional histories, because cultural
separation is as much a part of modern history as cultural exchange.
Let us
remember Zera Ya’icob. We need to decolonize history, but we also need to
depolarize history. Only then will we get over the Cold War.
Arguing About the Origins of Science. By Michael Bycroft. Los Angeles Review of Books, March 27, 2022
Think of a famous scientist from the past. What name did
you come up with? Very likely, someone from Europe or the United States. That’s
hardly surprising, because science is often taught in Western classrooms as
though it’s a European-American endeavor.
James
Poskett, a historian of science at the University of Warwick in England,
believes this myth is not only misleading but dangerous — and it’s something he
sets out to correct in his recent book, “Horizons: A Global History of
Science.” Billed as “a major retelling of the history of science,” the book
frames the last five centuries of the scientific enterprise as a truly
globe-spanning project.
In a recent
Zoom conversation, Poskett explained why he believes this retelling is needed.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Undark: You
point out that the history of science, as it’s usually taught, focuses on
figures like Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. And I think we can agree
that those people did actually make vital contributions. But what’s left out
when we focus on those figures?
James
Poskett: I agree, it’s really important to emphasize that those figures did
make contributions that were significant. So my book isn’t about Newton and
Darwin and Einstein not mattering. As you say, those people feature in the
book. They’re all significant figures in their own right. But by focusing
exclusively on them, we miss two global stories.
The first
global story is that these famous figures we’ve heard of in fact relied on
their global connections to do much of the work that they’re famous for. Newton
is a good example, in terms of him relying on information he was collecting
from around the world, often from East India Company officers in Asia, or
astronomers on slave-trading ships in the Atlantic. So we miss the global
dimension of these famous scientists — not just collecting information, but
often actually relying on the culture and knowledge of other peoples too.
The other
part is the people from outside of Europe who made their own really significant
contributions in their own right. There were Chinese, Japanese, Indian, African
astronomers, mathematicians, later evolutionary thinkers, geneticists,
chemists, who made genuine important contributions to the development of modern
science. It completely skews the story if we have this exclusive focus on White
European pioneers.
UD: Another
interesting point you make is that when textbooks or popular histories of
science do mention the contributions of, say, Islamic science or Chinese
science, it’s often framed as a historical episode. The reader gets the
impression that this was something that happened in the past. In your book, you
say this is not only misleading but it can have harmful consequences. How so?
JP: We’re
quite actually familiar with the idea that civilizations in the Middle East and
Asia, the Islamic world, Hindu civilizations, Chinese civilization — that these
contributed in some way to science. But it’s always told as part of a narrative
of an ancient or medieval golden age. And I always tell my students, you should
be super suspicious, as soon as you hear the term “golden age,” because it’s
massively loaded: It’s telling you that there was once this great achievement,
there was this once-great civilization — but the emphasis is on “once,” because
the “golden age” bit implies a fall from grace, or a dark age afterwards.
At face
value, it sounds good — you know, Islamic mathematicians, chemists, astronomers
made important contributions in the 10th century — but actually, that’s kind of
pushing those achievements way back in the past. It has the rhetorical effect
of saying that Islamic science isn’t modern, or Chinese science, or Hindu
science, or Mesoamerican science are not part of modernity; there’s something
kind of anti-modern about it.
Of course,
the Islamic world made important contributions to science in the medieval
period. But it didn’t suddenly stop. It continued throughout the 15th, 16th,
17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. And that’s really the message of
the book.
UD: An
obvious turning point, not just in the history of science, but in human history
writ large, is when Europeans first made contact with the Indigenous peoples of
the Americas. In your book, you say that these encounters were critical in
terms of thinking of human beings as part of nature. You even write, “The
discovery of the New World was also the discovery of humankind.” What do you
mean by that?
JP:
Broadly, for Europeans, the discovery that there was a “new world” was a major
shock to the very foundations of how they thought about knowledge. Knowledge
was supposed to be based on ancient texts; it was supposed to be on the
authority of ancient Greek and Roman authors, people like Aristotle, or Pliny
for geography. And also the Bible was kind of wrapped up with that as well, as
a source of ancient authority.
But of course, none of these ancient authors mentioned this enormous continent. And not only was this continent full of life, full of animals and vegetables and plants and minerals that in some cases had not been seen before and weren’t mentioned in the ancient texts — it was full of people!
So this
then made thinkers in Europe start saying, well, maybe actually, knowledge
isn’t best derived from ancient texts exclusively; maybe we need to go out into
the world and look at things to make discoveries. And of course, that’s the
metaphor we still use. We talk about scientific “discoveries.”
Humans were
seen as separate from the natural world. They were created — in Christian
Europe, and most of the major religions at that time — they’re created
separately. Humans have a moral element that can be analyzed philosophically
and morally, but they’re not meaningfully part of nature in the same way a horse
is. But this idea of discovering nature also opened the opportunity that there
were things that were to be discovered, not just about the outside world, but
about the kind of internal world of the human – that if you could discover a
tomato by looking out into the world, maybe you could discover something about
humans by looking inside them.
