Remembering the Spread of Western Science

Abstract

In the fifty years since publication of George Basalla's ‘The Spread of Western Science', historians of science have wavered between securely locating knowledge production in specific settings and trying to explain how scientific concepts and practices travel and come to appear universally applicable. As science has come to seem ever more ‘situated' and fragmented, we struggle to explain its obvious mobility and reproducibility. No single analytic framework seems plausibly to explain the globalization of science.