Knowledge does not simply originate in one place and arrive unchanged in another. It is selected, translated, tested, contested and remade by the people and institutions through which it passes.
The works below provide conceptual tools for studying circulation, communication, brokerage and translation without reducing world history either to isolated civilisations or to a one-way story of diffusion from a single centre.
The Globalization of Knowledge in History
Open-access edited book | Edited by Jürgen Renn
An interdisciplinary volume on the transmission, transformation and localisation of knowledge across cultures and historical periods. It provides a broad introduction to the idea that knowledge is shaped both by movement and by the settings in which it is received.
Article | James A. Secord
A foundational methodological essay proposing that the history of science should also be understood as a history of communication. It asks how claims, texts, objects and practices acquire meaning as they move between people, places and media.
Book | Kapil Raj
Challenges the model in which modern science is created in Europe and then exported elsewhere. Through studies of South Asia and Europe, Raj shows how knowledge was constructed through circulation, encounter, negotiation and the work of intermediaries.
Beyond Postcolonialism ... and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science
Article | Kapil Raj
A concise theoretical account of circulation as more than diffusion. Raj treats cross-cultural movement as a site of encounter and transformation in which knowledge, practices and participants are reconfigured.
The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820
Edited book | Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj and James Delbourgo
Studies translators, messengers, merchants, missionaries, spies and entrepreneurs who connected scientific, commercial and political worlds. The volume makes visible the human infrastructure through which global knowledge was produced.
Edited book | Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman and Ku-ming Kevin Chang
Compares traditions of textual scholarship across regions and periods. It presents philology - the preservation, interpretation and criticism of texts - as a family of practices with many histories rather than a uniquely European discipline.