About the author

Dr. James Poskett is Reader in the History of Science and Technology at the University of Warwick.

An active member of the GHCC, Dr. Poskett is currently working on a new project titled The Scientific Revolution as Global History, 1200–1800. This project is supported by a British Academy / Wolfson Fellowship.

Special Issue: The History of Science and the ‘Big Picture’

What does it meant to write the history of science and the ‘big picture’? This was the question we asked, and tried to answer, at the Global History and Culture Centre annual conference in 2022.

Co-organised with my colleague, Michael Bycroft, the conference aimed to get beyond the mass of localised case studies in the history of science, and in doing so, get to some ‘bigger questions’. It was envisioned as a response to a similar special issue which was published in 1993 in the British Journal for the History of Science. In that original 1993 special issue, James A. Secord, argued that “the striking lessons of recent research need to be applied to longer time spans, a broader range of participants, and wider regional and global perspectives.” We wanted to take up that challenge again today.

I’m delighted to say that a special issue of The British Journal for the History of Science: Themes has just been published collecting together a series of papers from the conference, and some additional ones from people who joined along the way.

The collection, edited by myself, features twelve papers alongside a roundtable conversation. There are papers on topics including the role of crises in the history of science, the use of digital humanities, what happens when we look at the history of science from outer space, and what David Graeber might have thought about the ‘big picture’. There’s even a defence of “neo-positivism” in the history of science! (Contributors, like those to the original 1993 special issue on the ‘big picture’, were “invited to be speculative, sketchy, polemical and provocative.”)

All the papers are available open access. So if you’re interested in the future of the history of science, do take a look!

 

The British Journal for the History of Science, volume 9 - 2024. Guest edited by Dr. James Poskett.