The article reflects upon the observational practices and methods developed by the early exponents of ethology committed to naturalistic field study and explores how their approaches and techniques influenced a wider field of popular natural-history filmmaking and photography. In doing so, my focus is upon three aspects of ethological field studies: the socio-technical devices used by ethologists to bring birds closer to them, the distinctive observational and representational practices which they forged, and the analogies they used to codify behaviour. This assemblage of elements included hides or screens from which to watch wild birds without disturbing them, optics to extend human vision, pens and paper to sketch and fix patterns of behaviour, watches to record timings, photography to capture action and freeze movement, and illustration and photographs to visualize behaviour. Carried through natural-history networks, the practices, methods and theories of ethologists like Huxley and Tinbergen influenced popular natural-history filmmaking and photography more broadly from the 1940s, driving a behavioural turn in these cultural practices. This popularization of the ‘ethological eye’ was further facilitated by the convergence of socio-technical devices, forms of observation and dramatization in the work of the early exponents of naturalistic field studies of birds and the popular filmmakers.

In order to explore the ways knowledge travels across spatial and cultural boundaries, this article focuses on the intriguing case of the Edinburgh-trained Scottish surgeon James Esdaile (1808–59), who, after practising conventional surgery for almost fifteen years in British colonial India, quite unexpectedly turned to mesmeric anaesthesia in the last five years of his service. By following his career and his mesmeric turn, the article describes Esdaile's subsequent public experiments in mesmeric anaesthesia in collaboration with indigenous practices and practitioners of trance induction in the 1840s which led to the creation of a special mesmeric hospital in Calcutta. Although very successful, it eventually ceased to function, apparently victim to new and cheaper chemical anaesthetics. Mobilizing the insights of science studies scholarship into the processes of scientific experimentation, this article seeks to shed new light on the necessary professional, social and political investments for the making and mobility of scientific knowledge across social and cultural boundaries in a colonial setting.

This special issue brings together a diverse set of cases from Asia with the aim of decentring established historical narratives about science diplomacy. With a critical perspective bringing together the bodies of literature in the fields of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) and critical Asian Studies, we argue that these cases foreground a geopolitical history with multiple forms of sovereignty – often contested ones – and a range of political institutions and actors that enables us to revisit science diplomacy as a means for understanding the relationship between science and international affairs. In doing so, the articles in this issue consciously eschew the normative ‘centring’ of superpowers or Western imperial powers as the primary actors, focusing instead on the agency and subjectivity of actors within Asia, many of whom were prominent in their respective local contexts. Additionally, we argue that the cases presented here, which examine issues from across science, technology, medicine and the environment, collectively demonstrate the further need for the ‘science’ in ‘science diplomacy’ to be interpreted more broadly, incorporating as it does many aspects of human engagement with the material world.

This paper is a study of the intersection between aviation and diplomacy in the semi-autonomous Indian state of Jodhpur in the final decades of British colonial rule in India. Jodhpur's Maharaja Umaid Singh established a major international aerodrome, patronized one of India's first flying clubs and collaborated with British authorities to make aviation laws for the Indian states. He would also serve in the Royal Air Force during the war and placed Jodhpur state's aviation resources at the disposal of the king-emperor. This paper argues that Jodhpur was able to leverage its aviation resources to wield substantial influence both within and beyond the British Empire through both war and peace. An analysis of Jodhpur's engagement with aviation diplomacy is also revealing of some of the limitations as well as possibilities for the deployment of science diplomacy frameworks, especially in non-Western contexts.

Measurement was vital to nineteenth-century engineering. Focusing on the work of the Stevenson engineering firm in Scotland, this paper explores the processes by which engineers made their measurements credible and explains how measurement, as both a product and a practice, informed engineering decisions and supported claims to engineering authority. By examining attempts made to quantify, measure and map dynamic river spaces, the paper analyses the relationship between engineering experience and judgement and the generation of data that engineers considered to be ‘tolerably correct’. While measurement created an abstract and simplified version of the river that accommodated prediction, this abstraction had to be connected to and made meaningful in real river space despite acknowledged limitations to measuring practice. In response, engineers drew on experience gained through the measuring process to support claims to authoritative knowledge. This combination of quantification and experience was then used to support interventions in debates over the proper use and management of rivers. This paper argues that measurement in nineteenth-century engineering served a dual function, producing both data and expertise, which were both significant in underpinning engineering authority and facilitating engineers’ intervention in decision making for river management.

The Glaisher snowflakes (1855) are amongst the most recognizable images of snow crystals produced in the nineteenth century. Made with the intent of compiling a comprehensive record of snow crystal forms, they also appeared in a variety of print publications, from popular magazines to scientific textbooks, and briefly circulated through various scientific and artistic societies. In a time when reliable images of these small, transparent, ephemeral objects were few and far between, the Glaisher snowflakes were widely praised for both their beauty and their fidelity to nature. But their origin has so far been little examined. This article sheds light on how James and Cecilia Glaisher went about making them, and invites readers to see them through three interconnected perspectives: as products of a domestic environment, as products of a husband-and-wife collaboration, and as products of iterative image making.

