How should historians of environmental and climate sciences respond to the Earth's move from the blank canvas to a foreground feature of ‘big-picture’ scholarship? This article highlights three crucial themes for histories of science in the Anthropocene: categories of scale and methods of scaling, the relationship between history of science and the disciplines it historicizes, and the entanglement of environmental damage and environmental knowledge. Critically engaging a wide range of recent literature across history of science, environmental history, and environmental humanities, alongside an array of case studies, the article puts forward an agenda for ‘planetary pictures’. These are analyses that actively contribute to the vital political and ethical task to make visible, and force a reckoning with, the perpetrators and victims of Anthropocene violence.

This conversation article brings together six of the original contributors to the 1993 Getting the Big Picture special issue of the British Journal for the History of Science. The contributors introduce their personal memories of the 1991 conference panel which formed the basis of that special issue. They also discuss the wider intellectual, institutional and political contexts of writing the history of science during the 1980s and 1990s, before concluding with reflections on the future of the discipline. The conversation was held live online via Microsoft Teams in March 2023. A professional transcript was produced by Sarah King. The transcript was then edited by James Poskett for length and clarity, before final edits were made by the contributors.

One methodological approach to grasping a ‘big-picture’ history of modern science involves tracing the complex entanglements between scientific knowledge and the development of racism and racialized economic systems. Indeed, no historical account of any scientific field can be complete without acknowledging the role of race as an intellectual, social or economic factor. We substantiate this argument through a synthetic review of three overlapping threads in the historiography of science. First, historical research on ‘race science’ has analysed the formation of disciplines directly involved in constructing scientific concepts of race, including medicine, anthropology, linguistics, phrenology, psychology, archaeology and genetics. Second, historians have demonstrated that connections between race and science are not limited to the domain of race science. Rather, European imperial expansion, colonialism and capitalism created the foundational infrastructures undergirding the emergence of modern professional science. Finally, new research shows how race remains covertly embedded in theoretical frameworks, statistical formulae and technological devices still used by scientists today. Through these examples, we perceive a big-picture history of science in which its co-constitution with race links localized case studies and imperial narratives across space and time.

Historians of science appear to agree on two things. There is a shortage of large-scale histories of science, and positivism is best avoided. In fact, we have many big-picture histories of science. The problem is not the lack of such histories but the lack of agreement between them. They differ with respect to chronology, geography, narrative structure, favoured disciplines, recent revisionism and epistemology. To make the most of these differences, I resurrect an idea from nineteenth-century positivism, namely that science evolves by the migration of methods from one matter to another. This is an old form of materialism that complements more recent materialisms. The neo-positivist approach may be illustrated by matters as varied as stars, crystals and the Pacific Ocean. If we revive positivism as an intellectual project, we might also revive the social goal of positivism, which was to use the history of science to make the world more rational. A present-day version of this project is to use the history of science to defend the humanities as a rational enterprise.

What happens when fragmentary and too much information is flowing across the world? This article sketches the emergence of one such informational flow through the ubiquitous concept of ‘new medicine’ in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire in a historiographical corrective. Rather than presenting it as a unified category, I argue that Ottoman physicians used ‘new’ as a loose, multivalent and discursive term whose potentiality lay in its malleability for future use. Ready to bear any contingent meaning at a certain point in the future, the ‘new’ became a strategic tool to cope with the uncertainties evoked by early modern globalization and local epistemic crisis. It also helped Ottoman scholars and physicians develop a tentative design for how much information, and of what sort, was just enough for the learned and laypeople to know during precarious times. I further discuss the fact that since the Ottoman motivation for the usage of the notion of the ‘new’ is without a decisive motive, it still haunts our historiographical debates about what was truly new about Ottoman science.

When considering the ‘big picture’ in the history of science, what or who is considered important depends upon the focal point of the analysis. Social network analysis, equipped with digital methods, offers historians a way to help generate alternative perspectives for analysis by revealing elusive patterns obscured by the apparent ‘centre/periphery’ dichotomy or ‘great-men’ narratives. The presented methods are focused on studying connections, relationships and structural characteristics in networks and can thus help bridge global and local perspectives and suggest new historical lines of argument. This point is illustrated with a case study of Polish oil prospectors working in Argentina in the 1880s, which problematizes the narrative of the formation of transnational networks based on this mineral resource. The article discusses the place of digital methods within historical research, arguing that good skills in the interpretation and communication of outputs produced through digital research methods, coupled with familiarity with their associated theories, strengths and weaknesses, are indispensable.

The history of science in public discussion is dominated by large-scale narratives of revolution. These locate epistemic violence within specialist communities, obscuring the role of science in environmental destruction and in silencing other ways of engaging with the world. At the same time, the language of revolution has fostered an unrealistic image of science, giving too much prominence to crisis, heroic challenges to authority and the wholescale abandonment of established theory. Revolutionary narratives in history of science were consolidated in the decades around 1900, as the genealogy for an emerging union of science, industry and imperial power. Even when explicitly rejected, they function as ‘ghost narratives’ within teaching and research. Relocating epistemic violence not only involves changing the geography and chronology of established narratives, a project that is well under way. It also requires understanding that revolution is the wrong category of event for communicating science and its history.

Over the past four decades, historians of science have come to discard crisis as a guiding heuristic in ‘big-picture’ narratives of scientific change. In this article, we argue that it can be rehabilitated without reintroducing the conceptual drawbacks of earlier historiographies. We suggest that analysing material crises as distinct episodes of knowledge-in-the-making focuses attention on the mangling of science and social order. We distinguish material crises from Kuhnian intellectual crises; the analysis of material crises begins with the interactive dynamics of actor practices and performances, emergent within concrete social orders, rather than from technical breakdowns within isolable theoretical paradigms. Drawing on Reinhart Koselleck's account of crisis, we characterize such events as patterned shifts in the tempo of actor behaviours, which are brought about by real-time processes of realization. In addition to the familiar, contemporary cases of climate change and COVID-19, we sketch out how three historical crises transformed knowledge production in disparate ways: the Ming–Qing transition in late imperial China, crises of labour precarity in seventeenth-century Istanbul and the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa.

This article identifies a few paradigmatic ways whereby the big picture of sexual science has been made possible, especially through a diversification in the uneven but interconnected geography of scientific practice. It focuses on the ways in which the life and work of individual researchers, institutional settings and journal circulations have anchored the development of narratives about the history of sexual science. By delineating the shifting cultural geography, epistemological premise and conceptual innovations in sexological research, it is possible to cast the co-constituted nature of knowledge making as an enterprise simultaneously local and global in its reach. The rise of modern sexual science represented as much a gestalt counterpart to the evolutionary paradigm as a response to the shifting terrains of religious and legal governance in the regulation of sexuality.