Abstract:

Have you ever wondered what the world would be like if global trade networks had never existed? Would the West have ever questioned their knowledge of the natural world unless the Americas had been discovered? Starting with the discoveries of the New World and then taking key moments in global history, James Poskett’s book titled Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science1 attempts to show how modern science has been made through global encounters. Horizons joins the flourishing body of knowledge in motion by giving scientific credit to as many cultures as possible. As a result, Poskett challenges the Eurocentric history of science narratives and argues the story that four or five isolated, disinterested, brilliant minds made modern science to be nothing but a myth. Furthermore, Poskett claims that a global history of science is now needed more than ever, as the world we live in today should form a future between the twin forces of globalization and nationalism (p. 440). In the epilogue titled “The Future of Science”, James Poskett argues that we are in a New Cold War characterized by a scientific rivalry over artificial intelligence and space exploration and that we need to remind ourselves how the legacies of the scientific past and their unequal power relations had resulted in the contexts of slavery, empire, and war.

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