This article focuses on the 1952 visit to the Jingjiang Flood Diversion Project, the first large-scale water infrastructure built on the Yangzi river after the founding of the People's Republic of China, by a foreign delegation from the Asia-Pacific Peace Conference. Serving as a form of technology diplomacy, this trip advanced two main purposes for the newly established country – to build up closer ties with ‘foreign friends’ who advocated international peace in the context of the Korean War, and to demonstrate China's own technical capabilities and achievements as part of the national campaign of ‘peaceful construction’ of the early 1950s. I argue that vernacular technologies, which were grounded in indigenous knowledge and practices for water control in the mid-Yangzi region, were essential in shaping China's self-reliant modernization and China's public diplomacy, which targeted individuals without scientific or technical backgrounds.

In nineteenth-century Britain, captive snakes in menageries and zoological gardens were routinely fed with live prey – primarily rabbits, pigeons and guinea pigs. From the late 1860s, this practice began to generate opposition on animal welfare grounds, leading to a protracted debate over its necessity, visibility and morality. Focusing on the c.1870–1914 period, when the snake-feeding controversy reached its zenith, this article charts changing attitudes towards the treatment of reptiles in captivity and asks why an apparently niche practice generated so much interest. By looking at the biological arguments put forward for and against live feeding, the article traces the changing nature of humanitarian activism in the late nineteenth century and shows how the shifting character of the live-feeding debate paralleled wider trends in the animal welfare movement. It also highlights the different types of knowledge and expertise involved in the debate, as naturalists, veterinary surgeons, legal professionals, zookeepers and humanitarians offered conflicting perspectives on questions of reptilian dietary requirements and animal sentience.

William Petty's work has usually been regarded as an epistemic break in the history of statistical and politico-economic thought. In this paper, I argue that Petty's statistical notions stemmed from the natural-historical techniques he originally implemented to manage the Down Survey. Following Bacon, who viewed the description of trades as a paramount branch of natural history, Petty approached the art of surveying itself as an object of natural-historical analysis. He partitioned the surveying work into individual tasks and implemented a meticulous division of labour, employing hundreds of disbanded soldiers as surveyors and using questionnaires to calibrate the responses of his ‘instruments’, as he called his specialized workers. By borrowing these methods from natural history to organize surveying work, Petty was able to conceptualize Ireland as a political body defined by tables of aggregate data. I then compare the Down Survey with John Graunt's observations on the bills of mortality to show that both are representative of a particular style of natural history, aimed at describing the natural and political state of a circumscribed territory. I close by considering other manifestations of ‘territorial natural history’, indicating a continuity between this research tradition and the appearance of statistics in the British Isles.

Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation by Robert Chambers, a Scottish publisher and popular writer, was one of the most influential evolutionary works in the pre-Darwinian age. This article examines the circumstances in which this treatise was published in Russia in 1863 and went through a second printing in 1868. Vestiges was translated into Russian by Alexander Palkhovsky (1831–1907), a former medical student, ideologically close to the nihilist movement, and was initially printed by the radical publisher Anatoly Cherenin, later prosecuted for his ties with revolutionary circles. Vestiges was translated not from the English original, but from a German translation by Karl Vogt. Given the popularity of German materialism among Russian radicals in the 1860s, association with Vogt's name did much to draw attention to the translation. Contrary to Vogt, who took an anti-evolutionary stance while translating Vestiges, Palkhovsky and other nihilists ardently supported evolution in the hope that it would help them combat religious belief. Praising the author of Vestiges for his evolutionary views, Russian radicals at the same time criticized him for numerous references to God, teleological thinking and blindness to social problems. In their attempts to put Vestiges into service, Russian nihilists were similar to English freethinkers of the 1840s. The study of how Vestiges was read and perceived in Russia provides a better understanding of the cross-cultural reception of evolutionary ideas on the eve of Darwin's Origin of Species.

This article explores medical diplomacy as a means of navigating distinct but related nation-building and internationalist projects during the Cold War. It examines how medical professionals from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) utilized their expertise to bolster foreign relations and assert national independence. This article focuses on how three tuberculosis (TB) specialists – Đặng Đức Trạch, Phạm Ngọc Thạch and Phạm Khắc Quảng – adopted, adapted and circulated techniques of TB control, including a modified version of bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccine. Amidst these endeavours, these medical-doctors-cum-diplomats navigated various forms of internationalism while soliciting medical assistance. Their roles within the DRV's state apparatus were prominently showcased from the 1950s to the 1970s, particularly at international gatherings such as the conferences of Ministers of Health of the Socialist Countries (MOHOSC). Because of the political complexities inherent in socialist internationalism, these conferences provided a crucial platform for dialogue among socialist nations when other avenues were limited. Consequently, the DRV's medical experts cultivated goodwill and garnered political support, despite encountering mixed results in their TB control initiatives.

