Horizons: A Global History of Science

Science is not a uniquely European endeavor, and this book celebrates the work of scientists from Africa, America, Asia, and the Pacific who have been neglected by history. It challenges the existing narrative and our perceptions of revered individuals, and reveals that this tradition goes back much further than we think.

Format: Hardback
Length: 464 pages
Publication date: 24 March 2022
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

Science is not, and has never been, a uniquely European endeavor. Copernicus relied on mathematical techniques borrowed from Arabic and Persian texts. When Newton set out the laws of motion, he relied on astronomical observations made in Asia and Africa. When Darwin was writing On the Origin of Species, he consulted a sixteenth-century Chinese encyclopaedia. And when Einstein was studying quantum mechanics, he was inspired by the Bengali physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose.

Horizons pushes beyond Europe, exploring the ways in which scientists from Africa, America, Asia, and the Pacific fit into the history of science, and arguing that it is best understood as a story of global cultural exchange. Challenging both the existing narrative and our perceptions of revered individuals, above all, this is a celebration of the work of scientists neglected by history. Among many others, we meet Graman Kwasi, the seventeenth-century African botanist who discovered a new cure for malaria, Hantaro Nagaoka, the nineteenth-century Japanese scientist who first described the structure of the atom, and Zhao Zhongyao, the twentieth-century Chinese physicist who discovered antimatter (but whose American colleague received the Nobel prize).

Scientists today are quick to recognize the international nature of their work. In this ambitious and revisionist history, James Poskett reveals.

Weight: 690g
Dimension: 175 x 242 x 38 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780241394090