The study of the history of science is widely understood to be undergoing a profound and much-needed transformation, from a subject focused on Europe to one encompassing the entire world. Yet the aims of the field have always been global. During the decades after the Second World War the inevitable progress of Western science was seen as the key to its role in world history. From the 1970s the rise of cultural history and laboratory ethnographies undermined this assumption. Indebted to colonial anthropology, these approaches revealed that the power of science was not inherent, but the result of local and contingent processes. Explanation needed to be symmetrical in analysing practices of all kinds wherever they were found, from economics and divination in West Africa to supernatural healing and particle physics in the American heartland. The geographical and conceptual broadening of the field is thus a long-delayed outcome of developments extending back many decades. It also means that references to the ‘global’ in history of science – even more than elsewhere in the humanities – continue to resonate with the universalizing aims of the natural and social sciences.

Built in Gif-sur-Yvette in the 1950s, the phytotron of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique provided plant physiologists with a set of enclosed growth rooms in which several climatic constituents of the environment could be simultaneously and separately controlled. This article examines the polyvalence of the French phytotron to explore the economic and political entanglements of experimental reasoning in mid-twentieth-century plant physiology. As Gif scientists embraced phytotrons as a means for developing an ‘experimental bioclimatology’, not only did they introduce into the laboratory an understanding of climate as a complex of agents likely to affect plant life, but also they sought to map scientific findings on productive pursuits during a period of intense agricultural modernization. The horticultural and agronomic applications envisaged were aimed at the timing of climate-sensitive biological events, but also at the expansion of productive areas within and outside metropolitan France, particularly in the context of late colonial and international dry-land development agendas. This case study of phytotronists’ agricultural imagination highlights a techno-scientific conception of climate steeped in biology, tied to the limits and potential of plant life in time and space, and regarded as either a deficiency to be corrected or a resource to be harnessed.

In this paper, I argue that Johann Christoph Sturm’s eclectic scientific method reveals an unexpected indebtedness to Francis Bacon’s thought. Sturm’s reception of Bacon is particularly surprising given that the German academic context in the second half of the seventeenth century was still largely Aristotelian. Sturm is indebted to Bacon in the following respects: (1) the critique of the current state of knowledge, (2) eclecticism, (3) a fluid transition from natural history to natural philosophy, (4) the conception of science as hypothetical and dynamic and (5) experimental philosophy and the use of instruments. Given that Sturm mentions Francis Bacon in important places in his work, these respects should not easily be dismissed as commonplace. Bacon is one of Sturm’s salient sources and they are both deeply concerned with a thoroughgoing reform of existing scientific practices.

Sir Albert Howard helped popularize the idea of translating ‘Eastern’ practice into ‘Western’ science in the field of agriculture. His approach to composting has been foundational to organic farming and counterposed with the field of agricultural chemistry. This depiction of feuding ideologies – organic versus chemical – is based largely on Howard's opposition to the fragmentation of scientific knowledge and its products, especially artificial fertilizer. One underexplored aspect of Howard's contest with the agricultural research establishment is the role played by intellectual property. This article contributes to Howard's historiography by examining three topics related to his life's work that concern money and patents: (1) the financial support for the Institute of Plant Industry at Indore, (2) an artificial manure patented by employees at Rothamsted Experimental Station and (3) a rival method in British municipal composting. I argue that Howard's ideological difference with agricultural chemists was not reducible to generating soil fertility with compost. Rather, the feud consisted of a larger debate about innovation, ownership and the societal benefits of scientific research.

The maritime expansion of the early modern period and the discovery of new continents necessitated a profound revision in traditional cosmology, bringing into question the millennia-old practices that were framed around that cosmology. Among these practices was astrology, which in the early modern period reached an unprecedented level of popularity through the development of the printing press. The application of the astrological corpus in tropical and southern latitudes questioned many of the foundational Ptolemaic concepts. At the core of this problem was the reversal of the seasons in the southern hemisphere. Since Ptolemy had firmly grounded the natural explanation of astrological attributes of the zodiac and the planets on the seasonal qualities, their reversal would imply a complete change in the zodiacal and planetary properties. Authors such as Girolamo Cardano, Tommaso Campanella and Athanasius Kircher addressed this matter, but it never became a central point of debate in the astrological literature of the period. However, practitioners in the New World, whose empirical view was very different to that of European authors, reached different conclusions. This problem offers an example of the difficulty in reconciling traditional authority with new knowledge. At the same time, it exposes the sharp contrast between the theoretical perspective of Europe-based authors and the actual experience of astrologers practising in the New World.

This essay examines the working relationship between Charles Darwin and the Edinburgh gardener John Scott that developed in the wake of the publishing of the Origin of Species (1859). As the essay shows, Darwin sought to utilize Scott’s horticultural knowledge and experimental expertise in order to provide some of the specialized botanical evidence that the Origin was not intended to provide. Scott, meanwhile, sought to use Darwin’s patronage and tutelage in order to overcome his modest status as a gardener while making contributions to scientific knowledge. And for an intense two-year period (1862–4), Darwin and Scott’s relationship was productive and mutually beneficial: not only did Scott’s work supplement Darwin’s ongoing botanical research on sexual development and fertility, but also his Primula experiments appeared to provide ‘physiological’ evidence of speciation via selective breeding. What the essay argues, however, is that there were limits to what Scott was able to achieve due in part to his social standing and perceived character that ultimately cast a shadow over his findings.

