Science since 1750

JAMES E. MCCLELLAN III

This article treats the history of science since 1750 from a history of the world perspective. The world and humankind entered a new era over the last three hundred years, and what we know as science has come to play a formidable role in the making of modern history.

Framing the topic: science and world history

We need to problematize several aspects of our topic. What do we mean by “science,” for example? What can we mean in today's world of postmodern critical thought? Science as natural philosophy and a body of knowledge? Science as a social institution? Science as a research enterprise? The sociology of science as a profession, say? Science and the scientific enterprise as institu­tions in society... ones supported by governments and states, for example? What about science as a force of production tied to technology? It is a tall order to combine these diverse elements of what we commonly understand as science, much less to sketch the broad outlines of change over the last two to three hundred years.

These considerations regarding how to think and write about science are only compounded when we ask about world history. An elaborate histor­iographical introduction is not germane here either, especially with the serious historiographical consideration in other chapters and other volumes in The Cambridge World History that more than adequately address the issues involved.^[320] Here, it suffices to point out that there are distinctions to be made between and among possibilities for world history. Is it universal history as in a history of the universe that includes the Earth and humans? Is it a unitary global history of humankind with one perspective on the global past and considered on a world scale, a single history of the world, governed by factors, like population growth or migration, playing themselves out over the longue duree? Is there such a thing as international history? Or, is our world history simply the sum of many histories, the addition of the multifaceted stories of individual peoples, societies, and cultures and all the multicultural diversity of the human experience so far? Or yet, are we still saddled with teleology, the end of history, or crossing some new threshold.

One point becomes immediately apparent when we juxtapose “science” and “world history” in this way: ours cannot be simply the story of Western science and the Western scientific tradition.^[321] Multicultural perspectives are essential. More than one culture and scientific tradition is at play even in the period from 1750 down to today. One has only to think of science and civilization in China and India in order to realize we have to deal with scientific traditions and knowledge systems in a variety of cultural contexts.^[322] To be sure, the story involves the globalization of “Western science” emer­ging out of Europe, particularly after the Scientific Revolution of the six­teenth and seventeenth centuries and then continuing with the union of modern science and technology in the nineteenth century. Any history of science on a global scale since 1750 therefore must account for the success of the West and the maturation of what today can only be called world science. Yet at the same time, historians have now “provincialized” and decentralized Europe in framing accounts from a global perspective.^[323]

By and large, science and its history seem little taken up in the historio­graphy of global or world history studies. The subject does not figure in Stuchtey and Fuchs's 2003 volume on writing world history, and Anthony Giddens does not speak about science at all in his authoritative volumes on Europe and modernity.^[324] Science does not appear in the special number of Storia della Storiografia in 1999 devoted to world history. In textbooks on world history, the Scientific Revolution gets mentioned in a rote way, particularly as tied to the Enlightenment, sometimes accompanied by “docu­ments” of one sort or another, but science otherwise receives largely token treatment, sometimes, as in the present volumes, mixed up as an element of “culture.”

In a highly productive realm of historiography, over the last half-century historians of science have intensely studied science and European colonial expansion, and they have developed a thriving academic field called Science & Empire Studies, but they, too, have only relatively recently turned to more explicitly global and world histories of science.^[325]

Our story also connects historiographically with an elaborate literature in the social sciences pertaining to modernity and globalization.

World systems theory has come in for criticism for its Marxist orientation and reducing everything to economics.11 It has now been refined by Anthony Giddens to encompass several different domains: (1) the world capitalist economy (per Wallerstein), (2) the nation-state system, (3) world military order, (4) international division of labor.1^[330] Obviously modern science is involved in all of these ways. Increasingly, globalization, too, is attracting wide critical attention, and thinkers likewise see it as a multifaceted subject.^[331] For Timothy Brennan in 2004, for example, globalization can variously mean: (1) political unification, (2) trade, commerce and finance, (3) geopolitical and American power, (4) new forms of colonization and imperialism, or even (5) that globalization doesn't exist, that the nation-state and the local are still the norm.^{[332] [333]} Once again, how we want to factor science into these equations complicates any account.

The field of Postcolonial Studies developed in the wake of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), and how science is treated or ignored in this literature should be remarked upon.1⁵ Because of its roots in literary studies and the humanities, Postcolonial Studies, too, has tended not to treat science. Insofar as it has, the field has offered critiques of Western science as arrogant and an instrument of colonial and imperial rule, as we will detail further. More than that, the field of Postcolonial Studies embodies serious postmodern critiques of language and a rejection of master narratives, which has implications not only where science and world history are concerned, but reflexively in framing this account as well.

