How did the histories of biomedicine and Christianity coalesce during the heydays of bacteriology and tropical medicine in the early twentieth century? How can the focus on relatively underexplored sites in the historiography of scientific knowledge add to our insights about the links between the histories of imperialism, disciplinary institutions and scientific experiments? How does one conceptualize the presence and agency of captive patients in the colonized context? This article argues that a renewed focus on the colonial leper asylums in British India allows us simultaneously to raise these fundamental questions, which resonate with the newly emergent histories of global and colonial science and medicine. In addressing these questions, this article establishes these leper asylums as a unique site where colonized diseased subalterns encountered, suffered, engaged with and defied different strands of British power that were concurrently imperial, biomedical and Christian.

The late nineteenth-century animal marketplace was a thriving industry. The growth of empire and the development of new technologies and infrastructure facilitated the global movement of animals. As a result, many more reached Britain, where they were purchased by a range of customers for varying pursuits. Historians have explored the role of animal dealers in facilitating this market, but few have considered the influence of the 'fancy of the private collector' upon the trade. Taking naturalist, museum proprietor and zoo owner Lionel Walter Rothschild (1868-1937) as its case study, this paper explores the ways in which the scientific predilections of those with money and influence shaped the market and business practices of animal dealers, contributing directly to the 'booms in beasts' of the period. However, the retailing of animals involved more than financial transactions. Through an examination of the supply of animals to Rothschild's zoological enterprise, this paper will demonstrate how scientific interests and purchasing power could combine to elevate customers from passive consumers, reliant on the capabilities of the animal dealer, to active collaborators. Working together, wealthy customers and dealers secured the further procurement of material, contributing to the construction of zoological knowledge, whilst also building their professional reputations.

This article examines the rise and global influence of sericulture experimental stations from 1869 to 1900, framing them as an international 'World Wide Silk Web'. Focusing on the Padua sericulture station as a case study, the essay traces how these stations initially emerged in response to the pébrine epizootic that devastated silk production across Europe and Asia. It argues that the adoption and diffusion of Louis Pasteur's preventive method against pébrine owed less to individual scientific discovery than to the collective work of these stations. Sericulture stations became hubs of techno-entomological knowledge, by blending traditional practices with new methods, creating knowledge commodities, and disseminating technical knowledge. Operating at the intersectionof national interests and international collaboration, stations exchanged expertise, materials, knowledge and innovations while supporting local silk industries. In contrast to models of knowledge movements that focus on imperial extraction, this article highlights the asymmetrical yet polycentric nature of this network, shaped by economic partnerships, scientific authority, geopolitical aims and international contexts.

This article contends that meteorology endured a severe crisis in the USSR in 1972. During a devastating drought this year, meteorology lost its reliability as a science able to forecast the weather many weeks and months in advance. Many professional users turned to an alternative weather forecaster, Anatolii D'iakov, who predicted the weather for the next season by observing the sun. The argument made here is threefold. First, the fundamental reason for the crisis in long-range weather forecasting lies in the disruption of a bond of trust between meteorologists and the government, built on unfulfilled prospects of rapid and sudden, but unrealistic, progress in long-range forecasting to help agriculturalists of the steppe regions. Meteorologists could not fulfil the high expectations put in them. Second, journalists covering rural matters were instrumental in extolling D'iakov's alternative forecasts and in lambasting 'official' meteorology; however, they did not succeed in convincing the leadership to purge forecasters and reorganize meteorology. The meteorologists preserved their autonomy to deal with D'iakov. Third, the article reflects on the consequences of the failure of long-term forecasting for the status of science within Soviet governance and ideology.

Today, the story of the opium trade is an almost archetypal representation of the social, economic and military power dynamics at play in the colonial world. But few, if any, are aware that the European encounter with Chinese opium smoking spurred a European interest in opium vapour therapy, or that its spirited uptake in European medicine inspired a research programme that spanned the continent for more than half a century. Opium smoking was intoxicating, something which experimental science suggested should be impossible, since the chemical properties of opium's active alkaloids all but precluded the possibility of vaporization. Recalling opium smoking's entrance into medical practice and the subsequent experimental interest in the chemical constitution of opium vapour, this paper reconstructs the history of European 'opium science'. In doing so, it realizes opium science as the site of competing definitions of the biomedical reality implicated in the experience of opium intoxication, one centred on the intoxicated experiences of the colonial subjects themselves. Far from being a simple story of exchange between centres and peripheries, it examines the polycentricity of knowledge circulation in the colonial world and the implacable agency of intoxication.

