History 1805E: Science, Technology and Global History

“There are mad and beautiful things beneath the skin of the world we know, that you only see when you look at things on a planetary scale.”
--Warren Ellis, Planetary

Course Description

History 1805e is a new introductory-level lecture course about the global histories of science and technology, and about the place of science and technology in global history. It is intended both for students planning to major in science or engineering and for history concentrators or other students in the social sciences or humanities. In other words, all are welcome. The course includes no technical math or science and we do not assume that students will have any particular historical background or technical expertise.

This course will introduce students to “big history,” which uses the tools of scientists, social scientists, and historians to unite more traditional history with the deep past of our species and our planet. We'll begin with the Big Bang and go all the way to the future. We'll examine the past at different scales, from microscopic bacteria to human beings to thousand-year empires. We'll ask how the histories of science and the world look different when viewed from India or China or Africa, from Renaissance Europe or ancient Greece. We'll consider alternate histories--what if things had happened differently?--and alternatives to the modern university and its disciplines. We'll argue against the separation of scientific and historical thought. We'll look at ways to end life on earth and consider other ways to save it. Above all, we'll learn how science and technology have always been shaped by human history, and vice versa.

And we'll do all that in one three-hour lecture a week.

Course Notes

All course notes for the second term will be on WebCT OWL. Log in with your UWO account and password. The course site should already be listed and accessible to you.

Reading and Required Texts

Required readings will be distributed online or in class. There are no texts that must be purchased for the course.

Assignments and Evaluation

History labs: 40%. Four short writing assignments (worth 10% each), on a variety of questions and topics.

Midterm examination: 30% and Final examination: 30%. Both exams will include a mix of identifications and short essay questions based on the lectures and course readings. The midterm will cover the first half of the course; the final exam will cover the second half of course.

Course Outline

There will be one three hour lecture each week, on Wednesday evenings from 6:30-9:30 pm in Social Science Centre 2020. The course develops chronologically on a roughly logarithmic scale.

Sept. 16 | Week 1 | The Inanimate Universe An introduction to the course and a critique of C. P. Snow's idea of 'two cultures.' What does it mean to take the histories of math, science and technology seriously? The origins of the universe, time, space, galaxies, stars and the earth.

 
 

Sep. 23 | Week 2 | Life on Earth The origins of life and the theory of evolution. Major evolutionary transitions. The biosphere. From our first ancestors to the beginnings of human history.  
 
 
 

Sep. 30 | NO LECTURE  
 
 
 
 
 

Oct. 7 | Week 3 | The Holocene Genetics, linguistics, and disease as evidence. Human impact on ancient environments and early ecological collapse. The arguments of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. Farmers, pharoahs and engineers: the rise of the hydraulic civilizations.  
 

Oct. 14 | Week 4 | Old World Encounters Trade and exchange on the silk road. Pyrotechnologies. The Pythagorean theorem and its wider implication: that the world can be represented with numbers. The 'Axial Age' and the spread of world religions.  
 
 

Oct. 21 | Week 5 | Astronomy How can we determine our place in the universe? Astronomy was the first of the exact sciences, with evidence of detailed observation going back to the Neolithic. We discuss the contributions of the hydraulic civilizations, the Greeks, and the Islamic astronomers, ending with Copernicus, Tycho and Kepler.  

Oct. 28 | Week 6 | Knowledge and Secrecy From the secret books of the Hermetic tradition to the trial of Galileo Galilei. Was Galileo a defender of reason in an irrational world? Giordano Bruno, 'the first martyr for science' and Athanasius Kircher, 'the last man who knew everything.'  
 

Nov. 4 | Week 7 | Scientific Revolution Was there a scientific revolution? We discuss alchemy and chemistry, mechanical philosophy, optics and dynamics. We compare European and Chinese science, technology and medicine. We discuss Francis Bacon, the rise of the Royal Societies, and the emergence of new forms of knowledge.  