This article examines the role of primary ethnographic materials – of field notes, letters and photographs – and even of the shelves and bookcases – in building accounts of the human condition. We trace the lives of incomplete and not-yet-found manuscripts, which have been treated as representative of whole archives, as well as closely held convictions and ideas in the history of anthropology. In so doing, we employ the notion of a ‘proxy’, or a set of signs and images which point the audience in particular directions, without determining their overall destination. Our research is based on a few episodes from the histories of paper and digital copies of manuscripts and photographs of the anthropological couple Sergei and Elizabeth Shirokogoroff, who conducted ethnographic, linguistic and some archaeological research, first on the borderlands between China and Russia, and then later within China. We aim to show the complexity and social and intellectual vibrancy of their ethnographic field archives, which have been scattered across countries, institutions and personal collections. We conclude by suggesting that engaging anthropologically with field archives enables us to approach existing perspectives on archives in a new way, viewing them not as containers of catalogued information, but as entanglements reflecting social relations in local communities, the trajectories of ethnographers, and the aspirations of scholars asking questions today.

As an industrial science, vaccinology is susceptible to changing social, economic and political frameworks. This article reconstructs the history of the birth of the Sabin strains-derived inactivated polio vaccine (sIPV) in China. The development of this nascent vaccine can be attributed first and foremost to the circulation of knowledge and technology in the global polio research network of the 1980s, before the privatization of vaccine manufacturing and the escalation of intellectual-property protections. Tracing correspondence between Jonas Salk and a Chinese scientist, Jiang Shude, and his colleagues, we chart how institutional efforts in search of a profitable product and scientists’ motives in pursuing personal careers in the post-socialist reform era led to collaboration on many levels, centered around polio vaccines. In response to recent polio history research, we also emphasize the impact of multiple temporalities of polio dramaturgy on the vaccine manufacturer, as this article demonstrates how the confluence of shifting global polio eradication agendas and contingencies in complex vaccinology undertakings ironically helped to materialize the idea of the sIPV. Finally, stories of vaccines and scientists in China add compelling subplots to the global polio history, which reveals the need to reconsider the politicization of imported technology in broader socialist contexts.

A letter dated ‘3 June 1986’ was mailed from Jonas Salk to Jiang Shude (姜述德). Jiang had been an unknown vaccinologist working at the Institute of Medical Biology (IMB) in Flower Red Cave in the Western Hills of Kunming, in south-western China. Salk had visited two years earlier to discuss the feasibility of the IMB's proposal to manufacture inactivated polio vaccine (IPV). The initial collaborative plan had come to a halt by the time Salk wrote the letter to Jiang; still, he kindly offered Jiang an opportunity to travel to Bilthoven and then Lyon to learn IPV-related technology with a generous $10,000 grant for his one-year stay in Europe.1

This article historicizes a single stage in how the contemporary obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) category was built. Starting from the position that the two central components which make up OCD are ‘obsessions’ and ‘compulsions’, it illustrates how these concepts were taken apart by a small group of clinical psychologists working at the Institute of Psychiatry and the Maudsley psychiatric hospital in south London in the early 1970s, and why compulsions were investigated whilst obsessions were ignored. The decision to distinguish the previously undifferentiated symptoms is attributed to the commitment amongst psychologists at the Maudsley, most notably Stanley Rachman, to an empirical conception of science which emphasized observability. Two aspects of this are discussed. First, compulsions were deemed ‘visible’ through their correspondence with animal behaviour. Second, the symptom was seen as open to an experimental modification procedure which privileged visible outcomes. Ultimately, the article concludes that the historical division between ‘obsessions’ and ‘compulsions’, and the extensive investigation of the latter, has had substantial implications for the development of OCD as a category centred on visible behaviours and treated through behavioural means.

This paper explores the role of World Health Organization (WHO) medical experts in ambitious projects for substance control during the Cold War in Thailand and India. The circumstances surrounding opium production in these two nations were very different, as were the reasons for requesting expert assistance from the United Nations. Whereas the Thai military regime was concerned with controlling illicit traffic to secure its borders, the Indian government wanted to direct its opium raw materials towards domestic pharmaceutical production. Overlapping and sometimes competing agendas of country governments and international agencies converged upon each project, complicating the consultants’ work and requiring careful navigation. In both cases, medicine as a science concerned with human health and well-being was subordinated to more pressing agendas. At the same time, the article argues that WHO consultants left an important impact, though not necessarily due to their skills and training in medicine. Instead, they provided exemplars of sound governance and delivery of public health in a politically stable and economically developed country.