In the 1950s, Alan Durrant of the University College Wales began a series of experiments to investigate the inheritance of environmental effects in plants, forging an unexpected connection to the controversial hereditary theories of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. Durrant's work relied heavily on a specific fibre flax variety, Stormont Cirrus, developed in the interwar period in the UK for linen production. I investigate how the exigencies of the UK linen industry, along with Durrant's training and institutional setting, formed the milieu that generated an unexpected outlier in British genetic scholarship during the Cold War. I supplement my text-based historical analysis by conducting experiments to re-examine the genetic constitution of the original Stormont Cirrus cultivar. These findings suggest that Durrant's creation of alternative 'genotroph' derivatives by treating Stormont Cirrus plants with different soil nutrient regimes likely resulted from selection of pre-existing genetic variation present in the incompletely inbred parental strain, rather than being an example of inherited environmental effects. Inverting Durrant's intention to interpret his results in the context of Lysenko's work, my historical analysis of Durrant's flax genotroph findings informs a reappraisal of one of the key experimental claims supporting Lysenko's environmentalist concepts of inheritance.

This paper shows how the Greater Manchester Museum of Science and Industry (GMMSI) was shaped by actors' experiences with the history of science and technology. The museum began under the leadership of scientist-historians at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) in the 1960s, where it was uniquely positioned to reflect contemporary histories of science, particularly framed around the concept of revolutions. This academic framing converged with long-held civic aspirations for a science museum in the city and cemented Manchester's historiographic position as the 'first industrial city'. Vivian Bowden, UMIST's principal, also explicitly aimed to educate future scientists whom he believed were key to overcoming the region's economic challenges. What is striking in this process is how perceptions of the past and contemporary views were integrated with vehement northern independence and determination to form a 'museum to rival South Kensington'. This paper concludes with the GMMSI's early 1980s relocation to Liverpool Road Station, where the museum became a wholly civic affair, beyond academia. Despite these changes, the belief that the past had a place in the education of future scientists laid the foundations for the later integration of an interactive science centre gallery in the 1980s.

This article examines a controversy over a nuclear-energy gallery at the Science Museum, London, in the early 1980s. It uses this case to explore the wider politicization of museums at this time, and thus the politicization of the display of science and technology. It argues that cultural changes in train since the 1960s, coupled with a museological turn towards 'social history' as the proper vehicle for exhibiting science and technology, led to the museum becoming newly subject to widespread critical scrutiny. That scrutiny had contradictory effects. On the one hand, it reinforced the image of the museum as a bastion of official culture and knowledge. On the other, it undermined this image, by exposing the ideological nature of the museum's authority. This double movement laid the groundwork for the crisis of confidence that culminated in the 'New Museology' of the later part of the decade. Attending to this controversy thus suggests a need to revise prevailing scholarship on the 'politics of display', which often takes for granted an overly straightforward connection between museums and power.

This article examines Redcliffe N. Salaman's (1874-1955) efforts to establish a national system for producing virus-free seed potatoes in 1930s Britain. It explores how scientific authority was mobilized to reshape agricultural practices and assert regulatory control over seed production. Although Salaman's proposals were never fully realized, they laid the groundwork for enduring strategies to improve potato crop health by protecting seed from infectious agents and their insect vectors. Salaman's work drew on both traditional horticultural knowledge and emerging microbiological techniques, spanning field and laboratory settings. He exemplifies how diverse modes of science making shaped a period of increasing professionalization and institutionalization in the biological sciences. By tracing interactions between scientists and other actors - including growers, seedsmen and government officials - the article shows how plant virus control was gradually redefined from a craft-based practice to a scientific domain. This article contributes to the early history of virology from an agricultural perspective, as well as to broader historiographical debates on the role of science in agriculture, the professionalization of expertise and the construction of regulatory authority in twentieth-century Britain.