Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science

"Again, it challenges our assumptions. I grew up in Britain and went to school in the 1970s and was told that science basically started with Isaac Newton . It’s really nice to read an account of scientific endeavor which tells you that across cultures and places, things were going on that gave insight into the world. For example, there’s the astronomer, Ulugh Beg, who five centuries ago calculated the length of the solar year to within 25 seconds of accuracy to what we’ve got today. That single episode encapsulates what this book is about. It encourages us to stop imagining that we are somehow at the center of the universe of progress and development and to recognize that there are other cultures out there who have been way ahead of the game and who we’ve learned from. We’re not very good at articulating or recognizing that, but this book does, across a range of places and times. That’s a really important exercise to engage in. Again, the book is very accessible. Coming back to what I said earlier, I write in the field of law, trying to make that accessible. I really appreciate a scientist helping me to understand scientific developments in a way that absolutely resonates and unpeels the complexities of our world. It’s a very significant book. I take a pretty broad view of understanding world cultures. There’s the macro, which this scientific book does, or there’s the micro which the Osebol or the Alexander Graham Bell books do. It’s about being able to look at the world in a different way, that’s the common theme."

"This is a new book and it tackles one of the subjects that has been most difficult to incorporate into global history, and that’s the history of ideas, intellectual history, and especially the history of science, which is very much part of the history of ideas. James Poskett introduces us to these European-based histories of science. As written from the late 19th century onwards, wherever the history of science has reached out to the wider world, it has always been considered as something that was transmitted from Europe, and picked up and adapted in other parts of the world, not that other parts of the world were making any major contribution to scientific endeavour and scientific progress in themselves. He discusses very different conceptions of science. Is it something that just takes place in the lab? We often think of it that way. Or is it in the minds of so-called great scientists? It’s also technology. It involves many different practices that, for some time now, historians have been presenting more as a history of knowledge than a history of science. But he sets this knowledge framework within the domain of the history of science. He takes us through these worlds of Copernicus, of Newton, of the atom, and all these traditional subject areas, but he shows how much they were created just as much by connections and endeavours from other parts of the world. Newton could not have done his work without the data that was being collected around the world, for instance from merchants, travellers and, indigenous peoples in various parts of the world collecting information on the tides. He was embedded in this world of data collecting. There’s wonderful material on natural history and the way that practices and collections were introduced to Europeans by indigenous groups in many parts of the world; the use of resources brought into Europe by these encounters, and how we just could not have had the kind of European science that developed without this interaction. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Another very interesting point is that the great advances of Islamic science during the medieval period have always been acknowledged, but it’s always presented as a story of decline after that; similarly, with Indian mathematics. He shows us that in both instances this was certainly not the case. He also makes the point that China is growing faster than anywhere else, and that it is a great science centre now. We need to know that this isn’t something that has just happened now—there is a long history to it. It’s a fascinating book, also written for a broad audience, and based on recent scholarship over the past 10 to 20 years. Certainly over the past 10 years there’s been a movement among historians of science to investigate the contributions of what they call ‘go-betweens’ and the indigenous roots of a number of scientific hypotheses and experiments. It was published in 2013, based on a conference that was run in 2009. Many famous historians contributed to the book. It’s very much tied to that conference, which brought together historians from many different fields and many areas of the world. It was not just a group that self-identified as global historians. Among the themes of the book was the question of how the challenge of the global was affecting historical research and writing. It’s been nearly ten years since the book came out. When people are looking for introductions to the field, this has been one of the go-to books because it sets out that moment of transition for historians as a whole engaging with this field. We interviewed a number of these historians. There is an archive of conversations with all these historians at the time, in addition to those who contributed to the edited volume , so that is another great resource. I should say that since the book was published, there has been a great deal of critique and rethinking of global history. People have raised really serious questions with which we need to engage. Two of the things we never talked enough about were war and slavery . My new book, which I have co-authored, is on slavery and the Industrial Revolution. We asked ourselves, a global approach to history was great for people who were on the move, but what about those who just stayed at home? What happened with them? How do we write about them as part of the world? There’s also been a more recent discussion of capitalism. What intervention can global history make in our histories of capitalism? What part do we play there? So there has been a lot of critique recently, but I think it has pushed new thinking. There are lots of problems in the world now, but we’re intellectuals and we need to reflect on this. We don’t just have knee-jerk reactions. I hope we never abandon global approaches to our history writing and go back to those old national histories and area studies. I hope global history will continue. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I also want to make a very strong plea that we continue to write our locally-focused histories. Our local histories are absolutely fundamental. We are historians, we go to archives, we want to find out the nitty-gritty of how events occurred, how social structures emerged, and how ideas were formed. We need to have our feet on the ground where we research. Global history is a way of thinking. It’s a way in which you approach your materials, your archives. It raises the questions that you want to ask of your materials, but we need to preserve our deep, archival understanding of the subjects we research."