British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Writing the History of the Global

British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1

21-22 May 2009

 Enlightened Knowledge and Global Pathways
Dr Simon Schaffer (Cambridge University)

There's something provocative about this workshop's claim that a turn to the history of the global is novel, in view of the very long and deeply troubled association between global concerns and the historiography of the sciences. Enlightenment savants and astronomers were especially concerned with writing global accounts both temporally and spatially. Their modern successors long cherished the reflections that the sciences were virtuous precisely because of their global reach; and that any adequate account of the sciences' emergence must thus be global in extent. In response, recent historiography of the sciences has been distinguished not by a turn to global stories but, rather, by a new orientation to the local, the situated and the microhistorical, in which chronologies have been displaced by maps, and the assumption of universal validity displaced by attention to specific forms of credibility. Charts of the complex and fragile networks on which the sciences depended and which they exploited have become thus common. The global has turned from premise to puzzle. This paper discusses some of these features of histories of global and local knowledges, especially in the case of astronomy. Astronomical sciences both in Europe and in other cultural spheres seem to offer an unusually rich terrain for rethinking the global, since they were used to define various versions of the globe; and they were always accompanied by specific histories written by astronomical practitioners that, reflexively, explained how and why different versions of this knowledge were developed, distributed and contested.