This edited collection uncovers the intimate relationship between the global circulation of science and its emergence as a universal form of knowledge. The volume itself arose out of a conference on Circulating Knowledge, East and West held at the University of King's College, Halifax, in 2010. The regional focus on connections between Britain, India and China reflects this. Circulation here provides a welcome change of pace from volumes which take imperialism and empire as organizing categories. Whilst these themes are by no means ignored, circulation offers a chance to avoid rehearsing old debates surrounding the relative influence of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’. George Basalla is refreshingly absent from the majority of contributions.

Following a short introduction, the collection is organized into five sections comprising twelve papers in total. The first section contains three papers based on the journals and letters of the Scottish astronomer James Dinwiddie. As we learn in the preface, this archive has recently been made available online by Dalhousie University (www.library.dal.ca/DUASC/Digital-Collections/Dinwiddie). Dinwiddie initially plied his trade as an itinerant lecturer in Britain, before joining Lord Macartney's infamous embassy mission to China in 1792 as a mathematical demonstrator. Having three papers based on the same set of primary sources is surprisingly successful, with each pushing the historiography of the itinerant lecturer well beyond traditional national boundaries. Savithri Preetha Nair's impressive contribution recovers Dinwiddie's performances as a Galvanic lecturer in Calcutta following the collapse of the Macartney mission. Jan Golinski then takes us back to London, completing the circuit whereby the meanings associated with the Galvanic pile are tied to Dinwiddie's status as traveller.

Circulation is then interpreted more broadly throughout the remaining four sections, which are less tightly organized. Much as in the earlier papers on Dinwiddie, Fa-ti Fan treats circulation in terms of material culture, tracing the development of legislation to control the movement of antiquities and fossils in China following the Republican Revolution of 1911. In contrast, Jahnavi Phalkey adopts an approach more closely related to the history of ideas. Phalkey follows the fate of science amidst the genesis of Indian nationalism. Here, circulation is imagined in terms of a movement between colonial and post-colonial thought. Phalkey demonstrates how science under Jawaharlal Nehru emerged anew as both a material and a rhetorical tool for planned industrial development. Jonathan Topham's excellent paper on British scientific periodicals then takes us back to Europe. Topham convincingly demonstrates how these early journals emerged as attempts to anthologize papers from across continental Europe. Historiographically, it is an important reminder of how studies of circulation need not always function at the level of empire. Sundar Sarukkai's concluding contribution pushes circulation in another direction altogether. Through a close study of Malayalam science textbooks recently published in Kerala, Sarukkai challenges historians of science to pay closer attention to translation as an active process in the creation of knowledge. This is a welcome call to arms, particularly aimed at historians of modern science, where work on translation is scarce in comparison with scholarship on ancient Greece and Assyria.

One standout contribution by Yang Haiyan takes up this charge to study science in translation. Yang's detailed study of the reception of evolutionary theory in Chinese publications around 1900 is essential reading for all historians of the life sciences. We learn how defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 catalysed Chinese interest in evolution. But, rather than On the Origin of Species, it was a translation and adaptation of Thomas Huxley's Romanes Lecture, published as Tianyan lun (The Theory of Evolution) in 1898, which proved most influential. The reform-minded author, Yan Fu, warned readers that China was losing out in the national struggle for existence. Borrowing from Herbert Spencer as well, Yan Fu presented an image of China as a ‘social organism’ in dire need of reform. In early twentieth-century China, it was Huxley and Spencer who dominated the reception of evolutionary theory, rather than Charles Darwin. A full translation of the English text of On the Origin of Species did not appear until 1920. In its own right, this paper is therefore a valuable addition to the growing body of scholarship on the global reception of evolution by natural selection.

Ultimately, this collection is best read for individual articles such as Yang's. Whilst a broad approach is in some ways welcome, the volume as a whole does not seriously develop circulation as an analytical category. Unlike related historiographies, such as those concerning material culture or scientific practice, circulation is still surprisingly undertheorized. We know little about the role of different modes and speeds of circulation, the relationship between circulation and empire, or the relevance of the movement of people versus things. From this collection at least, it still remains unclear if studies of circulation need to be grounded in material culture. These themes are all touched upon, but a more theoretically developed introduction and a clearer organization would have helped bring them into sharper focus. Individual authors do go some way to countering this issue. Fa-ti Fan, for instance, begins his paper with a convincing critique of our tendency to treat circulation as a natural state. But this analytic approach is not sustained across the volume. The Circulation of Knowledge is therefore best recommended to scholars with particular regional interests or course organizers looking to expand the traditional themes of experiment, display and publication beyond a European context. Where we go with circulation, however, remains an open question.