This article interrogates the positioning of British colonial meteorology in Malaysia and Singapore from the 1940s to 1960. This period spanned a global conflict and an internecine war, effecting profound sociopolitical changes from which neither Malaysia nor Singapore would emerge the same. The meteorological services were essential to Britain’s armed conflicts, providing vital weather information to the army, navy and, especially, the air forces, as well as supporting the aviation and shipping industry often in difficult and dangerous circumstances. This article argues that British military policy in South East Asia and the specific concerns of the colonial government in Malaya directly commanded the meteorological agenda on the ground during this period, with a secondary but significant impact on tropical climate and weather research. It thus addresses the interplay of science, colonialism and military interest from the perspective of a region that has featured little in the history of science.

Selenography was both a practice and a tool which developed through optical instrumentation in the seventeenth century. As a practice, it was the process of creating composite graphical depictions of the Moon through skill and sustained telescopic study. As a paper-based tool, the focus of this article, a selenography was a stabilized visualization and codified template for making, organizing and communicating lunar-based astronomical observations. The template's key observation and notation device was its system of named Moon spots, or lunar nomenclatures. Such systems varied significantly in different sites of knowledge making. Through the close study of two naming schemes produced and exchanged in Counter-Reformation contexts by Michael van Langren (1645) and Giovanni Battista Riccioli in collaboration with Maria Francesco Grimaldi (1651), this essay argues that selenographies were conceived with an eye to ideals of universal standardization for collective and even global observation. In practice, however, different forms of universality, revealing distinct local agendas tied to political and religious priorities, were materialized in each competing scheme.

Arguing about the stars has rarely been more controversial and dangerous than in the early modern period in Europe, especially in Catholic countries, in a time when old and novel conceptions of the heavens, planetary models and theories of celestial motions and influences were intensely debated, revised and scrutinized for philosophical soundness and religious conformity.1 In the hundred years or so that witnessed the birth and censorship of the Copernican theory; the execution in Rome of the most passionate defender of post-Copernican cosmology, Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), and the rise and fall of Galileo Galilei's (1564–1642) fame linked to his novel interpretation of the book of nature, the Catholic Church created some of the most powerful instruments of cultural control and educational conformity ever seen: the Inquisition, the Index of Forbidden Books and the vast network of Jesuit schools that spread from Rome and the Iberian peninsula across the globe.2

This article examines the scientific legacy of the first Glasgow Botanic Gardens and the part they played in the global circulation of botanical knowledge, from their creation in 1817 to their relocation to the West End of Glasgow in 1841. Located in a thriving industrial city with strong commercial ties to the British Caribbean, the gardens stood at an important crossroads of political and economic interests, scientific discovery, cultural innovation and imperial motives. They were managed by the talented English botanist William Jackson Hooker, who strove to transform them into a training ground for prospective botanists and a leading scientific institution. Yet, like many other botanical establishments of similar stature at the time, the gardens encountered many financial setbacks that hampered their success and threatened the scientific ambitions of Hooker and his peers. This article discusses the extent of the gardens’ scientific contribution within and beyond the borders of Britain and seeks to determine the degree to which science in these gardens was constrained by economic factors.

The inaugural lecture, or oration, delivered by Regiomontanus at the University of Padua in 1464 is deemed a document of remarkable significance in the history of science. Although it has attracted much scholarly attention, few efforts have been directed towards identifying the traces of Byzantine influence it might carry; that is to say, the extent to which Regiomontanus might have been influenced by the views of his patron, Bessarion. This paper responds to the need for such a study, arriving at the following conclusions. First, Regiomontanus's praise of astrology is in line with Bessarion's reaction to the official decisions taken against astrology in Constantinople at the Council of 1351 – decisions which were ultimately rooted in the hesychast controversy and in the confessional struggles between the Churches of Constantinople and Rome. Second, the legitimation of the Graeco-Arabic roots of astronomy in an institutional context, as undertaken by Regiomontanus, is in accordance with the intellectual influences Bessarion had absorbed in his youth in Constantinople. Third, contrary to some claims, it is likely that Regiomontanus does not adhere to a humanist anti-Arab agenda; rather, his views on the history of mathematics are a consequence of the Graeco-Arabic heritage of his patron, and of his lack of access to Arabic translations.

