In the early summer of 1914, the Dutch University of Groningen celebrated its 300th anniversary. The students’ representative, Melchior Bos, in an address to foreign guests on the first night of the festivities, reminded his audience of the glorious past of the Netherlands, especially during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Dutch Golden Age. In commerce, the arts, science, and scholarship Holland had then taken the lead in Europe. The founding of the University of Groningen in 1614 had been part of that spectacular flowering of Dutch culture. However, Bos argued, this Golden Age was more than just a memory. His country experienced a new wave of economic and cultural expansion, and perhaps, he concluded, a future generation would describe the period he lived in as a second Golden Age, or even a Diamond Age.

Unlike other sections of this volume, which are composed of groups of countries or regions that are geographically contiguous and share general cultural affinities, this section includes regions that do not as clearly share common borders and that are culturally much more diverse. Nevertheless, common issues do exist. In general this section covers the contiguous region from Africa, across the Middle East and to South Asia. Individual chapters discuss regions that are internally very diverse, and diversity and a general openness to outside influences characterize the regions. But perhaps most important, the chapters analyze regions of the world that are seen as non-Western and that share a common heritage of having dealt with the impact of European colonialism.

While European scientific and medical theories had almost no impact on the inhabitants of the territory that Europeans referred to as Indochina before the twentieth century, Western technological innovations, particularly in the areas of military armaments and engineering, were used in struggles for control of the territory that is now Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam from the seventeenth century on. The results of this use were particularly noteworthy during the twentieth century and have remained important for those countries in the twenty-first century.

Scandinavia formally comprises the traditional homes of the speakers of modern languages descended from Old Norse, namely Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Finland is often included in Scandinavia by English and American scholars, though Norden – “The North” – is the preferred inclusive term. Scandinavia and Norden will be used interchangeably in this chapter. These five nations and their historically subject (and more recently autonomous) territories – Greenland (Denmark), the Faroes (Denmark), and the Åland archipelago (Finland) – are bound together by historical, linguistic, and cultural ties, warranting their consideration as a supranational region.

Russian history of science begins with a question: Why did the Kievan Rus’, the medieval Slavs to whom modern Russians look as the origin of their culture, neglect the scientific sources of Byzantium, with which they were in close contact? Some Kievan monks and literati from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries did translate Greek texts from the great libraries of Constantinople. As a result, Byzantine influences prevailed in Kievan culture in liturgy, theology, political ideology, and art. Why was science not one of the objects of attention of the Kievan Rus’? Strikingly, during the Middle Ages the Kievan scholars translated no complete work of ancient Greek science, even though the Byzantine libraries were rich in these sources.

The Greater Caribbean is a sprawling, diverse region that encompasses the mainland and islands surrounding the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. For a few decades in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Greater Caribbean was at least nominally contained within a single polity – the Viceroyalty of New Spain. In 2015, the Greater Caribbean had slightly more than 200 million inhabitants, distributed unevenly across the region. Mexico alone is home to 63 percent of the total. The Greater Antilles (Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica) are home to 19 percent, or almost 39 million people.

Museums of natural history play a significant role in interpreting the natural world in scientific terms. They are sites where initially taxonomic, then geographic, and more recently environmental emphases have been reflected in their holdings and displays. Several issues frame their history: what individual museums hold; how objects are acquired; which material artifacts are displayed and in what arrangement; what audience observes them and for what purposes; and who sponsors museum activities. Cultural historians are particularly interested in museums as places that elaborate meaning through material objects on display, paying particular attention when interpretation is contested. Museum historians have traced the work of curators who developed and extended systematics within the natural sciences.

Writing a history of the sciences in one country over a long period of time has always been an exercise full of pitfalls. The main risk, we know, is essentialization – of a culture, of a social world, of a national style. It is not that these questions are without interest, but conceiving the analytical tools to tackle them properly is arduous. Such a history must also consider the interface, at global and national level, among knowledge production, academic institutions, technical development, industrial activity, military requirements, political culture, and the nature of the public space. And it has to be done in a moment – the last one hundred years – when the autonomy of scientific activity is less obvious than ever, when mobilization for war and economic progress have become the norm, and when criticism of science is on the rise.