Another feature of our story has to do with the universalist claims of science. It concerns a contrast to be drawn between universalist knowledge claims on the one hand and the universality of the social penetration and practice of science on the other. That is, since the Pre-Socratics, the claims of science have been universal in scope and applied to all natural phenom­ena. Yet, the social reality has been that knowledge of such claims has been limited to restricted circles and far from universally accepted. In other words, we can differentiate the universalist claims of science from the historical reality of how deeply they have penetrated intellectually and culturally. To illustrate this key point, consider that at the time of the first edition of Newton's Principia in 1687, only two people - Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley - knew of or subscribed to any universal law of gravity wherein every particle in the universe attracts every other particle in mathematical proportion. In 1750 the number of subscribers was already much greater, but not universal by any means when considered from a global point of view. And one can reasonably ask about the extent to which these universal claims of science are recognized or implanted uni­versally today, which adds another dimension to the topic.

The Enlightenment movement of the eighteenth century comes to mind in this same connection. The place of science in the Enlightenment and in the making of modern identities is well known. Even if contested, the story of the Enlightenment and how “reason” became reasonable is an important one to tell. This science-and-Enlightenment perspective begs the question about the fate of the Enlightenment program and the state of science in culture today. What of the continuing cultural wars involving science, not to mention “vernacular” sciences, aboriginal “native” knowledge, or the persistence of odd-ball beliefs?^[334]

Finally, we have to keep in mind the formal international organization of science on a world level. Such was already a feature of European science in the eighteenth century.

With these requirements, pitfalls, and perspectives before us, and to simplify embracing all these topics simultaneously within this small compass, let us begin by taking a snapshot of science on a world scale in 1750.

A snapshot circa 1750

The Western scientific tradition that stretched back to an earlier medieval age in Europe, the Islamic world, and the Greeks was alive and well implanted in Europe in 1750. Science was solidly institutionalized in European universities, in a transnational network of academies and societies of science, astronom­ical observatories, botanical gardens, hospitals, and in a variety of other niches, many state supported.^[335] The earlier Scientific Revolution transformed the understanding of nature and bequeathed to contemporary science and its practitioners new heroes in Bacon, Descartes, and Newton, a new cosmol­ogy, a new physics, and new ideas about the practice of natural philosophical inquiry. Sophisticated communities of academicians, physicians, savants, and amateurs actively pursued research along various lines and on various fronts and contributed to scientific inquiry and a burgeoning enterprise of science in Europe at the time.

Looking at Europe and Western science on the world stage in 1750, European power along with European science extended outward con­siderably, notably to North and South America, the Caribbean, India, and China. The empires and science of Spain and Portugal were stag­nant, but not to be overlooked, and the Dutch with their outposts in Batavia, including the scientific society, the Bataviaasch Genootschapt van Kunsten en Wetenschappen (1778), were more important players than usually credited. The British and the French were the major colonial powers, and science and medicine were both instrumentalities of over­seas expansion and also beneficiaries of the global spread of European power and influence. With the scientific expeditions of Bougainville, Cook, and La Perouse in the second half of the eighteenth century, Western science clearly demonstrated a global reach. The European outpost at Botany Bay in Australia speaks volumes in this regard. Yet, that grasp was more tentative than it would become in the nineteenth century and today. The Jesuits did run the Astronomical Bureau for the emperor in China, and there were European traders in Canton, but much else of the mandarinate in China in 1750 had its own institutions and cadres of experts with their special knowledge and remained far from touched or assimilated by Europeans. The same can be said of contemporary high civilization in India. Europeans displayed a probing interest in various aspects of Chinese and Indian science and medicine,

pp. 153-165; James E. McClellan III and Franςois Regourd, The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2011). See also earlier foundational works, including Rene Taton, ed., Enseignement et diffusion des sciences en France au dix-huitieme siecle (Paris: Hermann, 1964; reprint, 1986), and Charles C. Gillispie, Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton University Press, 1980). E. C. Spary, Utopia's Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (The University of Chicago Press, 2000), throws further light on the organiza­tion of contemporary science and its institutionalization and pursuit across Europe and around the world. Bertrand Daugeron, Collections naturalistes entre science et empires, 1763­1804 (Paris: Museum national d'histoire naturelle, 2009), offers the same for the period stretching into the nineteenth century.

in addition to a respectful stance towards medical and botanical knowl­edge held by aboriginal peoples everywhere.^[336]

For its adepts in Europe, America, and to a small extent elsewhere around the world in 1750 the enterprise of science and its goal remained largely natural philosophy, the disinterested pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake, a noble quest to decode the secrets of nature. Nevertheless, the support of science and useful knowledge by contempor­ary governments needs to be pointed out. The link between science and government goes back to the first civilizations, of course, and polities of all sorts have always needed and deployed experts in the service of governance.^[337] This was no less true for the nation-states of Europe in the eighteenth century. Some institutions have been mentioned, and it is not for nothing that Isaac Newton left the university to become Master of the Mint in London, as well as President of the Royal Society of London. Many institutional and individual examples could be cited to show the contem­porary science and government link. As it turns out, then, government- sponsored science and expertise facilitated the outward expansion of Europe and the maintenance of overseas colonies and trade. With state support, work in astronomy, botany, cartography, medicine, and a host of related areas was bent to colonial and later imperialist ends. In turn, the enterprise and practical bounds of science in Europe became enlarged by the overseas experience and expanded contact with the rest of the world. Contemporary European science thereby became complicit in bolstering the institution of slavery and retrogressive state economic policies of mercantilism.