Nov. 11 | Week 8 | Newton We continue our discussion of the scientific revolution with its most emblematic figure, Isaac Newton. We look at his natural philosophy, method, experimental procedure, optics, mechanics and alchemy.  
 
 

Nov. 18 | Week 9 | Columbian Exchange Pre-columbian hydraulic civilizations. The European discovery of the New World and its ecological ramifications. Norse and Inuit in Greenland. The transfer of disease organisms and domesticated plants and animals. Catastrophic consequences for the aboriginal people of the Americas.  

Nov. 25 | Week 10 | Unending Frontier The environmental history of the early modern world. Agriculture, the plantation system, and the slave trade. Colonial bioprospecting and the world hunt, the voyages of Captain Cook, and economic botany.  
 
 

Dec. 2 | Week 11 | Centres of Accumulation and Calculation Changing understandings of collecting and display. Exploration, cartography, trade and empire-building. The birth of the company and developments in the understanding of chance and risk. Enlightenment automata, and the growth of the idea that life is purely material.  

Dec. 9 | Week 12 | Darwin and Deep Time The environmental sciences in the nineteenth century and the work of Charles Darwin. We contextualize Darwin's evolutionary theory by relating it to earlier work in medicine, morphology and geology, and to a changing political milieu. Then we examine the intellectual aftershocks of Darwin's 'dangerous idea.'  

Dec. 11-22 | Mid-term Exam  
 
 
 
 
 
 

Jan. 06 | Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective How did coal and steam allow the British to spin a worldwide web of trade during the 18th century? What were the effects of the industrial revolution in the Americas, Asia and Africa?  
 
 

Jan. 13 | Electrical Enlightenment An examination of Benjamin Franklin's work on electricity allows us to trace the transatlantic network of trade, commerce and ideas that connected the United States to England and France during the 18th century.  
 
 

Jan. 20 | Industrialization, Cities and Germs Cities, sanitation, engineering, urban planning, people, infectious diseases.  
 
 
 
 

Jan. 27 | NO LECTURE  
 
 
 
 
 

Feb. 03 | Is a Whale a Fish? The example of whales provides us with an entry into the history of classification, and illustrates how the production of scientific knowledge was shaped and complicated by politics and economics during the 18th and 19th centuries.  
 
 

Feb. 10 | The Gender of Science; the Science of Gender Is feminist / gender studies a useful tool for helping us understand the ways that scientific knowledge has been historically produced? How has science shaped our understanding of sex and gender?  
 
 

Feb. 15-19 | READING WEEK  
 
 
 
 
 

Feb. 24 | Scientific Ideas about Race Now-extinct sciences like phrenology, craniometry, polygeny and eugenics were historically used to justify the subjugation, exploitation, and / or mass murder of various populations around the world.  
 
 

Mar. 03 | Empires of Time The history of Einstein's clocks and the technological roots of relativity.  
 
 
 
 

Mar. 10 | World Wars The 20th century science of death and destruction.  
 
 
 
 

Mar. 17 | Networks and Codes The history of computing from the Cold War to the present.  
 
 
 
 

Mar. 24 | Science, Technology and Nationalism The relationship between nationalism and scientific / technological development, as well as the ways that nationalism has informed competitions between nation-states over scientific discovery and technological innovation during and after the Cold War.  
 

Mar. 31 | Global Environment The global effects of local actions, focusing on the ways that post-WWII military, industrial, and agricultural pollution travels through the air, waterways and earth, and on the many manufactured products that link national economies on a global scale.  
 

Apr. 07 | Science, Inc. The increasing trend toward corporate or industrial sponsored research and development since the 1980s.  
 
 
 
 

Apr. 12-30 | Final Exam  
 
 
 
 
 

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General Information

  • Lecture: Weds 6:30-9:30pm
  • Classroom: SSC 2020
  • Syllabus term I
  • Syllabus term II