In 1976 Raymond Williams commented, ‘Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.’ Such implied difficulty has not prevented Bloomsbury Academic, since the 2000s, from publishing around forty series of their well-produced and generously illustrated Cultural Histories, with, according to their website, a further fifty in progress. Each series contains six volumes, each book covering, in theory, the same chronological period (antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the age of empire and the modern age), though there is some variation depending on precise topic. The idea is that one can use these books not only to read ‘horizontally’ about a subject across time, but also ‘vertically’ through different subjects in the same period – a idea made easier by the e-texts of the series on Bloomsbury's website.

This special issue brings together a diverse set of cases from Asia with the aim of decentring established historical narratives about science diplomacy. With a critical perspective bringing together the bodies of literature in the fields of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) and critical Asian Studies, we argue that these cases foreground a geopolitical history with multiple forms of sovereignty – often contested ones – and a range of political institutions and actors that enables us to revisit science diplomacy as a means for understanding the relationship between science and international affairs. In doing so, the articles in this issue consciously eschew the normative ‘centring’ of superpowers or Western imperial powers as the primary actors, focusing instead on the agency and subjectivity of actors within Asia, many of whom were prominent in their respective local contexts. Additionally, we argue that the cases presented here, which examine issues from across science, technology, medicine and the environment, collectively demonstrate the further need for the ‘science’ in ‘science diplomacy’ to be interpreted more broadly, incorporating as it does many aspects of human engagement with the material world.

How water is perceived and represented has an impact on the relationships between a given society and its water infrastructure. Historians have identified a shift in the perception of water during the nineteenth century, which was connected to the development of chemistry. From an understanding based in Hippocratic medicine and natural history that treated it as an infinite variety of substances, water eventually became understood as a simple compound consisting of oxygen and hydrogen. This resulted in the abstraction of water from its social and environmental contexts, with consequences for the way water was managed. This article aims to demonstrate that such a view gives a mistaken intellectual coherence to a fragmented and conflicted process, which involved continuities, an adaptation of old frameworks to new social priorities, and fine changes in scientific thinking and practices. This paper examines the scientific and political debates concerning water infrastructure, surveys and analyses on water quality, medical reports and political measures in nineteenth-century Italy. Ultimately, the reduction of ‘waters’ to ‘water’ in Italy was more about determining who had the authority to assess water quality in the process of creating and stabilizing new power relations between the public and the private spheres than about the abstraction of water from its social and environmental contexts.

In nineteenth-century Britain, captive snakes in menageries and zoological gardens were routinely fed with live prey – primarily rabbits, pigeons and guinea pigs. From the late 1860s, this practice began to generate opposition on animal welfare grounds, leading to a protracted debate over its necessity, visibility and morality. Focusing on the c.1870–1914 period, when the snake-feeding controversy reached its zenith, this article charts changing attitudes towards the treatment of reptiles in captivity and asks why an apparently niche practice generated so much interest. By looking at the biological arguments put forward for and against live feeding, the article traces the changing nature of humanitarian activism in the late nineteenth century and shows how the shifting character of the live-feeding debate paralleled wider trends in the animal welfare movement. It also highlights the different types of knowledge and expertise involved in the debate, as naturalists, veterinary surgeons, legal professionals, zookeepers and humanitarians offered conflicting perspectives on questions of reptilian dietary requirements and animal sentience.

Gordon Barrett (GB): Research Associate, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, UK (special issue co-editor).