In eighteenth-century Europe, as elsewhere, science and technology were still largely separate enterprises. Sociologically and intellectually, the world of everyday technologies took place at considerable remove from the contem­porary world of science and natural philosophy. We can speak of applied science in the context of government patronage mentioned above, wherein mapmaking and using astronomical methods to determine longitude can serve as examples. Contemporaries didn't spurn opportunities to turn science into practical application, for which Franklin's electrical science and the lightning rod provide a nice example.^[338] Science, rationality, and experiment had a large cultural impact at the time, but science and contemporary industry had little to do with one another, again sociologically or intellectually.^[339] The connection was between science and government, not science and industry. The Industrial Revolution that took off in England in the second half of the century arose out of the world of technology, not science. Effected for the most part by unlettered mechanics in the country­side in England, the Industrial Revolution with its steam engines, coal and iron mining industries, mechanization of the textile industry, and the rest had nothing to do with science in the city or any effort to apply science in industry.^[340] The ideology of Francis Bacon that science could or should be tapped for its useful application was without direct effect. The Industrial Revolution only coincidentally followed the Scientific Revolution.

In the eighteenth century the natural sciences anchored a broad and consequential intellectual and social movement, the Enlightenment. As is well known, science and the Scientific Revolution sparked the Enlightenment movement and inspired rational inquiry across a broad range of subjects in the social and political sciences, psychology, theology, and jurisprudence.^[341] Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence are unthinkable without Newton and a universal gravity of political atoms; Condorcet's Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind of 1793 and the French Revolution likewise make this clear. The renowned Republic of Letters was characteristic of the period of the Enlightenment, organized internationally across Europe and abroad with the academies serving as its capitals, and this Republic is not to be overlooked as indicative of the cultural impact and penetration of science in contemporary Western civilization.^[342]

As far as concerns the intellectual history of science, in the useful model put forward by Thomas S. Kuhn, scientific research in the eighteenth century generally speaking unfolded along two large and largely separate arcs: research in the more theoretical, mathematical and demanding sciences like astronomy and mechanics with their roots in antiquity - the so-called Classical sciences - and the so-called Baconian sciences, more experimental, empirical and easily accessible domains of scientific inquiry such as electricity, magnetism, or meteorology that largely originated in the seventeenth century.^[343] Considerable empirical work expanded domains in botany, natural history, geology, and geography across the century, not least because of the overseas expansion of Europeans. The multinational observations of the Transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769 that included Captain Cook observing from Tahiti are exemplary in this regard. In this context, too, Lavoisier and the Chemical Revolution of the eighteenth century stand out: Historiographically always something of a revolutionary outlier, with important developments in pneumatic chemistry, the chemistry of com­bustion, chemical nomenclature, and ultimately chemical atoms, the Chemical Revolution makes sense in Kuhn's model in terms of rationalizing chemistry within the Baconian sciences and under the theoretical aegis of Newton of the Opticks (1704). As vibrant, manifold, and growing as were these research endeavors, overall the natural sciences collectively lacked conceptual unity in 1750.

The wedding of science and industry

The important story behind science in the nineteenth century concerns the union of science and industry. The connection between science and govern­ment did not go away and, in fact, expanded as industrialization proceeded. But a potent novelty in this new era was what we can more readily identify as the union of science and industry and the emergence of modern applied science.^[344] The ideology goes back to Bacon, but this kind of applied science began in earnest in the nineteenth century as part of ongoing industrialization and the development of capitalism. Posed this way, we have to specify what was the science involved, what were the industries, and precisely how science conjoined with technology to become a powerful motor in the making of industrial civilization today.

The Industrial Revolution that began in England in the eighteenth century unleashed a momentous social and economic transformation, comparable in its effects to the Neolithic and Urban Bronze Age revolutions of so many millennia earlier. The result - still ongoing - was the rise of industrial civilization and a new mode of human existence. To repeat, the Industrial Revolution got off the ground without the aid or application of science in any notable way, but that changed as the nineteenth century unfolded and as applied science in industry developed. Historians of tech­nology debate whether there have been multiple “industrial revolutions” that have given rise to the world order we have today, and distinctions need to be drawn. But from the big picture perspective, one overarching, snowballing process seems to have been at play, transforming and continu­ing to transform life and the world as we know it. Science and science-based technologies have self-evidently contributed to the making of industrial civilization today.

