Horizons
- Author James Poskett
- Narrator Sid Sagar
- Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
- Run Time 15 hours and 22 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre African history, Asian history, General and world history, Globalization, History, History of engineering and technology, History of ideas, History of mathematics, History of science, History of the Americas, Middle Eastern history, Popular science.
Titles Purchased
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Price p/Title
- €9.95
- €8.95
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Listen to a sample
What to expect
Brought to you by Penguin.
A radical retelling of the history of science that challenges the Eurocentric narrative.
We are told that modern science was invented in Europe, the product of great minds like Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. But this is wrong. Science is not, and has never been, a uniquely European endeavour.
Copernicus relied on mathematical techniques borrowed from Arabic and Persian texts. When Newton set out the laws of motion, he relied on astronomical observations made in Asia and Africa. When Darwin was writing On the Origin of Species, he consulted a sixteenth-century Chinese encyclopaedia. And when Einstein was studying quantum mechanics, he was inspired by the Bengali physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose. Horizons pushes beyond Europe, exploring the ways in which scientists from Africa, America, Asia and the Pacific fit into the history of science, and arguing that it is best understood as a story of global cultural exchange.
Challenging both the existing narrative and our perceptions of revered individuals, above all this is a celebration of the work of scientists neglected by history. Among many others, we meet Graman Kwasi, the seventeenth-century African botanist who discovered a new cure for malaria, Hantaro Nagaoka, the nineteenth-century Japanese scientist who first described the structure of the atom, and Zhao Zhongyao, the twentieth-century Chinese physicist who discovered antimatter (but whose American colleague received the Nobel prize).
Scientists today are quick to recognise the international nature of their work. In this ambitious and revisionist history, James Poskett reveals that this tradition goes back much further than we think.
© James Poskett 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022
Critics Review
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Superb . . . Poskett rightly highlights the shamefully overlooked contributions of Indian, Chinese and Japanese scientists
Sunday Times -
A fundamental retelling of the story of science . . . Poskett deftly blends the achievements of little-known figures into the wider history of science . . . brims with clarity
Financial Times -
An honest conversation about the history of science is therefore not just of moral importance – it is part of what makes discovery possible
New Statesman -
I’ve been really impressed by Horizons: A Global History of Science by James Poskett. The book is exactly what it says on the cover: it’s a way of looking at the world of science and the development of technology from a genuinely global perspective. The narrative starts with the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan [on the site of modern-day Mexico City] and the engineering marvels that were present there, built long before the Spanish turned up during their conquest in the early modern era. Poskett also discusses Arab science, Chinese science and the story of science in the west, which is better known. So it’s a truly global and really well-written and engaging account
BBC History Magazine, Books of the Year 2022 -
A lively story of global collaboration in the study of nature from 1500 to the present day . . . rich and lucid
Literary Review -
European scientists for centuries served the political goals of empire building, which was based on slave trading, military power, oppression and violence . . . Poskett hopes for a future where the historic truth about how scientific progress has been made is universally accepted, where all cultures are valued, and where global scientific collaboration unleashes the creativity to solve problems such as climate change
Irish Times
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