UD: You
point out that when we think of the structure of the atom, we tend to think of
the New Zealand-born British scientist Ernest Rutherford, who’s often credited with
figuring it out. In the book, you talk about an often overlooked figure,
Hantaro Nagaoka. Who was he? What was his contribution?
JP: Hantaro
Nagaoka was a Japanese physicist. He was born in the mid-19th century. He came
from a Samurai family, like many 19th century Japanese scientists, and he was
studying physics at a time that Japan was industrializing; where the Samurai
were finding a new place for themselves in this modern industrial society. And
in the very early 20th century, in 1904, he gave an account of the structure of
the atom. He called it the “Saturnian” atom.
He’d worked
this out theoretically, rather than by doing experiments. He worked out that,
based on complex theoretical assumptions and following these through, that
there must be a large, central, positively charged nucleus, surrounded by
orbiting electrons. And he called it the Saturnian atom after the planet
Saturn, with a big central thing with its rings around it. This is the basic
structure of the atom that Rutherford later was famous for developing, for
doing the experimental work for — but Rutherford published his paper seven
years later, in 1911.
And in fact
Rutherford would have acknowledged this. Rutherford cites Nagaoka’s paper at
the end of his famous 1911 paper. And Rutherford actually corresponded with
Nagaoka. Nagaoka wasn’t some unknown scientist nobody had ever heard of. He was
attending conferences in Paris; he came to Britain and actually had a tour of
Rutherford’s laboratory in Manchester, where Rutherford did the experiments.
And actually, if you look at textbooks from the early 20th century, they
mention Nagaoka — he’s kind of just fallen out of the history later on.
So he made
this really serious contribution to atomic physics. But he’s one of the smoking
gun examples of someone who really came up with a key theoretical piece of
science, that was a major influence in the 20th century, but is almost
completely forgotten outside of Japan.
My point isn’t that Rutherford stole the idea. My point is that science is made through these processes of global cultural exchange, through these different people making different contributions.
UD: Turning
to the present day: You describe the current relationship between the U.S. and
China as being like a new Cold War. How does science fit in to this new “war”?
JP: Science
fits into it in some ways like the original Cold War, in that science has a
practical function. And that’s clearly how states like China, like the United
States, like India, the United Arab Emirates —they see it as part of their
economic strategy. Basically, that investment in sciences like artificial
intelligence will allow a transformation of the economy, increased production —
and this is really important for keeping citizens happy, and ultimately having
the kind of economic clout to dominate the world economically and politically
and through soft power.
Also, in
more practical terms, space science has a really clear military element with
respect to satellites, rocketry. I talk a lot about climate science being a
science that fits with the new Cold War, in that it’s seen by states as a kind
of security problem. For China, climate science is important to invest in
because their coastal regions are major economic centers. They don’t want those
going underwater.
So there
are practical elements — but it’s also ideological. We’re seeing a return of a
kind of nationalism — this weird combination of globalization and nationalism.
Xi Jinping is a nationalist, much more so than some of the previous Chinese
leaders. He’s just the most prominent example, and probably the person that’s
most likely be able to to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. But
nationalist leaders in India, in Turkey, in the UAE, in America, in Britain.
Boris Johnson talked about making Britain a new “scientific superpower.” So
science also becomes an ideological marker of national prestige.
UD:
Throughout the book you sort of argue that it’s wrong to frame the history of
science as a European endeavor or an Anglo-American endeavor. Why do you feel
it’s so important to rewrite or update that framing?
JP: For
overlapping reasons. A basic one is about representation and diversity in
science; equity. Science, in Europe and Britain, certainly in America — United
States and North America generally — is not equitable, particularly in terms of
diversity with respect to minority ethnic groups, but other kinds of diversity
as well, in terms of class and gender, disability, and the like.
So I think
if the scientific profession is disproportionately people like me — White men
who went to Cambridge — then part, but not the exclusive reason for that, is
because we repeatedly present to the public, to school children, to university
students, an image of the sciences which looks like me. It’s people like Newton
or Einstein or Darwin — they’re these White men. And again, my point isn’t that
they’re not part of the story. Absolutely they are. But that there are other
people from around the world, from different cultural backgrounds, who are part
of it.
We’re at a
kind of crossroads in history, but also in science. And the narratives that
scientists were taught and told themselves in the West was a narrative that was
built for the Cold War. But the Cold War’s over — the original one. Yet we’re
still telling these narratives about Western science, science being neutral. And
I think a lot of public mistrust in the sciences generally is actually a
function of this — that we need to present publicly a more realistic,
political, diverse account of how science is done – how we got to now — in
order to have the consent and engagement of the mass public in the sciences.
I really
think that this kind of history of science shouldn’t be seen as a threat to
scientists. I’m not doing it because I want to see the end of science, and for
all of us become vaccine deniers. I’m doing it for the opposite reason: I think
if you want to stem the tide of vaccine and climate denial, and xenophobic
nationalism, then you need a history of science which really engages with these
quite difficult histories.
In “Horizons,” a historian of science highlights the crucial achievements of non-Western scientists and thinkers. By Dan Falk. Undark , January 7, 2022.