Over the course of the nineteenth century the intellectual accomplish­ments of science, particularly the physical sciences, were tremendous, and it was this body of knowledge that leaked into practical and world­transforming new technologies. The details are fairly straightforward.^[345] One account starts with Newtonian ethers, Galvani's frog legs, and the invention of the battery by Alessandro Volta in 1800. Current electricity was virtually a new phenomenon of nature created by science, and it had wide scientific and technological impact. For science, the ramifications passed through Humphry Davy (1778-1829) and electrochemistry, John Dalton (1766-1844) and chemical atomism, and the mathematization of electricity and magnetism by way of Andre-Marie Ampere and the calculus. Compliments of Hans Christian Oersted and Michael Faraday, by 1831 scientific understanding had led to the technological development of motors, generators, and electromagnets. The telegraph was a new and consequential technology that emerged in 1837. Thomas Alva Edison inau­gurated the first electric lighting system in New York City in 1882. The telephone, invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, is a related and likewise consequential technological outcome stemming from nineteenth­century physical science. Another stream in this same flow emerges out of James Clerk Maxwell's work and the mathematization of Faraday's elec­tromagnetic field, notably in Heinrich Hertz's discovery of radio waves in 1887 and their almost immediate application by Guglielmo Marconi, as “wireless telegraphy,” which ultimately turned into radio and then television.

The dye industry in Germany proved another influential locus of applied science in the nineteenth century. This confluence depended on the for­midable maturation of analytical and organic chemistry in the context of German universities revived after Napoleon as research institutions, as well as peculiarities of German patent law and the state of German unification. Beginning with the first synthetic aniline dye by William Perkin in 1856 and moving on to the whole spectrum of coal tar dyes and their widespread application in dying, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and explosives, compa­nies like Bayer embraced science and forged tight links with responsive chemistry departments in universities. The novelty in this case was the creation of the first industrial research lab by the Bayer Company in 1874. The model was taken up by other industries in the nineteenth and twen­tieth centuries. A new model of invention and technology as applied science had finally arrived.^[346]

As much as we need to highlight new connections between science and industry in the nineteenth century, we cannot overlook continuing connec­tions between science and governments and the industrialization of war that took place on a vast scale in this period.^[347] Chemical warfare used in World War I is a telling example, and a host of war-related examples come to mind (the gunboat, rifled artillery, the machine gun, the dreadnought, chemical weapons, tanks, and airplanes, not to mention the trusty telegraph) showing the potency of applied science in the military. Governments thereby sup­ported and added to the momentum of industrialization and the integration of science into government as well as industry. It is not too crude to say that the place and role of science in society moved from the superstructure of natural philosophy to become part of the base and the means of production of contemporary industrial civilization.

Applied science in the military increased the ability of the West to impose itself on the rest of the world, and in this way science became a tool of empire. All Western colonial and imperial powers deployed scien­tists, physicians, engineers, and like experts in support of their burgeoning colonial and imperial endeavors.^[348] The various Pasteur Institutes spread around the French empire, for example, illustrate the reach and role of science in the colonial context of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.

As a concommitant feature of these developments, science in the West became professionalized in the nineteenth century in recognizably modern ways.^[349] That William Whewell coined the English word “scientist” in 1840 is emblematic of what was involved. The above-mentioned reform of German universities after 1815 as research institutions with laboratories and graduate programs, the explosion of specialized institutions such as the Geological Society of London (1807), and professional associations like the British Society for the Advancement of Science (1831) or its American counterpart, the AAAS (1847) bespeak these changed circumstances as science became a full-time occupation pursued by Ph.D. researchers in social roles that had become plainly demarked and acknowledged. While French had been the interna­tional language of science in the eighteenth and first decades of the nine­teenth century, it was German for the rest of the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries.

Although not without antecedents in the previous Republic of Letters, new forms for the organization and pursuit of science emerged on the international level in the nineteenth century. Formal relations between and among European and American scientific institutions continued, as did common research projects, such as the international geomagnetic survey of 1827-1848. But international scientific congresses were the novelty in the international organization of science beginning in the nine­teenth century.^[350] They set the pattern for the exchange of the latest research findings and organizing international projects. Such specialized disciplinary meetings forged scientific contacts across borders and new forms of international scientific relations. They created international com­munities of scientists and spurred an identity of scientific internationalism, although still almost wholly within the Western imperium. But nationalis­tic sentiments formed the backdrop to such conferences and continued to shape international congresses and the international organization of science down to today.