Focusing on South Korean biologists and their efforts to establish national parks in the 1960s and 1970s, I illuminate the ways in which they negotiated their relationship with the ecological diplomacy of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the anti-communist and developmentalist diplomacy of the South Korean government. To justify their activities, these South Korean biologists emphasized the importance of nature conservation activities in the competition for international recognition and economic development with their northern counterparts. The national-park initiative was thus subsumed into the politics of this legitimacy competition between the two Koreas, or what I call ‘victory-over-communism’ diplomacy. The IUCN's influence over South Korea was limited to the extent that both the government and scientists recognized the diplomatic merit they could gain in the context of their Cold War competition and developmentalism. It is also shown how, during the short detente period of the two Koreas, South Korean biologists used victory-over-communism diplomacy to renew their government's attention to their activities. This Korean episode contributes to the wider perspective of decentralizing the Cold War history of environmental diplomacy in the free-world bloc by illustrating the importance of its entanglement with the Cold War politics surrounding Asian developmentalism.

This essay explores how mid-twentieth-century mathematicians at New York University envisioned their discipline, cultural identities and social roles, and how these self-constructed identities materialized in the planning of their new academic building, Warren Weaver Hall. These mathematicians considered their research to be a ‘living part of the stream of science’, requiring a mathematics research library which they equated to a scientific laboratory and a complex of computing rooms which served as an interdisciplinary research centre. Identifying as ‘scientists’, they understood their societal value to be that of researchers, outputting mathematics research valuable to the natural sciences, the emerging field of computer science and the United States government and military, as well as educators. When the building opened in 1965, it was touted by the university administration as an ‘example of excellence’; it later, in 1970, became the site of heated negotiations when university student and faculty protestors staged a sit-in rebuking the Atomic Energy Commission's Computing Center housed on the second floor. A close study of the correspondence between the mathematicians and their peers in the university's administration, private foundations, government agencies and an architectural firm not only illuminates the day-to-day work practices of this eminent group of mathematicians, but also sheds light on their own self-constructed academic and social identities within their contemporaneous Cold War culture.

In 1960 Sir Solly Zuckerman proposed the idea of an interdisciplinary department of ‘environmental sciences’ (ENV) for the newly established University of East Anglia (UEA). Prior to this point, the concept of ‘environmental sciences’ was little known: since then, departments and degree courses have rapidly proliferated through universities and colleges around the globe. This paper draws on archival research to explore the conditions and contexts that led to the proposal of a new and interdisciplinary grouping of sciences by Zuckerman. It argues that the activities of Zuckerman and other scientists in Britain during the Second World War and in the post-war period helped to create fertile conditions for a new kind of scientific authority to emerge as a tool of governance and source of policy advice. In particular, the specific challenges of post-war Britain – as addressed through scientific advisers and civil servants – led to the ‘environment’ becoming both the subject of sustained scientific study and an object of concern.

Given that the practices and institutions of knowledge production commonly referred to as ‘science’ are believed to have ‘Western’ origins, their apparent proliferation entails negotiations and power dynamics that shape both science and diplomacy in specific locales. This paper investigates a facet of this co-production of science and diplomacy in the emergence of knowledge infrastructure in Japan during the Allied Occupation. It focuses on the 1947 delegation from the United States National Academy of Sciences to Japan and its role in creating the Science Council of Japan (SCJ). While historians view this mission as having been dispatched to provide advice on the foundation of the SCJ, it was in fact an unintentional outcome. The original plan was to recruit long-term scientific advisers on science policy to Douglas MacArthur's headquarters. The creation of the SCJ was not the brainchild of any individual but the result of an unforeseen alteration of the original idea through negotiations among various actors. By examining the transnational aspects of this process and the complex social process underlying it, and drawing on Manuel DeLanda's assemblage theory, this paper proposes the concept of ‘techno-diplomatic assemblage’ for understanding the transnational construction of knowledge infrastructure such as the emergence of the SCJ.

This article aims to bring out the problematic nature of condensation and rarefaction for early modern natural philosophers by considering two historically significant attempts to deal with it, first by Sir Kenelm Digby in his Treatise on Body (1644), and subsequently by Isaac Newton, chiefly in manuscript works associated with the Principia (1687). It is argued that Digby tried to sidestep the problem of variation in density and rarity by making it a fundamental starting point for his physics. But he also brought out the difficulties of dealing with condensation and rarefaction within the mechanical philosophy, whether that philosophy was plenist or allowed for void space. The problems became exacerbated after experiments with the air-pump achieved extreme rarefactions. It is argued that these led Newton to first consider a retiform or net-like structure of matter, before adopting the radical innovation of supposing repelling forces operating at a distance between the particles of the rarefied bodies. Eventually, Newton came to believe that extreme rarity was inexplicable ‘by any other means than a repulsive Power’.