Navigating polycrisis: long-run socio-cultural factors shape response to changing climate

Climate variability and natural hazards like floods and earthquakes can act as environmental shocks or socioecological stressors leading to instability and suffering throughout human history. Yet, societies experience a wide range of outcomes when facing such challenges: some suffer from social unrest, civil violence or complete collapse; others prove more resilient and maintain key social functions. We currently lack a clear, generally agreed-upon conceptual framework and evidentiary base to explore what causes these divergent outcomes. Here, we discuss efforts to develop such a framework through the Crisis Database (CrisisDB) programme. We illustrate that the impact of environmental stressors is mediated through extant cultural, political and economic structures that evolve over extended timescales (decades to centuries). These structures can generate high resilience to major shocks, facilitate positive adaptation, or, alternatively, undermine collective action and lead to unrest, violence and even societal collapse. By exposing the ways that different societies have reacted to crises over their lifetime, this framework can help identify the factors and complex social-ecological interactions that either bolster or undermine resilience to contemporary climate shocks. This article is part of the theme issue 'Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture'.

Islam's weight in global history: A response to Sidaway

In this commentary, we discuss three major themes that Sidaway raises in his article, 'Beyond the Decolonial: Critical Muslim Geographies': the problem of Muslims as 'others'; the fraught role of religion as a universal category; and Muslim geographies as perceived in area studies and global history. Along these lines, we argue that Sidaway makes a number of important interventions aimed at changing the social science focus on Muslims in the West, highlighting the importance of Islamic concepts, and dislocating spaces of Islam from predefined geographical areas. After a critical discussion of the specific approaches presented in the article, we follow up on Sidaway's encouragement to think beyond the decolonial. We see this as an invitation to formulate our own vision of a new global history of Islam that takes into account traces of the influence of Muslims and of Islam more broadly speaking from Indigenous Australia to China to the Americas, and from everyday culture in Europe to extinct empires in Iberia, Sicily, and the Balkans. From this perspective, we argue, a more serious engagement with the multitude of global Islamic influences beyond Muslim communities might turn into a powerful force of decolonization.

The instrumental Brahmin and the "half-caste" computer: Astronomy and colonial rule in Madras, 1791-1835

What did science make possible for colonial rule? How was science in turn marked by the knowledge and practices of those under colonial rule? Here I approach these questions via the social history of Madras Observatory. Constructed in 1791 by the East India Company, the observatory was to provide local time to mariners and served as a clearinghouse for the company's survey and revenue administration. The astronomical work of Madras' Brahmin assistants relied upon their knowledge of jyotiśāstra [Sanskrit astronomy/astrology], and can be seen as a specialized form of the kind of South Indian scribal labor and knowledge that also staffed the company's tax offices. If at Greenwich the division of labor meant observatory work bore resemblances to the factory and the accounts office, in Madras, astronomy and accounting drew on similar labor forms because they were part of the same enterprise. But the company did not just adapt preexisting forms of labor, it also attempted to produce its own at a school built near the observatory to train "half-caste" orphans as apprentice surveyors and assistant computers. The school, staffed by the Brahmins, drew upon knowledge and pedagogical practice associated with the tinnai, the schools in which upper-caste children learned to read, write, and calculate. For a time, the observatory's social order was literally "half-caste." The paper also considers how the relationship between caste, status, and instrument was reflected in the visual and material culture of the observatory, such as in Indian-language inscriptions on its central pillar. For company astronomers, the measurement of time meant reworking the relationships among the Indian past, the colonial present, and an imperial posterity. Science under colonial rule spanned multiple temporal and social registers because it was the result of negotiations between the demands of political economy and the knowledge and practices of colonized others.

The Electrophoretic Revolution in the 1960s: Historical Epistemology Meets the Global History of Science and Technology

This paper uses zone electrophoresis, one of the most frequently used tools in molecular biology, to explore two ideas derived from Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's reflections on experiments. First, the constraining role played by technical objects-instrumentation and material conditions-in the production of knowledge or epistemic things. Second, the production of interconnected experimental systems by such technical objects, which results in the unexpected entanglement of research fields and experimental cultures. By the beginning of the 1960s, the inception of zone electrophoresis in laboratories around the world transformed-some say, revolutionized-the study of proteins. Even today, electrophoresis continues to open research venues and questions in biomedicine, molecular biology, human genetics, and in the field of molecular evolution. In my essay, I seek to look at the interconnected lives of zone electrophoresis and address the broader social, and even global context, in which this apparently humble technique became a salient tool in the production of biological knowledge. In so doing, I aim to take the past and present of the history and historiography of experimental systems to the future, where experiments and technologies are interrogated as they are used in different geographies and contexts, including contexts of poverty.

The uses of useful knowledge and the languages of vernacular science: Perspectives from southwest India

In the first half of the eleventh century, a group of scholars in southwest India did something new. They began composing systematic texts about everyday life in a register of language sometimes called New Kannada. While looking back toward earlier texts composed in Sanskrit - and even translating portions of them - these scholars centered their poetic ability and their personal experiences as opposed to prior authoritative texts. They described themselves as authoring "worldly sciences" that were "useful to the people of the world," and they provided extensive reflections on the systematics of knowledge. Epistemic, linguistic, and political concerns were significantly renegotiated in this moment as local context was turned into a virtue for the production of technical treatises. This article uses this moment to interrogate recent discussions of useful knowledge and vernacular science. Usefulness can mean different things at different times and vernacular sciences change according to their language. This article argues for a usage of both terms that is more attuned to historical particulars. A history of useful knowledge from a place that now appears under the double effacement of the non-modern and non-West offers an opportunity to think through central concepts of the history of science without relying on economic or utilitarian discourses. This paper presents one possible example of what a more global history of useful knowledge might look like.

