UNDARK
In “Horizons,” a historian of science highlights the crucial achievements of non-Western scientists and thinkers.
Think of a famous scientist from the past. What name did you come up with? Very likely, someone from Europe or the United States. That’s hardly surprising, because science is often taught in Western classrooms as though it’s a European-American endeavor.
James Poskett, a historian of science at the University of Warwick in England, believes this myth is not only misleading but dangerous — and it’s something he sets out to correct in his recent book, “Horizons: A Global History of Science.” Billed as “a major retelling of the history of science,” the book frames the last five centuries of the scientific enterprise as a truly globe-spanning project.
In a recent Zoom conversation, Poskett explained why he believes this retelling is needed. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Undark: You point out that the history of science, as it’s usually taught, focuses on figures like Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. And I think we can agree that those people did actually make vital contributions. But what’s left out when we focus on those figures?
James Poskett: I agree, it’s really important to emphasize that those figures did make contributions that were significant. So my book isn’t about Newton and Darwin and Einstein not mattering. As you say, those people feature in the book. They’re all significant figures in their own right. But by focusing exclusively on them, we miss two global stories.
The first global story is that these famous figures we’ve heard of in fact relied on their global connections to do much of the work that they’re famous for. Newton is a good example, in terms of him relying on information he was collecting from around the world, often from East India Company officers in Asia, or astronomers on slave-trading ships in the Atlantic. So we miss the global dimension of these famous scientists — not just collecting information, but often actually relying on the culture and knowledge of other peoples too.
The other part is the people from outside of Europe who made their own really significant contributions in their own right. There were Chinese, Japanese, Indian, African astronomers, mathematicians, later evolutionary thinkers, geneticists, chemists, who made genuine important contributions to the development of modern science. It completely skews the story if we have this exclusive focus on White European pioneers.
UD: Another interesting point you make is that when textbooks or popular histories of science do mention the contributions of, say, Islamic science or Chinese science, it’s often framed as a historical episode. The reader gets the impression that this was something that happened in the past. In your book, you say this is not only misleading but it can have harmful consequences. How so?
JP: We’re quite actually familiar with the idea that civilizations in the Middle East and Asia, the Islamic world, Hindu civilizations, Chinese civilization — that these contributed in some way to science. But it’s always told as part of a narrative of an ancient or medieval golden age. And I always tell my students, you should be super suspicious, as soon as you hear the term “golden age,” because it’s massively loaded: It’s telling you that there was once this great achievement, there was this once-great civilization — but the emphasis is on “once,” because the “golden age” bit implies a fall from grace, or a dark age afterwards.
At face value, it sounds good — you know, Islamic mathematicians, chemists, astronomers made important contributions in the 10th century — but actually, that’s kind of pushing those achievements way back in the past. It has the rhetorical effect of saying that Islamic science isn’t modern, or Chinese science, or Hindu science, or Mesoamerican science are not part of modernity; there’s something kind of anti-modern about it.
Of course, the Islamic world made important contributions to science in the medieval period. But it didn’t suddenly stop. It continued throughout the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. And that’s really the message of the book.
UD: An obvious turning point, not just in the history of science, but in human history writ large, is when Europeans first made contact with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. In your book, you say that these encounters were critical in terms of thinking of human beings as part of nature. You even write, “The discovery of the New World was also the discovery of humankind.” What do you mean by that?
JP: Broadly, for Europeans, the discovery that there was a “new world” was a major shock to the very foundations of how they thought about knowledge. Knowledge was supposed to be based on ancient texts; it was supposed to be on the authority of ancient Greek and Roman authors, people like Aristotle, or Pliny for geography. And also the Bible was kind of wrapped up with that as well, as a source of ancient authority.
But of course, none of these ancient authors mentioned this enormous continent. And not only was this continent full of life, full of animals and vegetables and plants and minerals that in some cases had not been seen before and weren’t mentioned in the ancient texts — it was full of people!
So this then made thinkers in Europe start saying, well, maybe actually, knowledge isn’t best derived from ancient texts exclusively; maybe we need to go out into the world and look at things to make discoveries. And of course, that’s the metaphor we still use. We talk about scientific “discoveries.”
Humans were seen as separate from the natural world. They were created — in Christian Europe, and most of the major religions at that time — they’re created separately. Humans have a moral element that can be analyzed philosophically and morally, but they’re not meaningfully part of nature in the same way a horse is. But this idea of discovering nature also opened the opportunity that there were things that were to be discovered, not just about the outside world, but about the kind of internal world of the human – that if you could discover a tomato by looking out into the world, maybe you could discover something about humans by looking inside them.
UD: You point out that when we think of the structure of the atom, we tend to think of the New Zealand-born British scientist Ernest Rutherford, who’s often credited with figuring it out. In the book, you talk about an often overlooked figure, Hantaro Nagaoka. Who was he? What was his contribution?
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