This Introduction offers a conceptualization of the Indo-Pacific, its islands and their place within the history of science. We argue that Indo-Pacific islands present a remarkable combination of social, political and spatial circumstances, which speak to themes that are central to the history of science. Having driven movements of people and represented staging grounds for explorations, expansions and cross-cultural exchanges, these spaces have been at the forefront of historical change. The historiographies of the two oceans have traditionally emphasized indigenous agency while downplaying European historical trajectories, and therefore they provide historians of science with materials and methodologies that promise nuanced portrayals of knowledge production in cross-cultural settings. Rather than unifying the oceans into a cohesive narrative, we seek to uncover the many horizons of Indo-Pacific worlds and pluralize the spaces within which knowledge travelled at specific times, but not at others. Offering a middle plane between the globe and the region, islands are particularly productive sites for such analyses, as they bring to attention both localized kinds of agency and the impacts of colonialism and globalization. This special issue investigates what happens to knowledge within island spaces and demonstrates that even as small strips of land, islands can significantly enhance our understanding of the practices of knowledge making within the broader contours of world history. In bringing to the fore the contributions of actors from across the wider social spectrum and, especially, the interacting roles of indigenous agents and their traditions, Indo-Pacific worlds thus offer exciting new directions for a field which has often been dominated by a focus on European institutions.

Historians generally grumble at the liberties taken with letters and papers by editors and biographers in the past, while reviewers may complain at the professorial pomposities which interfere with the reader's interaction with the text. Certainly, reading is not a mere matter of information retrieval or of source-mining, but a meeting of minds, and any over-zealous editing which makes this more difficult will have failed. Editors, whether of journals or of documents, are midwives of ideas—self-effacingly bringing an author's meaning and style into the world. What reviewers praise is the unobtrusive, and what they damn is ‘a manner at once slapdash and intrusive’, making allowances perhaps for an ‘introduction which is as admirable as his footnotes are useless’. When in the 1960s new technology brought us a flood of facsimile reprints of scientific works, some avoided these problems by appearing naked and unashamed: but for a text on phrenology, or for Goethe's Theory of Colours, a fig leaf or two of commentary is really necessary to help the innocent reader to interact with the book. Facsimiles of nineteenth-century editions of Wilkins' papers, of some Newton correspondence, or of Henry More's poetry are even more problematic; the reader should know that these editors' assumptions cannot be taken for granted, and that their introductions are themselves historical documents. The exact reproduction of misprints and misbindings (giving pages out of order and misnumbered) is of dubious assistance to the modern reader.

This article will reveal how local scientific determination and ambition, in the face of rejection by funders, navigated a path to success and to influence in national policy and international medicine. It will demonstrate that Birmingham, England's ‘second city’, was the key centre for cutting-edge biological psychiatry in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. The ambitions of Frederick Mott – doyen of biochemistry, neuropathology and neuropsychiatry, until now celebrated as a London figure – to revolutionize psychiatric treatment through science, chimed with those of the City and University of Birmingham's Joint Board of Research for Mental Diseases. Under Mott's direction, shaped by place and inter-professional working, the board's collaborators included psychiatrist Thomas Chivers Graves and world-renowned physiologist J.S. Haldane. However, starved of external money and therefore fresh ideas, as well as oversight, the ‘groupthink’ that emerged created the classic UK focal sepsis theory which, it was widely believed, would yield a cure for mental illness – a cure that never materialized. By tracing the venture's growth, accomplishments and contemporary potential for biochemical, bacterial and therapeutic discoveries – as well as its links with scientist and key government adviser Solly Zuckerman – this article illustrates how ‘failure’ and its ahistorical assessment fundamentally obscure past importance, neglect the early promise offered by later unsuccessful science, and can even hide questionable research.

Scurvy is now almost a forgotten disease, but it would be difficult to exaggerate its importance in the history of a maritime nation such as our own. To the historian of medical science it is equally interesting, because the various and extraordinary variety of theories concerning it reflect in themselves the intellectual climate of the past. By their repeated refusal to accept the conclusions of an experimental method, by their pedantic reliance on a priori reasoning or antiquated prejudices, the medical authorities of all countries delayed the conquest of this terrible disease long after a cure had been established by men who had practical experience of it. If anyone imagines that even in scientific knowledge progress is inevitable, let him remember that scurvy continued to be the curse of the sea and the hardship of explorers so recent as Scott and Shackleton a hundred years after it had been eliminated in the fleets of Nelson's day.

In the last years of the eighteenth century, Egypt famously witnessed the practice of European sciences as embodied in the members of Bonaparte's Commission des sciences et des arts and the newly founded Institut d'Egypte. Less well known are the activities of local eighteenth-century Cairene religious scholars and military elites who were both patrons and practitioners of scientific expertise and producers of hundreds upon hundreds of manuscripts. Through the writings of the French naturalist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844) and those of the Cairene scholar and chronicler ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jabartī (1753–1825), I explore Egypt as a site for the practice of the sciences in the late eighteenth century, the palatial urban houses which the French made home to the Institut d'Egypte and their role before the French invasion, and the conception of the relationship between the sciences and social politics that each man sought. Ultimately, I argue that Geoffroy's struggle to create scientific neutrality in the midst of intensely tumultuous political realities came to a surprising head with his fixation on Paris as the site for the practice of natural history, while al-Jabartī’s embrace of this entanglement of knowledge and power led to a vision of scientific expertise that was specifically located in his Cairene society, but which – as Geoffroy himself demonstrated – could be readily adapted almost anywhere.

