History of Science and Natural History

The history of science has increasingly moved beyond the laboratory and the European metropolis to ask how knowledge was produced, carried, and transformed as it crossed oceans, colonial frontiers, and competing institutional networks during the nineteenth century and beyond. Scholars trace the practical work of local intermediaries, indigenous informants, and traveling naturalists to show that what counts as universal scientific fact was often assembled from deeply uneven exchanges shaped by imperial power. A central open question concerns how to write genuinely global accounts without simply recentering Western institutions — that is, how to recover the agency and epistemic contributions of non-European actors whose roles were long minimized in conventional historiography. Active work in the field is also pressing on how scientific networks reinforced or occasionally disrupted colonial hierarchies, and what it means to reconstruct a shared geohistory from sources that were themselves products of asymmetrical encounters.

Works

149,418

Total citations

182,759

Keywords

Global HistoryScience CirculationColonial KnowledgeScientific NetworksImperialismHistoriography