British Journal for the History of Science最新文献

Essay review: the fictive history of Victorian science and empire.

IF 0.7 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2024-12-19 DOI: 10.1017/S0007087424001249

Jacob Steere-Williams

{"title":"Essay review: the fictive history of Victorian science and empire.","authors":"Jacob Steere-Williams","doi":"10.1017/S0007087424001249","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087424001249","url":null,"abstract":"In 1820 two French scientists - Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Jean Bienaimé Caventou - discovered and named the active alkaloid substance extracted from cinchona bark: quinine. The bark from the 'wondrous' fever tree, and its antimalarial properties, however, had long been known to both colonial scientists and indigenous Peruvians. From the mid-seventeenth century, cinchona bark, taken from trees that grow on the eastern slopes of the Andes, was part of a global circulation of botanical knowledge, practice and profit. By the 1850s, Europeans eager to bypass South American trade routes to access cinchona plants established plantations across the global South in French Algeria, Dutch Java and British India. Wardian cases - plant terrariums named after British physician Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward - would fuel new imperial efforts to curb malaria, contemporaries argued. And yet cinchona trees proved difficult to transport over land and sea, and did not easily or universally thrive in new tropical climates. As a result of the growing demand and uncertainty around cinchona, as Pratik Chakrabarti has argued, from the late eighteenth century there was 'a global scientific obsession' with finding a 'substitute' for cinchona, particularly local alternatives in India and China.","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"1-3"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142855877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Cold War aviation: American technology transfer and the construction of Turkey's first international civilian airport in Yeşilköy, Istanbul, 1944-1953. 冷战航空：美国技术转让与 1944-1953 年在伊斯坦布尔耶希尔科伊建造土耳其第一个国际民用机场。

IF 0.7 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2024-12-16 DOI: 10.1017/S0007087424001225

Tanfer Emin Tunc, Gokhan Tunc

{"title":"Cold War aviation: American technology transfer and the construction of Turkey's first international civilian airport in Yeşilköy, Istanbul, 1944-1953.","authors":"Tanfer Emin Tunc, Gokhan Tunc","doi":"10.1017/S0007087424001225","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087424001225","url":null,"abstract":"With the economic and political support of the United States, in July 1947, Turkey signed contracts with the Westinghouse Electric International Company and J.G. White Engineering Corporation to construct its first international civilian airport, Istanbul's Yeşilköy Airport. As this article will argue, the building of Yeşilköy (1949-53), through a partnership with two American engineering firms, is essentially an early Cold War narrative of transnational exchange involving the multidirectional flow of technical knowledge, expertise and resources between the United States and Turkey; the circulation of geopolitically significant (and frequently competing) military, civilian and government actors; and the local and global implications of these transmissions. Yet the Yeşilköy construction narrative also illustrates how post-war technology transfer was a highly political process of constant adaptation, modification and negotiation. Fraught with unforeseen friction and thorny challenges, Yeşilköy exemplifies the complicated American Cold War strategy of creating and maintaining alliances through engineering knowledge, personnel and practices, often with unintended consequences. Moreover, as a case study, Yeşilköy opens a new window into the cautious science diplomacy that occurred along the Iron Curtain, while filling a notable historiographic gap with respect to aviation in early Cold War Turkey.","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"1-20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142830405","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Essay review: Why we fight about science. 论文评论：我们为何为科学而战？

IF 0.7 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2024-12-16 DOI: 10.1017/S0007087424001237

William Thomas

引用次数: 0

When Scottish medicine hospitalized Indian magic: Dr James Esdaile's mesmeric surgery in mid-nineteenth-century Bengal. 当苏格兰医学将印度魔法带入医院时：詹姆斯-埃斯戴尔医生在十九世纪中期孟加拉的迷幻手术。

IF 0.7 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2024-12-16 DOI: 10.1017/S000708742400116X

Kapil Raj

引用次数: 0

Atmospheres of influence: the role of journal editors in shaping early climate change narratives. 影响氛围：期刊编辑在塑造早期气候变化叙述中的作用。

IF 0.7 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2024-12-13 DOI: 10.1017/S0007087424001304

Robert Naylor, Eleanor Shaw

{"title":"Atmospheres of influence: the role of journal editors in shaping early climate change narratives.","authors":"Robert Naylor, Eleanor Shaw","doi":"10.1017/S0007087424001304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087424001304","url":null,"abstract":"The role of editorial staff in shaping early climate change narratives has been underexplored and deserves more attention. During the 1970s, the epistemological underpinnings of the production of knowledge on climate change were contested between scientists who favoured computer-based atmospheric simulations and those who were more interested in investigating the long-term history of climatic changes. Although the former group later became predominant in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change during the 1980s, the latter had a sizable influence over climate discourse during the 1970s. Of these, one of the key popularizers of climate discourse during the 1970s was the British climatologist Hubert Lamb (1913-97). The correspondence between Lamb and journal editors who gatekept and curated different audiences helped craft resonant messages about climate change and its potential effects, and we explore Lamb's interactions with editors of Nature, the UNESCO Courier, The Ecologist and Development Forum in the 1973-4 period. Through understanding how climate change discussion was influenced by editors, we gain an insight into how such narratives had to be adjusted to fit into pre-existing discourses before their importance was more widely established, and how these adjustments helped shape conceptualizations of climate change as a global, human-caused phenomenon and a source of universal threat.","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"1-20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142819570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

