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  3. Science in History

Science in History is a major series of ambitious books on the history of the sciences from the seventeenth century through the mid-twentieth century, highlighting work that interprets the sciences from perspectives drawn from across the discipline of history. The focus on the major epoch of global economic, industrial and social transformations is intended to encourage the use of sophisticated historical approaches to make sense of the ways in which the sciences have developed and changed.

  • General Editors: Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge, James Secord, University of Cambridge, Lissa Roberts, Universiteit Twente, The Netherlands

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22 results in Science in History

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Death in Beijing
  • Murder and Forensic Science in Republican China
  • Daniel Asen
  • Published online:
    05 July 2016
    Print publication:
    28 July 2016
  • In this innovative and engaging history of homicide investigation in Republican Beijing, Daniel Asen explores the transformation of ideas about death in China in the first half of the twentieth century. In this period, those who died violently or under suspicious circumstances constituted a particularly important population of the dead, subject to new claims by police, legal and medical professionals, and a newspaper industry intent on covering urban fatality in sensational detail. Asen examines the process through which imperial China's old tradition of forensic science came to serve the needs of a changing state and society under these dramatically new circumstances. This is a story of the unexpected outcomes and contingencies of modernity, presenting new perspectives on China's transition from empire to modern nation state, competing visions of science and expertise, and the ways in which the meanings of death and dead bodies changed amid China's modern transformation.

Toxic Histories
  • Poison and Pollution in Modern India
  • David Arnold
  • Published online:
    05 February 2016
    Print publication:
    15 February 2016
  • Toxic Histories combines social, scientific, medical and environmental history to demonstrate the critical importance of poison and pollution to colonial governance, scientific authority and public anxiety in India between the 1830s and 1950s. Against the background of India's 'poison culture' and periodic 'poison panics', David Arnold considers why many familiar substances came to be regarded under colonialism as dangerous poisons. As well as the criminal uses of poison, Toxic Histories shows how European and Indian scientists were instrumental in creating a distinctive system of forensic toxicology and medical jurisprudence designed for Indian needs and conditions, and how local, as well as universal, poison knowledge could serve constructive scientific and medical purposes. Arnold reflects on how the 'fear of a poisoned world' spilt over into concerns about contamination and pollution, giving ideas of toxicity a wider social and political significance that has continued into India's postcolonial era.

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