As far as the intellectual history of science in the nineteenth century is concerned, to reprise Kuhn's model, we can simplify by pointing to what has been labeled the Second Scientific Revolution. This overlooked con­ceptual transformation involved the mathematization of the Baconian sciences (notably electricity and magnetism) and the unification of the previously separate Classical and Baconian sciences. The result is modern physics, something as we know it today. By the end of the nineteenth century, a grand intellectual synthesis and picture of the world - the Classical World View - emerged. For a brief period before 1905 and Einstein, physicists and chemists achieved a powerful if fragile and not uncontested scientific vision of the cosmos. Starting with Newton's abso­lute space and time (and therefore the flow of history), this vision held the universe to consist of three components: immutable chemical atoms endowed with the power of universal gravity, combining chemically, and bouncing around according to the laws of mechanics; the force of energy that changed from one form to another, but conserved itself in its protean guises; and a universal ether, the physical substrate of light and electro­magnetic radiation. Thermodynamics and the discovery and mathematical mastery of energy and its behavior, incidentally, was one of the great achievements of nineteenth-century physics brought about by Joule, Kelvin, Maxwell, Clausius, and others. These discoveries and accomplish­ments cemented the moral authority of science, particularly the physical sciences, as a body of knowledge and a means of knowing, as well as a font of utility. Ironically, another of those pillars of modern scientific under­standing - Darwinian evolution - was likewise the product of nineteenth­century science, but remained on the margins at the turn of the twentieth century, in good measure because the physicists denied Darwin the time needed to permit evolution. Much would change in science after Einstein and 1905.

World science and industrial civilization today

By 1900 the world had become a very different place than it was in 1800, as industrialization worked its transforming effects. We need to distinguish between and among the industrial revolution as something that unfolded in England, the larger process of industrialization that spread around the world, and industrial civilization as the practical and social/cultural result. Industrialization and industrial civilization have expanded and spread over the last two hundred years to the point where the Earth is entangled in one interconnected, intertwined, and interdependent global ecology of humans and the natural world. The most remote human outposts and regions of the globe today are not untouched by industrial civilization, but are now connected by the tentacles of progress. That the world population has grown from one billion in 1800 past the threshold of seven billion today is only one measure of the dramatic global changes that have developed in the period under review here. The exponential growth of science beyond even these indicators underscores the importance of science and industrial civilization on a world scale today.^[351] With increasing momentum in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, science and science-based technologies have been and remain non-trivial factors driving world- historic change.

A simple laundry list shows the place and role of science and science-based technologies in industrial civilization on a world scale today. Almost ran­domly consider airplanes, automobiles,... transportation systems,... instantaneous global communication facilitated by orbiting satellites. Let's not forget about computers and the Internet and all that has come with, compliments of materials science and the silicon chip. Think how these technologies have restructured the world and everyday life in only the last half century. Any number of examples of continuing connections between science and the military tell the same tale, from stealth bombers to remotely operated drones to God knows what else. And, we should not overlook scientific medicine and what has resulted from medical applications of scientific research in biology, chemistry, and a host of related fields. At least in part, today's hyper-connected and global world owes itself to science and in some sense is the product of science. This begs the question of how exactly science has been tapped and applied in the technologies of contemporary civilization.

The atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 represent an iconic case of applied science in the modern age, not least because they ended one war and started another, the Cold War, wherein physicists and nuclear weapons held the balance. The Bomb is a bad example to the extent that it uncritically inspires the cliche of technology as applied science.^[352] The Bomb was a clear­cut and direct application of scientific theory to a practical application, knowl­edge from the cutting edge of the research front being turned directly to practical application, in this case from Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn and the conceptualization of nuclear fission in 1938 /1939 to the Americans obliterat­ing Japanese cities in 1945.

The reality of applied science in industrial and increasingly world civiliza­tion, however, is somewhat different from this sexy sense of science in society. More often, it involves what the historian DerekPrice labeled “boiled down science” or the mundane (but hardly trivial) exploitation of knowledge by engineers or R&D specialists using what's available in textbooks, say, or online.^[353] The invention of xerography and photocopying is exemplary here. Chester Carlson, a chemist and lawyer, developed the process by himself in his kitchen in 1938 using what he knew of optics and photochemistry. That for decades Carlson had to peddle his invention (with a wall of patent protection around it) or that photocopying machines did not come into general use until the 1960s says that much else is always involved when “science” gets trans­muted into “technology.” In this case considerable R&D, financing and business arrangements, and key marketing decisions had to be made before the technology migrated into copiers and printers and became a technologi­cal commonplace everywhere in the world. This instance turns another cliche on its head, with invention becoming the mother of necessity.

In the 1980s historians of technology, among others, introduced the concept of a technological system, or the idea of an entire set of things and ways of doing things required for any working technology, distinguishing, for example, between the artifact of a light bulb from all that's required to make it glow. Science and applied science are probably better thought of as part of the coming into being of technological systems, rather than as science somehow, almost mechanically, turned into technology. The concept of technological systems has proved most useful in conceptualizing today's incredible technol­ogies and the place and role of science in innovation and new product devel­opment. The work of Thomas Parke Hughes stands out in this regard, and for Hughes and like-minded colleagues, rightly, science is only a piece of the whole puzzle that has to fall into place for a new science-based technology to emerge.^[354] The electric car or wind or solar power technologies come to mind as examples. These days, systems thinking transcends privileging science or its application, as we somehow used to think.

