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Paper short abstract:

Many narratives about the production of knowledge address specific national contexts. Deliberately comparative approaches—transnational history embracing multiple perspectives, co-written by several scholars—have great promise in exploring national security, colonization, conservation, and more.

Paper long abstract:

How can we best narrate the history of recent science? In his classic 1992 essay, historian Bill Cronon declared that “narrative is the chief literary form that tries to find meaning in an overwhelmingly crowded and disordered chronological reality” and “is fundamental to the way we humans organize our experiences” (Cronon, “A Place for Stories,” J. Amer. Hist. 78, 4 (1992): 1347-1376). This approach has allowed individual historians to communicate key insights about the production of knowledge and its cultural influences, often within specific national contexts. But what approaches can enhance our understanding of scientific developments that take place within global contexts, where key developments and insights occur at the intersection of what would otherwise be narrow national narratives?

Historians in the “Colony, Empire, Environment” team—supported by the European Science Foundation’s bold 2006 initiative “BOREAS—Histories from the North” initiative—faced this challenge as its nine members sought to create “a comparative international history of changing conceptions of the Arctic landscape during the twentieth century.” What could Norwegian, Swedish, Russian, Danish, Canadian, and U.S. scholars learn while exploring changing conceptions of military patronage and national security, colonization and nature conservation, indigenous knowledge, and Western science?

Our team ultimately published co-written articles in a special edition of the Journal of Historical Geography deliberately embracing comparative approaches—what John V. Pickstone called constructive histories building “upon multiple perspectives” and C.A. Bayly et al and A. Iriye termed “transnational history” (Doel/Wråkberg/Zeller, “Introduction,” JHG 2014, n. 22). This paper extends our discussions.