Introduction

James Poskett, 'Science in History', FirstView (2018)

Abstract: What is the history of science? How has it changed over the course of the twentieth century? And what does the future hold for the discipline? This ‘Retrospect’ provides an introduction to the historiography of science as it developed in the Anglophone world. It begins with the foundation of the Cambridge History of Science Committee in the 1940s and ends with the growth of cultural history in the 2000s. At the broadest level, it emphasizes the need to consider the close relationship between history and the history of science. All too often the historiography of science is treated separately from history at large. But as this essay shows, these seemingly distinct fields often developed in relation to one another. This essay also reveals the ways in which Cold War politics shaped the history of science as a discipline. It then concludes by considering the future, suggesting that the history of science and the history of political thought would benefit from greater engagement with one another.

Retrospect Articles

Charlie Dunbar Broad, ‘The new philosophy: Bruno to Descartes’,[Cambridge Historical Journal], 8 (1944)

Henry Dale, ‘Experiment in medicine’,[Cambridge Historical Journal], 8 (1946)

Quentin Skinner, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the nature of the early Royal Society’, 12 (1969)

Roy MacLeod, ‘The Royal Society and the government grant: notes on the administration of scientific research, 1849-1914', 14 (1971)

Roy Porter, ‘Gentlemen and geology: the emergence of a scientific career, 1660-1920', 21 (1978)

John Morgan, ‘Puritanism and science: a reinterpretation’, 22 (1979)

Lawrence Goldman, ‘The origins of British ‘social science’: political economy, natural science and statistics, 1830-1835', 26 (1983)

Aileen Fyfe, ‘Reading children’s books in late eighteenth-century dissenting families’, 43 (2000)

Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Trading knowledge: the East India Company’s elephants in India and Britain’, 48 (2005)

David Gange, ‘Religion and science in late nineteenth-century British Egyptology’, 49 (2006)

Sadiah Qureshi, ‘Robert Gordon Latham, displayed peoples, and the natural history of race, 1854-1866', 54 (2011)

Harriet Lyon, ‘The Fisherton monster: science, providence, and politics in early Restoration England’, 60 (2017)

James Poskett, ‘Phrenology, correspondence and the global politics of reform, 1815-1848', 60 (2017)