Industrial civilization brought the industrialization of scientific research itself or what is known as Big Science. In Big Science today industrial-scale teams pursue scientific and applied science research in huge facilities on a large scale. The Manhattan Project and building the atomic bomb is a paradigmatic example; the best example currently is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator operated by CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) on the Franco- Swiss border outside of Geneva. The LHC is a 26-kilometer ring built 100 meters underground and outfitted with particle detectors the size of six-story buildings; CERN itself employs 4,400 people. A list of such Big Science projects would go on to include other particle accelerators, national space programs, or the race to build the world's fastest computer. Any deep­space project and many ground-based astronomical observatories fit this category. All of these projects and more like them in the physical and biological sciences (such as the Human Genome Project) involve bringing together large, complex teams of researchers developing and using complex technological instruments for sophisticated research and application. Teams and individuals are inevitably specialized scientific workers, numbering in the hundreds and even thousands in multinational collaborative networks, con­nected by computer and massive data processing. The expenses involved in this kind of research and development are enormous, funding at this scale mostly coming from governments, but also from regional, multinational, and industry sources. Thirty countries funded the LHC at a total cost of nearly two billion dollars. The Hubble Space Telescope cost approximately three billion dollars to build, service, and operate over the course of the period 1990-2007; the 2003-2005 Mars Exploration Rover Mission project cost $820 million. Nationalistic and military research may be less multinational, but no less industrial and managerial in this regard, and the phenomenon is worldwide. Small-scale science done by individuals or small teams, charac­teristic of the enterprise of science before the twentieth century, has not gone away and often, as in botany, paleontology, or mathematics, for example, produces important results. The industrialization of scientific research in the twentieth century is so new and such a marker of the blending of science and technology and of modernity on a global scale that it has been given the name Technoscience.^[355] The term is a loose one with shades of meaning suggesting a seamless merger of what might be thought of separately as science and technology.

An argument can be made that science today is no longer “Western” per se, but has now gone global and become a world phenomenon, not in the sense of science studying the world as a whole, but institutionalized and implanted worldwide.^[356] That is, what we think of as science or human understanding of nature may have (but only for the most part) come out of Europe and the West, but science today has vaulted to and implanted itself on the global level. To the extent that this claim is true, the globalization of Western science is a remarkable phenomenon in the history of science and world history since 1750. For current circumstances concerning science in society the suggestion is to drop the strawman label of “Western” science and substitute “modern science” or “science today” instead.^[357] Plenty of evidence supports this approach. Consider what is taught in university-level science courses, say physics or even biology 101, in China or India or Malaysia or Korea, Taiwan, or anywhere around the globe. Consider the rankings of nations in science and technology. And, world science is also the implantation of industries and R&D culture internationally. The spread of nuclear power and nuclear weapons to places like Pakistan in its way testifies to the global frame of reference that we now need to deploy in thinking about science and science-based technologies far and wide. The globalization of Western medicine and scientific medicine is only more true, with organized and institutionalized medicine of this sort found in hospitals and medical centers around the world today. The return of overseas Chinese scientists to their homeland is a recognized phenomenon, and China and India are already building cadres of scientific and technical experts and attractive facilities to support them at home. Places like Saudia Arabia and Qatar are not to be overlooked as developing centers of scientific research and application.^[358] R&D is no longer strictly nationally based; what is important is innovation and application via global communication networks, not national or industry-based traditional R&D. Here, the multinational corporation versus the nation-state needs to be brought into focus in discussing the globalization of science. Europe and the USA account for slightly less than two-thirds of world R&D spending, but that share is decreasing, and other parts of the world spend proportionately much more on science R&D than does the USA^[359] The rest of the world is producing an increasing share of research spending, patents, and scientists and engineers outside of traditional areas in Europe and the USA.

Such a change in terminology and perspective shifts the emphasis to where it belongs, away from the loaded term “Western science” and postcolonial conflict with the West (and its science) toward a more encompassing per­spective and a range of other issues: the distribution of wealth within societies and across the globe; the state of the nation-state and the global organization of nations; the state of the world economy and world capitalism today; the success or inexorability of global and other globalizing institutions; centrifu­gal forces be they regional, local, or cultural; population, production, con­sumption, and the huge ecological effects of how we are living today,... in short, to straight thinking about industrial civilization and the state of the planet today. Science today is both part of these concerns and affected by them. In this connection, Postcolonial Studies scholars Gesa Mackenthun and Sunne Juterczenka have suggested that the epistemological “fuzziness” we must bring to thinking about science is partly the result of its internationa­lization and globalization.^[360]

