Afterword: What Next for Cross-Contextualisation?

Abstract

When one sends a piece into the world, one sends it out and then tries never to read it again. Or at least that is the relationship that I tend to have with my own writing. But when it comes to ‘Sciences and the Global’, my sense of the piece is ever more awkward. I wrote this piece quickly and I did not expect it to have so much of a life of its own. A historian can never predict what it is of their writing that is read and what it is that dies a quiet death. For myself, I had not read it for ages. So, when I received the invitation to have this dialogue around it, I had to force myself to dive back in. The piece and the forum around it which was a collective effort including several friends arose from a particular moment in the history of the sciences, when it was difficult to stretch the field to engage with places outside Britain, Europe and North America. To think simply of Cambridge and its Department of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS), which was the home from where this conversation arose and where we meet again now, it was easier to arrange the history of science around scientific disciplines. One could ask a colleague if they were a historian of natural history or a historian of physics or a historian of astronomy, but not specifically if they were working on the Pacific, or West Africa or the Arctic or Britain. This articulation of the patterning of the history of science was tied in turn to a defensive sense of what science is and what historians of science should then attend to as worthy subjects.