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This article proposes a new global approach to the history of science centered on questions of geopolitics, historical consciousness, and cultural identity. Arguing that the field is now at a crossroads between its longstanding focus on the history of the natural sciences in the Western world, and the prospect of some form of worldwide history of science, the article describes a new undergraduate lecture course, designed by the author and taught at Rutgers and Harvard since 2015, which neither begins in Western Europe nor culminates with the United States. It aims to articulate an original vision for the field on this basis. Histories of science can and should offer deep histories of the global present, it is argued, by rethinking how historical narratives involve geographical decisions about where to focus analytical attention (and where not) and tackling narrative and geography together as linked issues. The approach proposed here is neither science in context nor knowledge in transit but engages the notion of a knowing world: one made up of multiple scientific cultures and long historical memory, and requiring dialectical movement back and forth across both space and time on a worldwide scale to grasp the scientific past’s importance for the present, as well as the present’s impact on how we perceive the past. Explicitly addressing polemics of identity, culture, race, and nationhood can help us to construct a more civic-minded and geopolitically informed history of science of use in the changing circumstances of the twenty-first century.

Nomen Genericum valet in Republica Botanica uti nummus (The generic name is, as it were, the official currency of our botanical republic) Linnaeus, Philosophia Botanica, section 2841 2 1This issue ...

Anthropologists, linguists, cultural historians, and literary scholars have long emphasized the value of examining writing as a material practice and have often invoked the list as a paradigmatic example thereof. This Focus section explores how lists can open up fresh possibilities for research in the history of science. Drawing on examples from the early modern period, the contributors argue that attention to practices of list making reveals important relations between mercantile, administrative, and scientific attempts to organize the contents of the world. Early modern lists projected both spatial and temporal visions of nature: they inventoried objects in the process of exchange and collection; they projected possible trajectories for future endeavor; they publicized the social identities of scientific practitioners; and they became research tools that transformed understandings of the natural order.

This essay examines an influential treatise on the causes of African skin color published by the Virginia-born physician John Mitchell in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions in 1744. Instead of charting Mitchell's position in the development of eighteenth-century thinking about human variation – the preoccupation of many intellectual genealogies of race – the essay links Mitchell's account to specific period practices in the natural sciences, questions of authority, and networks of circulation. The diachronic impulse to identify the emergence of a robust concept of race is relaxed in favor of a more synchronic approach that explores how and why such an account was crafted to achieve credibility in the first place. Central here are Mitchell's combination of anatomical work with Newtonian optical theory to explain variations in skin color. His status as a Creole-American author is also considered, as are the relationship between Newtonianism and variationist discourse, and the way in whi...

