How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-Making: Interaction, Circulation and the Transgression of Cultural Difference

This multidisciplinary collection of essays provides a critical and comprehensive understanding of how knowledge has been made, moved and used, by whom and for what purpose. To explain how new knowledge emerges, this volume offers a two-fold conceptual move: challenging both the premise of insurmountable differences between confined, autarkic cultures and the linear, nation-centered approach to the spread of immutable stocks of knowledge. Rather, the conceptual focus of the book is on the circulation, amalgamation and reconfiguration of locally shaped bodies of knowledge on a broader, global scale. The authors emphasize that  the histories of interaction have been made less transparent through the study of cultural representations thus distorting the view of how knowledge is actually produced. Leading scholars from a range of fields, including history, philosophy, social anthropology and comparative culture research, have contributed chapters which cover the period from the early modern age to the present day and investigate settings in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Their particular focus is on areas that have largely been neglected until now. In this work, readers from many disciplines will find new approaches to writing the global history of knowledge-making, especially historians, scholars of the history and philosophy of science, and those in culture studies.

Table of Contents:
1. "Introduction: Interaction, Circulation and the Transgression of Cultural Differences in the History of Knowledge-Making" (Johannes Feichtinger).- Part 1. Knowledge Production beyond the Logic of Cultural Difference.- 2. The Role of Exiles in the History of Knowledge: Two Cases (Peter Burke).- 3. "Interactive Knowledge-Making: How and Why Nineteenth-Century Austrian Scientific Travelers in Asia and Africa Overcame Cultural Differences" (Johannes Feichtinger).- Part 2. Mobilizations of Knowledge Reconsidered.- 4. "How Romance Studies Shaped the Ukrainian Language and How the Ukrainian-Romanian Conflict Helped to Create Ladinian: A (Very) Entangled History of A-Political Science" (Jan Surman).- 5. "A Spiritual Unity of Europe and the Yugoslav Politics of Knowledge in the Interwar Period: A Philosophical Enhancement of the ‘Slavic Spirit’" (Dragan Prole).- Part 3. Shifting Positions of and for Knowledge Production.- 6. "A History of Circulation vs. an ‘Episodic’ History of Mathematics in South Asia: Titrating the Historiography and Social Theory of Science and Mathematics" (Dhruv Raina).- 7. "Shaping Newtonianism: The Intersection of Knowledge Claims in Eighteenth-Century Greek Intellectual Life" (Manolis Patiniotis).- Part 4. Writing a Shared History of Knowledge Production.- 8. "Queer Diasporic Practice of a Muslim Traveler: Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Chacha Kahini" (Kris Manjapra).- 9. "Shared Village Stories: How (Not) to Disentangle Literary Historiography from ‘Modernization’" (Marcus Twellmann).- 10. "Can Black Folk Dream—in Theory? Psychoanalysis and Coloniality—Anamnesis of a Failed Encounter" (Ulrike Kistner).- 11. "Positivist Worldmakers: John Stuart Mill’s and Auguste Comte’s Rival Universalisms at the Zenith of Empire" (Franz L. Fillafer).