Exploring Traditions: Sources for a Global History of Science

The long-term historical development of the sciences in global context has already attracted public attention, and questions of cultural espionage and secrecy, the parallel and divergent histories of innovation and invention, the role of knowledge in warfare, imperialism, naval power and political ascendancy, as well as the dynamics of intercultural exchange and barter, have all occupied a place in public consciousness. Questioning the status of the global in the sciences is also of immense importance if we are to come to a more reflexive understanding of some of the key issues facing our planet today, including the challenges of underdevelopment, education, healthcare, epidemics, information exchange, 'indigenous' knowledge and rights, and the technological gap.

This project seeks to interpret the globalization of the sciences since 1750 in a new way, by encouraging scholars, students and policymakers to think beyond their usual starting points. It asks them, firstly, to use new sources, and in particular to avoid a tendency to rely solely on the deposits in European libararies and museums, and in particular those in European languages and traditions of production and representation, in order to understand how science was globalized and also how it was used by different cultures. This has been one of the key limitations to our understanding of the global in science. Secondly, it encourages all those involved in the network to establish sustained exchanges with other scholars, students and policymakers elesewhere, and in particular in Africa and South Asia. This is driven by the belief that if we are to understand the global in science, we need to be globally engaged in intellectual terms. Thirdly, it seeks to link scholars working on quite different areas and in line with different methods; in the world of museums as well archives; in the study of particular areas of the world as well as Europe; and as historians, sociologists, philosophers, and anthropologists amongst others. The legacy of the project will lie in the training it will provide to a new generation of postgraduate and postdoctoral students, as well as the training resources it will develop for the study of the globalization of the sciences. It will bring its findings to a wide audience by use of video presentations, poisition papers and briefing documents. It will also help those working in museums and libaries to consider how to interpret and display their materials in the UK.

The project will be based at the University of Cambridge, which has already proven itself to be a leading centre for the study of global histories of science, with scholars based at a number of its departments and institutes studying and writing in this field. It will involve visits by four scholars with African and South Asian intersts to Cambridge and will also involve a series of workshops and a conference in Delhi. At heart this is a globally collaborative enterprise about the globalization of the sciences, which will have global impact.

Current models of development, of public health, and of appropriate aid and technological investment can be handicapped by inaccurate accounts of the role of science in globalization and of the process through which the sciences have been used in past schemes for economic transformation and administration. Specifically, many global histories of science still adopt a simple picture in which scientific advances are diffused from political centres towards less developed peripheries; and on this picture it becomes hard to understand the challenges of collaboration and development on which welfare depends. This Research Network moves on from these images of diffusion to show how processes of circulation, disconnection and transformation have long characterized the place and role of the sciences in global historical patterns.

A major task of the Network is to bring together international authorities with expertise on the globalization of medical and scientific traditions that will speak to contemporary policy issues: for instance, the patterns of healthcare and technical implementation that characterized attempts to manage the challenges of endemic tropical and subtropical disease; and the forms of social management and state building that relied on new kinds of technological and scientific technique. In each of these cases, the Network will ensure the widest possible application for its work in the immediate and urgent contexts of healthcare challenges and economic crisis through the production of briefing documents and position summaries available through the University's Communication Office in the participating centres in UK, South Africa and India. The Network will also use the resources of the university to prepare brief video and other media presentations for widespread distribution.

Members of the Research Network have substantial experience with outreach activity, including broadcast media and interpretative exhibitions. Two important aspects of its work, training in new materials for the study of global sciences, and a cross-national enterprise of transfer and exchange between scholarship from different traditions, provide exciting opportunities for this outreach work. In the course of the organized visits of scholars to Cambridge, work will include study of current expository methods for the representation of the sciences in properly global perspective, with the aim of refining and reorienting public practices in these projects of widespread significance. This involves development of new approaches to global histories of sciences, especially in dialogue with invited participants from museum practice, journalism and broadcasting.

The Network taps into a complex and important set of debates about improvements in forms of knowledge investment and transmission. These debates, which have drawn in part on the work of the participants in this network, have involved rival accounts of the processes through which expertise has been employed, and alternative narrations of the means through which centralized planning mechanisms have exploited technical resources offered by forms of science ranging from tropical medicine to infrastructural engineering. Also pertinent is the question of which agencies representing community and indigenous groups can better participate in fundamental decisions about implementation of scientific work and the analysis of outcomes. A major theme of the Network is thus the appropriate methods to be used to correct and refine policy initiatives' assumptions about the long-term historical development of the sciences in global context. An aim of the Delhi conference is to provide the forum for exchanges on this theme by all concerend stakeholders.