A new genre of treatises on practical seamanship emerged in eighteenth-century Britain. Authored by a group of seamen with decades of experience on the lower deck of merchant and naval vessels, these texts represented the ship as a machine, and seamanship as a form of mechanical experiment which could only be carried out by deep-sea sailors. However, as this article finds, this group of sailor–authors had only a brief moment of authoritative legitimacy before their ideas were repackaged and promoted by land-bound authors and naval officers, and the progenitors of the ‘science of seamanship’ were deemed unfit participants in its ongoing practice. This article explores this brief moment, taking seriously the ideas and influences of the maritime milieu which spawned it, and arguing that the codification and circulation of ‘useful knowledge’ in eighteenth-century Britain often hardened social hierarchies. Examining seamanship forces us to question the progressivist linear trajectory of an increasingly open scientific culture during this period, and to focus instead on a repeating pattern in which the working knowledge of labourers and artisans was appropriated and its original practitioners denigrated.

This article examines the significant relationship that existed between commercial British television and the study of animal behaviour. Ethological research provided important content for the new television channel, at the same time as that coverage played a substantial role in creating a new research specialism, the study of primate facial expressions, for this emergent scientific discipline. The key site in this was a television and film unit at London Zoo administered by the Zoological Society and Granada TV. The Granada unit produced ‘Animal expressions’, a twenty-five-minute television film based on research on monkeys and apes by the Dutch postgraduate student and soon-to-be-leading-authority Jan van Hooff. Recovering the production and multiple uses of ‘Animal expressions’, this paper offers the first sustained historical analysis of science on commercial television. I show how Granada patronage helped Van Hooff to support his argument that human expressions such as smiling and laughter shared common evolutionary origins with similar facial movements in nonhuman primates. Emphasizing the mutual shaping of science and ITV, I argue that ‘Animal expressions’ repurposed televisual conventions of framing talking heads, and blended serious science with the comedy of ‘funny faces’, thereby epitomizing Granada's public-service strategy at a time when commercial television was defending itself from criticism in the Pilkington report.

In his Telluris Theoria Sacra and its English translation The Theory of the Earth (1681–90), the English clergyman and schoolmaster Thomas Burnet (c.1635–1715) constructed a geological history from the Creation to the Final Consummation, positing predominantly natural causes to explain biblical events and their effects on the Earth and life on it. Burnet's insistence on appealing primarily to natural rather than miraculous causes has been interpreted both by his contemporaries and by some historians as an essentially Cartesian principle. On this reading, Burnet adhered to a Cartesian style of explanation in which there was no place for miracles. In this paper, I propose a different interpretation. Burnet's commitment to natural over miraculous causes, I argue, was grounded in an anti-voluntarist theology which he inherited from the Cambridge Platonists and Latitudinarians. This anti-voluntarism, moreover, also dictated the kind of miracles to which he did appeal. This reading of Burnet contrasts with the view that he was simply following Cartesian principles. First, Descartes had espoused a radical form of theological voluntarism. Second, Burnet's and Descartes's views of providence were based on distinct attributes of God, and these attributes had quite different implications regarding the place of miracles in the providential order.

The selection of nineteenth-century Arabic texts on medical education, medicine and health demonstrates the significant link between the revival of the Arabic language and literary culture of the nineteenth century, known as the nahda, and the introduction of medical education to the Ottoman Empire. These include doctor Ibrahim al-Najjar's autobiographical account of his studies in Cairo (1855), an article by doctor Amin Abi Khatir advising on the health and care of infants (1877), questions and answers in the major popular Arabic journals al-Hilal and al-Muqtataf (1877–1901) and an article about a new tuberculosis treatment by doctor Anisa Sayba‘a (1903). Taken together they contribute to our understanding of the bottom-up production, reproduction and reception of global scientific knowledge, as well as to a social and intellectual history of science. We argue that the engagement with science during the nahda was a multi-vocal and dialogical process, in which doctors and patients, journal editors and their readers, negotiated the implications of scientific knowledge for their own lives and their own society. The texts of the original documents and their translations can be found in the supplementary material tab at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087422000413.

For several decades historians of science have interrogated the relationship between empire and science, largely focusing on European imperial powers. At the same time, scholars have sought alternatives to an early diffusionist model of the spread of modern science, seeking to capture the multi-directional and dialogic development of science and its institutions in most parts of the globe. The papers in this special issue illuminate these questions with added attention to particular claims about the exceptionalism – or not – of Islamic societies’ approach to science, modernity and politics. Each contribution centres individuals and groups who engaged with science theoretically or practically, taking seriously their analytical categories and how they understood and grappled with the social, economic and intellectual transformations happening around them. Collectively, these studies make the case for Middle Eastern and Ottoman history as useful sites for furthering our field's understanding of processes of the globalization of science and how authority, politics and science have been and continue to be interconnected.