In the meantime, what can we say of the remarkable development of science as natural philosophy in the twentieth and now twenty-first cen­tury? That is, science as a body of knowledge not only to be put to use in industrial civilization, but to explain the natural world around us. That story involved the collapse of the Classical World View of the nineteenth century and can only be suggested here by waving at Einstein and general and special relativity, the discovery of radioactivity and particle physics as these fields developed, the quantum theory of light and then the quantum mechanics and uncertainty as understood and articulated by Werner Heisenburg and Erwin Schrodinger and later Niels Bohr; Edwin Hubble and an expanding universe, Big Bang cosmology, and the Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias discovery of the 3° Kelvin background radiation in 1965. A notable theoretical and practical development in twentieth-century science was the revival and success of Darwinian evolution along with Mendel's genes and their confirmation in the discovery of the double helical nature of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. Subsequent developments in genetics, consequential for natural philosophy and for practical applica­tion (think of DNA forensics, for example), have been spectacular over the last half century, and evolutionary thinking has refracted into huge areas of scientific thought, not least concerning sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Add to this psychology, paleontology, plate tectonics, and the full panoply of scientific knowledge today, and we are well equipped to tell unprecedentedly sophisticated stories about ourselves and the nat­ural world around us. With every epistemological and postmodern caveat in mind, these incredible stories make science a great human intellectual and cultural achievement. It is a human-based explanatory enterprise that remains open-ended. Scientific questions over dark matter and dark energy, for example, and related speculations at the research front of so many fields today are both fascinating and make us ultimately tentative about an “end of science.” But science's claims are the best we've got presently and in this author's opinion the best we can get in principle.

More than one international association and commission now binds scientific research and researchers together on a global level, including UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and the umbrella organization, the International Council for Science, founded in 1931 as the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), with well over one hundred affiliated organizations, including that for the history and philosophy of science. The ICSU and its subordinate unions sponsor many congresses, conferences, symposia, and meetings around the world annually. There are hundreds and thousands of international scientific and specialist conferences with as many specialist societies and organizations sponsoring these events. If the international language of science was German in the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries, then after a detour through Russian, it is now almost universally English.

Science and industrial civilization have been the subject of criticism, especially in the postcolonial period following the Second World War. Decolonization has not entailed a democratization of science, although it has a bit with science-based technologies, such as cell phones, that have significantly impacted economically disadvantaged countries and peoples. But nevertheless, rich and poor countries and peoples separate themselves out today not just economically, but also scientifically and technologically.^[361] A divide exists, an imbalance between haves and have-nots that offers further perspectives on the enterprise of science on a world scale today. Many topics involving science and global issues have not been sufficiently broached. These include the existence and character of whatever “colonial science” remains in former colonies, the Third World Academy of Science, brain drain, the skewed investments of multinational corporations in R&D over­seas, biopiracy, biopatents, “ethno botany,” native patrimony and rights, and intellectual property.^[362]

The Postcolonial Studies critique mentioned above sees science too often as part of a grand narrative about the Enlightenment, reason, progress, freedom, democracy, equality, justice, and a universalizing rationality of European origin.^[363] The field proposes a counter narrative about science from a global vantage point that involves imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, slavery, subjugation, domination, appropriation, exploitation, profit, and self-interest.^[364] Other critics have bemoaned cultural homogenization and the decline of and threats to local cultures brought on by science and industrialization, especially with world science now closely tied to technolo­gical progress, the market economy, and doctrines of rationality. Science and scientists are part of the “technical-managerial elite” in cahoots with univer­sities, industry, and government to rule the world. Regionalism, ethnocentr­ism, superstitions, and fundamentalisms of various sorts continue to challenge the hegemony of world science and industrial civilization. The ecological effects of industrial civilization hardly need to be remarked upon, including science and industries as contributing factors to climate change and environmental issues affecting world history. How humanity lives today is astounding and begs the question about the future of industrial civilization. In this sense science today is part of the problem, but potentially part of the solution.

The distinction is made in French between “mondalisation” and “globali­sation.” The former is taken to mean something local, raised informally from the bottom up, almost by diffusion, to the world level, as in your local Chinese, Thai or Mexican take-out, versus “globalisation” which implies the homogenization of global culture, more like the McDonalds or Starbucks on your corner. From this perspective the enterprise of science is indicative of something in between. It is surely global, as experts can migrate from one lab or project to another. But there is no single mark or brand. The enterprise of science is still very nation-based and supported by local interests, yet to an extent free from them and corporate interests, too. Not just anyone can do science, either, as we might open an ethnic restaurant. Then, if there is such a thing as “demondialisation,” will science, too, retreat into regional or local identities?