In 1820 two French scientists – Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Jean Bienaimé Caventou – discovered and named the active alkaloid substance extracted from cinchona bark: quinine. The bark from the ‘wondrous’ fever tree, and its antimalarial properties, however, had long been known to both colonial scientists and indigenous Peruvians. From the mid-seventeenth century, cinchona bark, taken from trees that grow on the eastern slopes of the Andes, was part of a global circulation of botanical knowledge, practice and profit. By the 1850s, Europeans eager to bypass South American trade routes to access cinchona plants established plantations across the global South in French Algeria, Dutch Java and British India. Wardian cases – plant terrariums named after British physician Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward – would fuel new imperial efforts to curb malaria, contemporaries argued. And yet cinchona trees proved difficult to transport over land and sea, and did not easily or universally thrive in new tropical climates. As a result of the growing demand and uncertainty around cinchona, as Pratik Chakrabarti has argued, from the late eighteenth century there was ‘a global scientific obsession’ with finding a ‘substitute’ for cinchona, particularly local alternatives in India and China.1

With the economic and political support of the United States, in July 1947, Turkey signed contracts with the Westinghouse Electric International Company and J.G. White Engineering Corporation to construct its first international civilian airport, Istanbul's Yeşilköy Airport. As this article will argue, the building of Yeşilköy (1949–53), through a partnership with two American engineering firms, is essentially an early Cold War narrative of transnational exchange involving the multidirectional flow of technical knowledge, expertise and resources between the United States and Turkey; the circulation of geopolitically significant (and frequently competing) military, civilian and government actors; and the local and global implications of these transmissions. Yet the Yeşilköy construction narrative also illustrates how post-war technology transfer was a highly political process of constant adaptation, modification and negotiation. Fraught with unforeseen friction and thorny challenges, Yeşilköy exemplifies the complicated American Cold War strategy of creating and maintaining alliances through engineering knowledge, personnel and practices, often with unintended consequences. Moreover, as a case study, Yeşilköy opens a new window into the cautious science diplomacy that occurred along the Iron Curtain, while filling a notable historiographic gap with respect to aviation in early Cold War Turkey.

The concept of ‘science’ occupies a distinctive place within our rhetorical inheritance. Tangential to science's actual practices and institutions, this rhetoric holds that science comprises an arsenal of techniques, or a pervasive mentality, that have broadly shaped and even defined modern society. Such notions have been the subject of more or less constant discussion for two or three centuries, with early critics of scientific thought targeting its links to the religious and political radicalism of the Enlightenment and the troubles of industrialization.

During the transition from the early to the modern era, the marginalization of astrology from the learned world marked a significant shift. The causes of this phenomenon are complex and still partially obscure. For instance, some sociological interpretations have linked it to a broader shift in mentality among the gentry and bourgeoisie, while other scholars attributed the decline to the emergence of the ‘new science’. Focusing on the case of Jean-Baptiste Morin (1583–1656), this paper examines the changing dynamics of patronage for what has been termed ‘the last official astrologer’. It demonstrates that Morin's appointment as professor of mathematics at the Collège royal and his prominence within the French court were expressions of a cultural politics in which his patrons were deeply invested. Conversely, Morin's efforts to restore astrology lent validation to the belief systems of his patrons. The paper further analyses Morin's fall from grace during his polemics with Gassendi and his circle, highlighting the political context of the Fronde and a growing public weariness regarding the relationship between politics and astrology. Ultimately, this case study reveals that in the French context, the marginalization of astrology was not solely determined within the ‘learned jurisdiction’. Instead, the shifting cultural and political investments of the ruling classes played a significant role.

The role of editorial staff in shaping early climate change narratives has been underexplored and deserves more attention. During the 1970s, the epistemological underpinnings of the production of knowledge on climate change were contested between scientists who favoured computer-based atmospheric simulations and those who were more interested in investigating the long-term history of climatic changes. Although the former group later became predominant in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change during the 1980s, the latter had a sizable influence over climate discourse during the 1970s. Of these, one of the key popularizers of climate discourse during the 1970s was the British climatologist Hubert Lamb (1913–97). The correspondence between Lamb and journal editors who gatekept and curated different audiences helped craft resonant messages about climate change and its potential effects, and we explore Lamb's interactions with editors of Nature, the UNESCO Courier, The Ecologist and Development Forum in the 1973–4 period. Through understanding how climate change discussion was influenced by editors, we gain an insight into how such narratives had to be adjusted to fit into pre-existing discourses before their importance was more widely established, and how these adjustments helped shape conceptualizations of climate change as a global, human-caused phenomenon and a source of universal threat.

It has been thirty years since the end of political apartheid in South Africa in 1994. Those decades have been marked by single-party dominance under the African National Congress (ANC), and the expansion of democratic rights and public goods like education, as well as neoliberal economic policies, growing inequality and, in recent years, corruption and maladministration scandals. On the heels of a historic election in May 2024, one which marked the end of the ANC's electoral dominance and was shaped, in part, by government mismanagement of the energy sector and extensive infrastructural decline, it is a timely moment to consider the history of South Africa's state and its relation to industries of extraction and energy production. Two new books do just that. Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures, by Gabrielle Hecht, takes a long view of the impact of extractive industries, arguing that contemporary South Africa may offer a cautionary tale of the devastating impacts of the Anthropocene, one that ‘foretells planetary futures’ in the way that the state has failed to reckon with the enduring communal and environmental impacts of the mining industry. Apartheid's Leviathan: Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence, by Faeeza Ballim, historicizes the development of South Africa's electricity sector under the apartheid state and traces the roots of the current energy crisis back to the pursuit of authoritarian high modernism in the mid-twentieth century.