Global history is a heavy industry nowadays. Historians have caught pace with the seemingly unstoppable late modern border-free movements of commodities, capital, and, increasingly, people, turning to the study of past exchanges and circulations on a world scale. Expanding on the hitherto predominant “local” focus, encompassing region and nation, it is becoming increasingly clear that these localities are really the nexus points of a global scope.
That the history of science has been a little slow to join the flow is not surprising. Science, the quintessential modernist global project, is often conceived as a predominantly Western or “Eurocentric” affair—its origins located in European (subsequently Anglo-American) Scientific and Industrial Revolutions and its supposed “universalism” and “objectivity” in lockstep with exploration/conquest and colonialism/imperialism, replacing peripheral indigenous cultures with techno-rationalism. Surprisingly, however, critics and celebrants of the process told the same stories. Within the historiography of science, however, this hegemonic center–periphery model is...