The cultural impact of science in the modern world has been great, certainly in secular democratic societies, but sadly, it is not uncontested even there. Around the globe one can ask about the reality of science as simply an instrument providing powers versus science linked to values and the Enlightenment program of reason, human understanding, and human progress

Further reading

Bijker, Wiebe E., Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds. The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions on the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.

Daugeron, Bertrand. Collections naturalistes entre science et empires, 1763-1804. Paris: Museum national d'histoire naturelle, 2009.

de SoUa Price, Derek J. Little Science, Big Science... and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Dorn, Harold. The Geography of Science. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Fuchs, Eckhardt. “The politics of the Republic of Learning: international scientific congresses in Europe, the Pacific Rim, and Latin America,” in Eckhardt Fuchs and Benedikt Stuchtey (eds.), Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective. Lanham, md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, pp. 205-244.

Galison, Peter and Bruce Hevly, eds. Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research. Stanford University Press, 1992.

Elshakry, Marwa. “When science became Western: historiographical reflections.” ISIS 101 (2010), 98-109.

Gillispie, Charles C. Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime. Princeton University Press, 1980.

Hughes, Thomas P. American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970. New York: Viking, 1989.

Huigen, Siegfried. Knowledge and Colonialism: Eighteenth-Century Travellers in South Africa. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009.

Jacob, Margaret C. Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West. Oxford University Press, 1997.

Juterczenka, Sunne and Gesa Mackenthum, eds. The Fuzzy Logic of Encounter: New Perspectives on Cultural Contact. Munster, New York, Munchen, Berlin: Waxmann, 2009.

Kuhn, Thomas S. “Mathematical versus experimental traditions in the development of physical science,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 7 (1976), pp. 1-31. [Reprinted in Kuhn, The Essential Tension. University of Chicago Press, 1977, pp. 31-65.]

Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton University Press, 1986.

McClellan, James E. III. Colonialism and Science: SaintDominguein the Old Regime. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992; reprint with a new preface by Vertus Saint-Louis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

“Science and empire studies and postcolonial studies: a report from the contact zone,” in Gesa Mackenthun and Klaus Hock (eds.), Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship, vol. 4. Munster: Waxmann, 2012, pp. 51-74.

Science Reorganized: Scientific Societies in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

“Scientific institutions and the organization of science,” in Roy Porter (ed.), The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 4: Science in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 99-120.

McClellan, James E. III, ed. The Applied Science Problem. Jersey City, nj: Jensen/Daniels Publishers, 2008.

McClellan, James E. III and Harold Dorn. Science and Technology in World History: An Introduction: Second Edition. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006; 3rd edn. 2015.

McClellan, James E. III and Franςois Regourd. The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2011.

Osborne, Michael A. Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

“Science and the French Empire,” ISIS 96 (2005), pp. 80-87.

Price, Tom. “Globalizing Science,” CQ Global Researcher 5 (2011), pp. 53-78.

Pyenson, Lewis. Civilizing Mission: Exact Sciences and French Overseas Expansion, 1830-1940. Baltimore and London: TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Cultural Imperialism and Exact Sciences: German Expansion Overseas 1900-1930. New York: Peter Lang, 1985.

Empire of Reason: Exact Sciences in Indonesia, 1840-1940. Leiden; New York: E. J. Brill, 1989.

Raj, Kapil. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900. Delhi: Permanent Black; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Regourd, Franςois. “Science in the French colonies,” in George N. Vlahakis, Isabel Maria Malaquias, Nathan M. Brooks, Franςois Regourd, Feza Gunergun, and David Wright (eds.), Imperialism and Science: Social Impact and Interactian. Santa Barbara, Denver, Oxford: A.B.C. Clio, 2006, chapter 3.

Safier, Neil. “Global knowledge on the move: itineraries, Amerindian narratives, and deep histories of science,” [Focus: Global Histories of Science] ISIS 101 (2010), pp. 133-45.

Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America. University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Sivasundaram, Sujit. “Introduction” and “Sciences and the global: on methods, questions, and theory,” ISIS 101 (2010), pp. 95-97 and 146-58. [Focus: Global Histories of Science, ISIS 101 (2010), pp. 95-158.]

Spary, E. C. Utopia's Garden: French Natural Historyfrom Old Regime to Revolution. The University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Stuchtey, Benedikt, ed. Science across the European Empires, 1800-1950. Oxford: German Historical InstituteZOxford University Press, 2005.

Stuchtey, Benedikt and Eckhardt Fuchs, eds. Writing World History, 1800-2000. Oxford: Oxford University PressZGerman Historical Institute London, 2003.

Taton, Rene, ed. Enseignement et diffusion des sciences en France au dix-huitieme siecle. Paris: Hermann, 1964; reprint, 1986.

Tilley, Helen. “Global histories, vernacular science, and African genealogies; or, is the history of science ready for the world.” [Forum: Global Histories of Science] ISIS 101 (2010), pp. 110-119.