I do not pretend to have been to the bottom of the sea.Robert Boyle, 1670MATTER OUT OF PLACEConsider the following object as shown in an early eighteenth-century engraving (Figure 1) . It is a piece of wood - not a highly worked thing, not ingeniously wrought, though it is an artefact of human labour rather than a natural body. Or is it? In the engraving, the piece of wood disappears: it is visible towards the bottom of the image, a sober pointed stump, but it is quickly subsumed by a second, enveloping entity that swirls about it in an embroidering corkscrew. What elements are here intertwining? The legend beneath the engraving identifies the artefact thus: "Navis, prope Hispaniolam ann Dom 1659. Naufragium passae, asser, a davo ferreo transfixus, corallio aspero candicante I. B. Obsitus, & a fundo maris anno 1687 expiscatusV It describes a stake or spar from a ship wrecked off Hispaniola in 1659, which is transfixed by both an iron bolt and rough whitish coral, fished out of the depths in 1687. This collector's item is neither the cliche of exemplarily beautiful coral nor straightforwardly a historical relic, but an intertwining of the two: the "transfixing" of a remnant of maritime technology by an aquatic agent. It exhibits the very process of encrustation. The spar is juxtaposed with the image of a jellyfish, and more proximately, engravings of Spanish silver coins, also encrusted with coral: "Nummus argenteus Hispanicus . . . incrustatus", one of the labels reads.1 Still another illustration, in a separate engraving, bears the legend "Frustum Ugni e mari atlantico erutum cui adhaerescunt conchae anatiferae margine muricata" - a piece of "drift wood beset with bernecle [sic] shells". It poses a similar puzzle. What appears of interest to the curious is neither the barnacle nor the wood as autonomous specimens but their physical relationship - the fact that they are stuck together.2The engravings in question were commissioned by Hans Sloane for his two- volume Natural history of Jamaica (1707-25). Sloane had visited England's rising sugar colony during 1687-89 as physician to its then governor, Christopher Monck, second Duke of Albemarle, during a period of intense capital investment underwritten by the acceleration of English involvement in the African slave trade, in whose profits Sloane became a direct beneficiary. Although Sloane's voyage to Jamaica is noted for the hundreds of plant specimens he brought back to London, the origins of his Atlantic passage in fact lie under water, in that the original motivation for Monck's acceptance of the governorship was to make a fortune through salvage projects on sunken treasure ships in the Caribbean Sea. Among Sloane's haul of specimens were numerous curiosities, including aquatic objects, such as his coral-encrusted spar and coins. Several of these curiosities were later placed on public view in the British Museum, which opened in 1759 to house the collections Sloane had amassed. To Sloane's rival John Woodward, shipping the physical context of specimens was at best a matter of necessity. "For those pieces which are found lodged in marble or stone", he advised collectors in 1696, "and are not easily got out single, send pieces of the said marble and stone, of all sorts, with the shells so lodged in them". Sloane's engraving of the encrusted spar was neither accident nor instrumentality, however, but a display of learned attention to the processes of mutual transformation between natural and artificial forces, divine creativity and human ingenuity.3Fusions of natural and artificial entities also suggest the relation between worlds of specimen gathering and treasure-hunting in which collectors like Sloane trafficked. This essay pursues early modern curiosity culture's fascination with things encrusted and transfixed into an intensely fetishised zone of collection and signification: the submarine. It aims to open up the history of the underwater realm in early modernity by examining what the anthropologist Michael Taussig suggestively describes as "the art of matter out of place". …

Commemorations of Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), one of the pivotal figures in early modern British science and medicine, turn on the ambiguous relation between the production of natural knowledge and its commercial exploitation. This relation is neatly expressed by the caption that accompanies Godfrey Kneller’s portrait of Sloane (1716), which hangs in the Royal Society. The caption informs visitors that Sloane formed the foundation collection of the British Museum — and invented milk chocolate. It is to this inviting juxtaposition between collection and confection that this essay attends. Traces of Sloane’s sweet legacy are concentrated in West London. The Natural History Museum houses his original cacao specimen as part of the herbarium he assembled from the hundreds of plant species he brought back from the island colony of Jamaica to the imperial capital in 1689. Grand botanical and culinary narratives converge to make it the herbarium’s most prestigious species. Linnaeus used the engraving Sloane made of this sample for his authoritative designation of Theobroma cacao in 1753, making it typespecimen material.1 But Sir Hans Sloane’s Milk Chocolate and the Whole History of the Cacao

What did it mean to go under water in the early modern period? Diving bells had been employed since antiquity, but in the late seventeenth century spectacular recoveries from sunken Caribbean treasure ships prompted renewed innovation. Edmond Halley's diving engine of the 1690s tried to make the depths amenable to the human senses and practical manipulation. This striking attempt to create a dry world under water was part of a larger Baroque culture of the submarine that delighted in astonishing transformations between wet and dry.

Historians and commentators have long discussed tensions between specialist and lay expertise in the making of scientific knowledge. Such accounts have often described quarrels over the distribution of expertise in nineteenth-century "popular" and imperial sciences. The "crowdsourcing" of science on a global scale, however, arguably began in the early modern era. This essay examines the lists of specimen suppliers, the artifacts of a worldwide collecting campaign, published by the London apothecary James Petiver at the turn of the eighteenth century. Listing suppliers helped Petiver advertise his status as a global specimen broker in the Republic of Letters. However, publicly listing his sources drew criticism over the social character of his collecting project, while lists became synonymous with the debasement of learning in polemics over natural history.

That objects of knowledge get moved across boundaries is well known. But how they get moved often goes unexamined. Modes of movement cannot be ignored when considering objects’ historical signi?cance. Put differently, how geographies are negotiated is central to the constitution of knowledge objects. This essay offers a brief assessment of the competing agencies at work in the global collections of the Enlightenment naturalist Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753). While discussing broadly the relationship between collecting and power in Sloane’s career, the essay stresses the passivity and strategic weakness of the collector, and suggests how the meanings of speci?c curiosities varied according to asymmetries in their mode of transfer.

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