The expert in the early modern period was frequently looked upon with suspicion. Though expertise was associated with specialized knowledge and skill, it was also associated with cunning, deception and social climbing. Indeed, such knowledge threatened well-defined and time-honoured social and disciplinary boundaries. This was certainly the case with practical mathematics, which was considered by many to be an inferior grade of knowledge, especially when compared with natural philosophy and theology. This spawned numerous attempts to elevate the status of practical mathematics and to lend legitimacy to its practitioners. This article focuses on one such attempt, that of an early sixteenth-century French cosmographer–explorer–poet named Pierre Crignon. Crignon participated in voyages of exploration and was renowned as a cosmographer and navigator, but his contemporaries perhaps best knew him as a poet. The paper examines how Crignon attempted to bring together and legitimate the disparate forms of his expertise as a navigator, cosmographer, humanist poet and theologian through the multivalent medium of his poetry, and in particular through a poem comparing the Virgin Mary to the astrolabe.

Francis Hauksbee (1660–1713) is well known for his double-barrelled air-pump. However, the origin of this pump, and Hauksbee's background, are often described as a mystery. This text seeks to dispel the riddle. It is argued that Hauksbee's competence as an exceptional maker of air-pumps was developed between 1699 and 1703 as a result of his experiences with the construction, manufacturing and sale of cupping-glasses. His cupping utensils embodied a new design, where syringes were used to evacuate the glasses, instead of the traditional way by fire or mouth suction. These syringes, which in fact were small air-pumps, were perfected between 1699 and 1701. A larger syringe, introduced in 1701, served as a transition from the cupping-syringe to his first air-pump for use in natural philosophy. This syringe was described as a ‘combined engine’, which could serve as an air-pump, a condensing engine and a syringe for injecting air, wax or mercury into pathological specimens. Hauksbee's first air-pump was a single-barrelled model introduced in 1702, based on the combined engine. Its various features, such as easy and convenient leak-tightening, exact pressure measurements by an in-built barometer and an air-inlet function for readmission of air into the receiver, are discussed. Finally, it is shown that these activities gave Hauksbee the reputation of being an outstanding instrument-maker, years before the double-barrelled air-pump was in sight.

This paper examines cave environments as unique spaces of knowledge production and shows how visualizations of natural cavities in maps came to be powerful tools in scientific reasoning. Faced with the challenge of limited vision, mapmakers combined empiricism and imagination in an experimental setting and developed specific translation strategies to deal with the uncertain origin of underground objects and the shifting boundaries between the known and the unknown. By deconstructing this type of cartographic representation, which has barely been studied, this paper furnishes surprising insights into the scholarly practices and tools used to deal with this considerable epistemic uncertainty and to signal credibility and trust to potential users. The array of maps used for this study includes both archival and published sources, depicting caves in Europe, America and Siberia.

This article situates the collecting practices of museums of natural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in dialogue with similar practices amongst societies in the Pacific by focusing on how European curators, dealers in natural history and Pacific Islanders shared a common fascination with Spondylus shells. In particular, this article examines the processes for turning Spondylus shells into unique or duplicate specimens. Spondylus shells were crucial for regulating gift and commercial exchanges in the societies of both regions. Famously, the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski claimed that these shells were an essential element of the gift-based kula exchange, which helped him distinguish Western capitalist society from less developed societies without commercial trade. Yet Spondylus shells were also collected and exchanged as gifts amongst British and European naturalists in this period, performing the same roles as in Melanesia. In addition, such gift exchanges could only come into being thanks to the actions of commercially motivated dealers, located both in the Pacific and in Europe, who were the suppliers of these shells both to Melanesian participants in the kula and to Western natural historians and collectors. These observations call into question earlier arguments that equate modernity with the rise of commercial capitalism. It is instead claimed that commercial and gift exchanges were intricately connected and reliant on each other throughout the period, whether in the worlds of Western museums or in Pacific archipelagos. The act of turning Spondylus shells into unique or duplicate specimens was the key tool for regulating these exchanges.

Martin Folkes (1690–1754) was Newton's protégé, an English antiquary, mathematician, numismatist and astronomer who would in the latter part of his career become simultaneously president of the Royal Society and of the Society of Antiquaries. Folkes took a Grand Tour from March 1733 to September 1735, recording the Italian leg of his journey from Padua to Rome in his journal. This paper examines Folkes's travel diary to analyse his Freemasonry, his intellectual development as a Newtonian and his scientific peregrination. It shows how, in this latter area, how he used metrology to understand not only the aesthetics but also the engineering principles of antique buildings and artefacts, as well as their context and place in the Italian landscape. Using Folkes's diary, his account book of his journey in the Norwich archives, and his correspondence with other natural philosophers such as Francesco Algarotti (1712–1764), Anders Celsius (1701–1744) and Abbé Antonio Schinella Conti (1667–1749), this paper will also demonstrate to what extent Folkes's journey established his reputation as an international broker of Newtonianism, as well as the overall primacy of English scientific instrumentation to Italian virtuosi.

How may scientific research contribute effectively to industrial development? This question has been debated for many years. However, a recent development in this discussion has come from a number of eminent scientists and others who have become concerned with what has become known as the public understanding of science. According to them, a greater understanding of science by members of the public would result in a higher value being placed on scientific research, which, eventually, would result in both increased social status for scientists and growing funding from government and industry for their work. Thus, in part, concern about the public understanding of science is an indirect way of influencing the outcome of discussions about the science budget.