Like many of us, I’ve been preparing my teaching for the coming academic year. I’m planning on giving a lecture on early modern science as part of our Galleons and Caravans: Global Connections, 1500–1800 module. I was thinking about how to present these debates on Newton, particularly to a group of students who may have no previous experience in the history of science, but are certainly interested in global history.

Recalling a brief former stint as a computer scienceLink opens in a new window student, I spent a few days putting together an interactive map that is now available online. I hope it will be a useful resource, not just for my students, but for anyone teaching the history of science, or indeed global history.

You can check it out here: https://isaacnewton.world/Link opens in a new window

From the Indian cottons that were traded around Asia and Africa in the Middle Ages, to the global dominance of the blue-and-white pottery of Jingdezhen, and new approaches to the global history of science, in this blog the founding director of the GHCC, Professor Maxine Berg, speaks to Benedict King about five books that transformed our understanding of the past millennium and stand as significant milestones in the development of the vibrant field of global history.

In the last ten years or so historians of science have done much to challenge the existing Eurocentric historiography, yet such works are only just starting to make its way onto core reading lists and into the mainstream of the discipline. In this blog post James Poskett surveys the most exciting new scholarship in the field and makes a case for five books he thinks every historian of science should read. These are books that, whilst often focusing on particular regions or periods, nonetheless speak to the bigger concerns of the discipline. And in fact, for anyone more broadly interested in the history of science, who wants to know where the field is headed, these books are a great place to start.

In this blog post GHCC member Dr James Poskett presents his new book, Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815–1920, published by the University of Chicago Press. His book tells a story of skulls from the Arctic, photographs from India, books from South Africa, and letters from the Pacific. By following these objects across the world, Poskett shows how the circulation of material culture underpinned the emergence of a new materialist philosophy of the mind. As well as a history of phrenology, the book also offers a broader reflection on what it means to write a global history of science.