How the Glaishers pictured snowflakes. Glaishers 如何描绘雪花。

IF 0.7 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2024-11-19 DOI: 10.1017/S0007087424000803

Floris Winckel

引用次数: 0

Proxies and partial connections in an anthropologist's archive. 人类学家档案中的代理和部分联系。

IF 0.7 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2024-11-14 DOI: 10.1017/S0007087424000815

Dmitry V Arzyutov, David G Anderson

{"title":"Proxies and partial connections in an anthropologist's archive.","authors":"Dmitry V Arzyutov, David G Anderson","doi":"10.1017/S0007087424000815","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087424000815","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the role of primary ethnographic materials - of field notes, letters and photographs - and even of the shelves and bookcases - in building accounts of the human condition. We trace the lives of incomplete and not-yet-found manuscripts, which have been treated as representative of whole archives, as well as closely held convictions and ideas in the history of anthropology. In so doing, we employ the notion of a 'proxy', or a set of signs and images which point the audience in particular directions, without determining their overall destination. Our research is based on a few episodes from the histories of paper and digital copies of manuscripts and photographs of the anthropological couple Sergei and Elizabeth Shirokogoroff, who conducted ethnographic, linguistic and some archaeological research, first on the borderlands between China and Russia, and then later within China. We aim to show the complexity and social and intellectual vibrancy of their ethnographic field archives, which have been scattered across countries, institutions and personal collections. We conclude by suggesting that engaging anthropologically with field archives enables us to approach existing perspectives on archives in a new way, viewing them not as containers of catalogued information, but as entanglements reflecting social relations in local communities, the trajectories of ethnographers, and the aspirations of scholars asking questions today.","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"1-17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142630103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Essay review: technopolitics, development and the residues of the South African state. 论文评论：技术政治、发展和南非国家的残余。

IF 0.7 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2024-11-14 DOI: 10.1017/S0007087424001031

Anne Heffernan

{"title":"Essay review: technopolitics, development and the residues of the South African state.","authors":"Anne Heffernan","doi":"10.1017/S0007087424001031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087424001031","url":null,"abstract":"It has been thirty years since the end of political apartheid in South Africa in 1994. Those decades have been marked by single-party dominance under the African National Congress (ANC), and the expansion of democratic rights and public goods like education, as well as neoliberal economic policies, growing inequality and, in recent years, corruption and maladministration scandals. On the heels of a historic election in May 2024, one which marked the end of the ANC's electoral dominance and was shaped, in part, by government mismanagement of the energy sector and extensive infrastructural decline, it is a timely moment to consider the history of South Africa's state and its relation to industries of extraction and energy production. Two new books do just that. Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures, by Gabrielle Hecht, takes a long view of the impact of extractive industries, arguing that contemporary South Africa may offer a cautionary tale of the devastating impacts of the Anthropocene, one that 'foretells planetary futures' in the way that the state has failed to reckon with the enduring communal and environmental impacts of the mining industry. Apartheid's Leviathan: Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence, by Faeeza Ballim, historicizes the development of South Africa's electricity sector under the apartheid state and traces the roots of the current energy crisis back to the pursuit of authoritarian high modernism in the mid-twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"1-5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142630093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Charting the hybrid architectural style of quantum theory. 描绘量子理论的混合建筑风格。

IF 0.7 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2024-11-08 DOI: 10.1017/S0007087424000839

Steven French

引用次数: 0

The politics of medical expertise and substance control: WHO consultants for addiction rehabilitation and pharmacy education in Thailand and India during the Cold War. 医学专门知识和药物管制的政治：冷战时期世界卫生组织在泰国和印度的戒毒康复和药学教育顾问。

IF 0.7 1区哲学

British Journal for the History of Science Pub Date : 2024-10-28 DOI: 10.1017/S000708742400058X

Reiko Kanazawa

{"title":"The politics of medical expertise and substance control: WHO consultants for addiction rehabilitation and pharmacy education in Thailand and India during the Cold War.","authors":"Reiko Kanazawa","doi":"10.1017/S000708742400058X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S000708742400058X","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the role of World Health Organization (WHO) medical experts in ambitious projects for substance control during the Cold War in Thailand and India. The circumstances surrounding opium production in these two nations were very different, as were the reasons for requesting expert assistance from the United Nations. Whereas the Thai military regime was concerned with controlling illicit traffic to secure its borders, the Indian government wanted to direct its opium raw materials towards domestic pharmaceutical production. Overlapping and sometimes competing agendas of country governments and international agencies converged upon each project, complicating the consultants' work and requiring careful navigation. In both cases, medicine as a science concerned with human health and well-being was subordinated to more pressing agendas. At the same time, the article argues that WHO consultants left an important impact, though not necessarily due to their skills and training in medicine. Instead, they provided exemplars of sound governance and delivery of public health in a politically stable and economically developed country.","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"1-18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142510191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0