Horizons: A Global History of Science?
Poskett’s Horizons: A Global History of Science (NY, Penguin: 2022) is a provocative new history of science. Poskett sees modern science as the product of ceaseless cross-cultural, global geopolitical transformations. The “Western” revolutions in science turn out to be the result of global transcultural and transregional interactions, all triggered by global socio- cum-geo-political shifts. Take, for example, Copernicus’.
Poskett locates Renaissance Astronomy within the much larger context of the expansion of Islam in North Africa and Euro Asia. Islam demanded great accuracy in the observations of solar, lunar, and planetary movements to organize ritual calendars and sanction political power. Copernicus drew on Islamic astronomical tables as the Ottomans gained control of the Black Sea. The fall of Constantinople triggered a wave of texts, exiles, and learned captives. It was a combined effort of many astronomers to produce and smuggle more accurate astronomical tables that led to the demise of Aristotelian and Ptolemaic geocentric models all over Euro Asia.
Poskett brings his model of transculturation and global geopolitics transformations to bear on every major breakthrough in the history of modern science, namely, Newton’s Physics, Linnaeus’s Natural History, Lavoisier’s Chemistry, Darwin’s Natural Selection, Maxwell’s Electromagnetism, Einstein’s Relativity, Bohr’s Quantum Mechanics, and Mendel’s Genetics. The result is a bold new interpretation.
Newtonian physics was global and supported by geopolitical developments. All the key evidence to create Newton’s new physics came from comparative studies of the length of a degree of a meridian in equatorial and Artic locations, as well as the time it took pendulums to swing in these antithetical settings. Newtonian physics also demanded comparative observations of the transit of Venus. Artic and equatorial measurements settled controversies over the oblong shape of the earth (ultimately over Newton’s non-mechanical models of gravitation as an occult attraction at a distance). The observations of Venus in antipodal Pacific islands settled controversies over the true shape of the orbits of planets. To have colonies and to reach isolated islands in the Pacific one needed advanced fleets and navies. Ultimately, Poskett argues, it was the Atlantic slave trade that made the accumulation of evidence for Newtonian physics possible.
Poskett’s model of globalization and geopolitics works well. He shows that early-modern European Natural History was driven by commerce, colonialism, and slavery. So too were China’s and Japan’s. Naturalists in Europe, China, and Japan modified classical bookish traditions to adjust to the demands of commerce and globalization. All early modern empires sought to access new botanical resources to secure either commercial advantages or economic autarky.
Nineteenth-century industrialization, nationalism, settler colonialism, and imperialism, in turn, drove the development of evolutionary biology, particularly Darwinian natural selection. Poskett shows that the idea of evolution as the survival of the fittest became a trope in the development of national armies (pitting nations against each other) and frontier societies (pitting Individuals against indigenous settlers). Nineteenth-century Argentina, Russia, Japan, and China excelled in paleontology and evolutionary biology
Electromagnetism flourished in India, Russia, Japan, and China as these struggling empires sought to create instant systems of communication. Telegraphy helped to increase the presence of the state in borderlands. It was the pursuit of communication in scattered imperial polities that led to breakthroughs in telegraphy and radio, particularly in Russia, Japan, and China. The rush to industrialization in the nineteenth century, in turn, sparked much research in chemistry. The Russian Dimitri Mendeleev spearheaded inquiries into the periodic table and the Japanese Hantaro Nagakoa into the first model of the atom.
Poskett sees Marxist ideologies and Cold War conflict as two of the main forces behind the global spread of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Genetics. Einstein’s and Bohr’s new physics were received by Bolshevik radicals in Russia as a welcome challenge to bourgeoise complacency. Nationalists and republican radicals in India and China also embraced the two new physics with gusto. The fear of famine and atomic warfare in destabilizing Cold War ideologies, in turn, greatly facilitated the spread of population and agricultural genetics in Mexico, China, and India.
Poskett’s main contribution is to demonstrate that “European” knowledge has long been global and that science is a peculiar modern product intimately attached to colonialism, capitalism, slavery, industrialization, and geopolitical conflict. Poskett offers countless microhistories of non “European” scientists whose research changed the sciences in radical new ways. Innovative new knowledge has been a constant in modern Islam, Russia, China, Latin America, and Japan. Yet, for all his sharp insights, Poskett remains firmly grounded in Eurocentric teleologies. In his book science moves through familiar markers, all associated with “Europe” in the first place: Copernicanism, Newtonianism, Linnaean Natural History, Maxwellian electromagnetism. Almost every single one of Poskett’s dozens of micro biographies of non-European innovators shows that they were first trained in “European” institutions, and in the US after the advent of Cold War genetics. Poskett does not deal with (and actually reinforces) the basic Eurocentric assumptions of most historiographical categories that organize the history of science: Print Revolution, Republic of Letters, Public Sphere, Enlightenment, Democracy, Industrial Revolution (in teleological order). Poskett’s is nevertheless a challenging book that deserves a wide readership.
