Networks of knowledge, or spaces of circulation? The birth of British cartography in colonial south Asia in the late eighteenth century

Of the many domains of history, there is at least one – the history of science – that has since its institutionalization in the interwar years, always proclaimed its universal status. Indeed, George Sarton, often referred to as the father of the discipline, famously characterized it as ‘the only history that can illustrate the progress of mankind.’ He went on to assert that ‘We can thus reconstruct, or help to reconstruct, as it were, the development of the human genius, that is, not the intelligence of any single man or group of men, but that of mankind as a whole.’ What, however, did Sarton mean by this assertion? How, for him and for Isis, the journal he founded in 1913, and which was to become the flagship organ of the budding discipline of the history of science, did this claim translate into a history of mankind? In its early years – the interwar period – the history of science was conceived as a metascientific project in which the sciences themselves participated: ‘For most scientists,’ writes Peter Dear, ‘the past of their disciplines was an integral part of the science itself.’ The history of science as published in Isis was thus addressed primarily to scientists on an expectation of contemporary usefulness — the motive resided in the belief that history possesses an educative, heuristic or polemical value. The appraisal Sarton thus sought to present was the sum total of all human knowledge where ‘human’ and ‘knowledge’ were each conceived of as a harmonious whole, a unity, in which ‘the progress of each branch of science is a function of the progress of the other branches’. The contents of Isis thus included contributions on the history of various sciences in India, Japan, the Arab world, China, and ancient Egypt, to name but a few. In spite of its resolutely positivist and cumulative history of ideas perspective, far removed from present-day perceptions, the philosophy behind the journal in its early decades was resolutely that of the unity of mankind encapsulated in what Sarton labelled ‘the New Humanism’. ‘The progress of science,’ he wrote, ‘is not due to the isolated efforts of a single people but to the combined efforts of all peoples’. The aim of the discipline and its flagship journal was to offer an account of how peoples all over the world had contributed to one great project that could elevate them above their petty nationalistic and religious differences. To be sure, the majority of articles concerned the history of modern science partly because, as Sarton later explained, its development