This collection of essays emerged from a conference held at the University of Pittsburgh's World History Centre. The event was the first in a series aimed at forging a ‘world history of science’. The inaugural conference pivoted around a period marked by the ‘great divergence’ in economic growth between Europe and China, starting from the mid-eighteenth century. The editors of the published essays are candid about the difficulties of bringing all the papers under that particular rubric. Nevertheless, the effort has produced a fascinating set of explorations of ‘global scientific practices’ that repay close reading.

The two chapters that explicitly engage with the thesis of the great divergence are placed in a section at the end of the volume, but are worth highlighting first. Both bring world economic history and the global history of science into a single frame. Jessica Ratcliff's careful discussion of alignments between global economic and scientific practices is suggestive and cautionary. The proposal that a ‘great data divergence’ might be correlated with an economic divergence of the same magnitude is certainly worthy of further detailed investigation. It is not hard to envisage a plausible case for a dramatic increase in long-distance flows of information about the natural world in European spheres of influence from the late eighteenth century on. Ratcliff points to various ways to place this alongside economic concerns, noting, for example, the work of Jan de Vries on the ‘industrious revolution’. The potential limitations of this approach are also signalled. As Ratcliff notes, while bringing into better focus peripheral centres, colonial subjects and global networks, the thesis falls short of a polycentric analysis of the accumulation and exchange of natural knowledge.

Daniel Rood's essay also points towards a synthesis between world economic history and a history of science attuned to global patterns of exchange. Rather than working with large-scale trends in data flows, Rood sets out an agenda for what he calls a ‘global labor history of science’. The long-distance management of ‘data collectors’ provides a core theme, allowing parallels to be drawn between global labour relations in general and those operating within the field sciences. What Rood wants to avoid – and, I think, for good reasons – is collapsing the logics of scientific labour into economic functionalism. The large-scale management of scientific labour should not be thought of as driven by economic imperatives tout court. Even so, labour history might well provide some useful modes of analysis and some examples of substantive overlap to offer a way forward for constructing a novel and fruitful world history of science.

The essays in the book's earlier sections are generally less explicit about linking, conceptually or empirically, world economic history and the global history of science. All, however, make significant contributions to a history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science that are alert to the ‘global’, however that abstract noun might be understood. Part I on ‘Exchanges among ways of knowing’ includes three stimulating chapters examining the precarious and polysemic character of natural knowledge made in, and moved from, regions at a distance from imperial centres. That knowledge concerned Cinchona plantations in present-day Ecuador (Matthew Crawford), hurricanes in Louisiana (Eleonora Rohland) and bird-eating spiders originally observed and drawn in Dutch Surinam (Kay Etheridge). In each case, indigenous knowledge and practices entered into the production and utility of natural knowledge in ways that were later obscured or lost entirely. Part II takes the development and implementation of the ‘Linnaean vision’ as its central concern. The three essays in this section provide insights into the ambitions, reach and often less-than-global realities of classifiers and collectors. Kenneth Nyberg's account of Linnaeus's ‘apostles’ shows how those long-distance travellers adopted a classificatory system designed, at least in part, to give Sweden an economic advantage over its competitors and used it for much more diffuse scientific purposes. As Hannah Hodacs shows in the subsequent chapter, the ability of Linnaean taxonomy to travel was made possible through embodied mnemonic and organizational practices. In the section's final chapter, Göran Rydén investigates the detailed descriptions by a Swedish mercantilist of British industrial and economic practices and places them within a form of travel and describing akin to the observant and classificatory practices of Linnaean science.

Part III turns to descriptive and taxonomic practices in a more general sense. It begins with Iris Montero Sobrevilla's excellent essay on the hummingbird. Long a symbol of tropical torpor, both natural and human, this image of the bird was overturned in 1790 by the criollo naturalist José Antonio Alzate. Sobrevilla argues that this intervention helped cultivate a ‘Creole science’ and offered greater recognition of the place of indigenous knowledge in natural-historical practices. Marcelo Fabián Figueroa's account of the ornithological investigations of the Spanish military engineer Félix de Azara examines the pursuit of natural-historical inquiry as a practice operating on the margins of the ‘imperial geostrategy’ of Spanish Bourbon reformers at the end of the eighteenth century. Azara's collection of Paraguayan birds was only possible because of his involvement in a Spanish boundary expedition and in that sense was entirely contingent upon imperial projects. Yet as supernumerary to the expedition, bird collecting fell outside the metrics of imperial utility. The final essay, by Irina Podgorny, tracks the provenance, shipment and classificatory histories of specimens of pichiciegos (a species of armadillo) that found their way from southern South America to museums in North America and Europe. Among other things, Podgorny argues that the contests and confusions surrounding classification point to the fundamental epistemic instabilities that existed at those metropolitan centres too often typecast as places where nature gathered from peripheral spaces was put to order.

Part IV brings together three essays dealing with ‘Logistics, management, and planning’. Leida Fernández-Prieto examines nineteenth-century ‘sugar science’ by exploring agronomic practices and experimentation in the Hispanic Caribbean. The chapter is concerned with the complex relations between an ‘archipelago’ of local practices and a more ‘global’ (but by no means uniform) agronomic science. The flows of expert knowledge associated with the tropical sugar industry trouble a historiography based on reified categories such as imperial or peripheral, Western or indigenous. The next chapter, by Stuart McCook, offers a fascinating material history of global plant transfer by telling the story of the Wardian case and its use, for a limited period between c.1830 and 1880, to transport live plants across the world. Although the case allowed botanists and more commercially motivated actors to successfully move plants over long distances, it also facilitated the global spread of pathogens. Tighter phytopathological regulations spelled the phasing out of its use. Darker histories of globalizing practices are also in evidence in Devyani Gupta's compelling chapter on the Imperial Post Office and its transformative effect on the political economy of colonial India. Gupta positions the imperial postal system within a wider array of scientific and economic practices that eroded local custom and market arrangements to the benefit of British imperial and private commercial interests (not least the opium trade). Those scientific and economic practices were generated, developed and implemented in India, making the imperial periphery crucial to the creation of powerful regulatory regimes.

As these uniformly excellent essays demonstrate, the task of constructing histories of science that provide cogent narratives about scientific practices might be described, in one way or another, as ‘global’ is hugely demanding. That task may, rather unnervingly, place the historian on the same footing as some of the actors they study – on a quest for an all-encompassing ‘global’ view. It need not, of course, be framed in quite this way. A global history of science might entail the study of science's growing global influence, or alternatively involve a critical examination of the global ambitions or imaginaries of past scientific practitioners. Looking at efforts to operate across multiple linguistic and cultural boundaries can be used to underline the fragility, failure and partisan politics of past efforts to ‘upscale’ science to offer explanations of planetary-level phenomena and processes. As some critics have pointed out, however, even this project can risk eliding actors who were untouched or excluded by ‘global’ practices. Despite these and other conceptual and methodological challenges, the essays reviewed here represent an exciting beginning to a larger project with much promise.