Material conditions and ideas in global history

Since the rise of a "scientific" historiography in the nineteenth century, the role of ideas in history versus that of material forces has been a key philosophical problem. Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology (2019), read as a work of global history, offers a provocative rehearsal of this question. On the one hand, the book is an attempt to provide a narrative historical frame for the hard data of the World Inequality Database. On the other, paradoxically, it offers a defiant conclusion that ideology is, or at least could be, the key driver in social and institutional change towards universal progress. St Simon, Comte and Spencer have found their twenty-first century heir. How can we historicize Piketty's impetus, both understanding its provenance and making sense of its limitations? One key issue is its roots in the traditions of National Accounts, which leads to an approach to the global which is stresses comparison over connection, and to an uncritical reproduction of the portrait of an egalitarian non-capitalist Twentieth century painted by Kuznets during the Cold War. Another is its presentism, with the historical argument driven by an attempt to understand the c.1980-2020 conjuncture and its alternatives, and a connected overdependence on the support of a few historians. A third, a consequence in part of the inequalities between the quality of data we have for different parts of the world, and of Piketty's provenance and imagined audience, is a Eurocentric, even Gallocentric approach. A fourth is a very French republican refusal to address how class is complicated by identities of race and nation so that neither egalitarian policies nor ideologies provide remedies for the populist politics of right. None of these criticisms are in contradiction with our view that Capital and Ideology is a work of social theory of world historical importance.

How the nerves reached the muscle: Bernard Katz, Stephen W. Kuffler, and John C. Eccles-Certain implications of exile for the development of twentieth-century neurophysiology

This article explores the work by Bernard Katz (1911-2003), Stephen W. Kuffler (1913-1980), and John C. Eccles (1903-1997) on the nerve-muscle junction as a milestone in twentieth-century neurophysiology with wider scientific implications. The historical question is approached from two perspectives: (a) an investigation of twentieth-century solutions to a longer physiological dispute and (b) an examination of a new kind of laboratory and academic cooperation. From this vantage point, the work pursued in Sydney by Sir John Carew Eccles' team on the neuromuscular junction is particularly valuable, since it contributed a central functional element to modern physiological understanding regarding the function and structure of the human and animal nervous system. The reflex model of neuromuscular action had already been advanced by neuroanatomists such as Georg Prochaska (1749-1820) in Bohemia since the eighteenth century. It became a major component of neurophysiological theories during the nineteenth century, based on the law associated with the names of François Magendie (1783-1855) in France and Charles Bell (1774-1842) in Britain regarding the functional differences of the sensory and motor spinal nerves. Yet, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that both the histological and the neurophysiological understanding of the nerve-muscle connection became entirely understood and the chemical versus electrical transmission further elicited as the mechanisms of inhibition. John C. Eccles, Bernard Katz, and Stephen W. Kuffler helped to provide some of the missing links for modern neurophysiology. The current article explores several of their scientific contributions and investigates how the context of forced migration contributed to these interactions in contingently new ways.

From bauxite to cooking pots: Aluminum, chemistry, and West African artisanal production

The history of aluminum's transformation from a precious to a commonplace metal over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries has frequently been told as a narrative about intrepid western chemists, whose discoveries made it possible for industrialized manufacturers to make the metal global. This paper questions both the singularity of that discovery and the inevitability of aluminum's global dominance as a 'modern' material of manufacture. It does so by considering the history of aluminum in West Africa and the ways in which artisans in that region domesticated the substance to an artisanal mode of production and developed quotidian chemical knowledge of it in the process. Considering aluminum from the perspective of West Africa suggests that aluminum may not have been discovered once, but many times, and that everyday material engagements can inspire forms of chemical knowhow that operate well beyond the bounds of the laboratory and industrial manufacturing plant.

What is "colonial" about medieval colonial medicine? Iberian health in global context

Colonial medicine is a thriving field of study in the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century medicine. Medicine can be used as a lens to view colonialism in action and as a way to critique colonialism. This article argues that key debates and ideas from that modern field can fruitfully be applied to the Middle Ages, especially for the early empires of Spain and Portugal (mid-fourteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries). The article identifies key modern debates, explores approaches to colonization and colonialism in the Middle Ages and discusses how medieval and modern medicine and healthcare could be compared using colonial and postcolonial discourses. The article ends with three case studies of healthcare encounters in Madeira, Granada and Hispaniola at the end of the fifteenth century.

Atlantic conjunctures in Anglo-American neurology: Lewis H. Weed and Johns Hopkins neurology, 1917-1942

The emergence of neurology at Johns Hopkins presents a case study for reconsidering the international and institutional contexts of neurology generally. Using a variety of sources, Hopkins's interwar plans for neurology are presented and contextualized in the international environment of neurology, medical research, and philanthropy. During this period, neurology across the world, especially in Britain, was undergoing vast institutional changes. In order for Hopkins to remain at the forefront of excellence in both medicine and medical education, a program in neurology was deemed essential, and this would seem now to have been an unproblematic advance. Spearheading the project for the establishment of neurology at Hopkins was the dean of the medical school, Lewis H. Weed. Weed attempted from 1919 until 1942 to establish a department of neurology but had only limited success. The fact that finding support proved challenging for Weed and Johns Hopkins casts a provocative light on the broader historiography of neurology and illustrates the important role of the international context in defining neurology professionally.