During the past century, Korea has developed modern science quite rapidly. The economic development and industrialization of Korea during the last five decades or so have been considered as reflecting the success of Korean science. This success is especially remarkable because it has been achieved in spite of many political and social problems not favorable for scientific development – intrusion of foreign powers, oppressive colonial rule, wars, and political unrests, for example. The main task of this chapter is to sketch this development.

Historical studies of science in Spanish America emphasize efforts by local groups to overcome adverse conditions, participate in international networks of knowledge, and promote science as essential to national projects of development. Initially, research groups were small, fragile, and dominated by individual pioneering figures. Many members were astute and creative in overcoming inadequate funds, libraries, and laboratories, and in surviving as researchers in societies that usually placed a low cultural value on science. This chapter will describe the main scientific events, characters, and trends in Spanish South America between the late eighteenth century and the late twentieth century. The emphasis will be in the life and exact sciences and in their connection to medicine and engineering.

Portugal is a small European country located in the western part of the Iberian Peninsula with stable geographical mainland boundaries since the thirteenth century. One of the leaders of European overseas expansion during the sixteenth century, Portugal declined after 1600 while northern European states took the leadership. From the eighteenth century onwards, despite securing a large empire that included Brazil and a significant share of African territories, Portugal shifted from a center to a periphery. This particular, and even paradoxical, trajectory, from a European center to a periphery, but still keeping its centrality concerning its long-lasting empire in Africa (the last Portuguese colonies became independent in 1975), places Portugal as a privileged case study to look at the role played by science, technology, and medicine (for short science) at the national, transnational, and global levels as well as in a long-durée perspective.

The territory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and (Northern) Ireland, as it now is, has been the site of major scientific endeavors from the seventeenth century to the present, as is evident from any history of science. Indeed with the great expansion of Anglophone historiography of science since the 1970s, British cases, for the period 1750 to 1914 especially, were central to general arguments about the nature of science, situated in very local contexts but speaking to global concerns. In contrast, national modes of writing long suggested systematic deficits in British science. In the 1820s, Charles Babbage reflected on the “decline of science” compared to Continental Europe, and later in the century scientific campaigns relied on exaggerated contrasts with other nations, especially Germany.

The chapters in this section of the volume mainly represent major English-speaking former British colonies. One essay also includes regions in the Pacific Ocean, but there is less discussion about countries in this region because less has been written about them. This essay will primarily compare and contrast the major former British colonies but it will also mention potential future areas of research in the Pacific Ocean region. The former British colonies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States share a common identity as settler societies, and although in the early twenty-first century, they are very diverse, traditionally they were all largely dominated by Protestant, Anglo-Saxon elites.

The coincidence in 2017 of the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation with the 175th year of the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC), one of the country’s oldest, most venerable scientific institutions, highlighted historical entanglements that run deep, in both directions. A tumultuous generation after The New Yorker published Nathan Fast’s telling assessment of more than just “The Status of Canadian Geology” in 1957, a team of Quebec geoscientists in 1995 reported in Nature that Canada owes its tectonic origins to a clash between two incompatible micro-continents.

By 1800, after three centuries of extraordinary and at times violent explorations driven by a complex mixture of capitalism, Christianity, and conquest, Europeans had produced fairly complete maps of the coastal outlines of the globe and brought back to their capital cities elaborate accounts of, and specimens by the shipload from, what they saw as a New World. In so doing, they had radically changed the form and content of all the major sciences in Europe. Whereas in 1500 a botanical book might list hundreds of different species, by 1800 there were tens of thousands recorded and no end in sight; and whereas in 1500 a geographer might be able to sketch out portions of the continents of Africa, Europe, and Asia with wildly varying degrees of accuracy, by 1800 he could precisely map those continents as well as Australia and the Americas and myriad islands in between.

There is a paradoxical quality to international science after 1940. World War II and the Cold War restricted many traditional avenues of scientific internationalism: atomic physics and allied fields became shrouded in national security restrictions; basic data (including sea floor soundings and geodetic data) were restricted or classified; and communications between Western and Soviet scientists frayed. Espionage agencies recruited scientists, international scientific meetings were postponed or delayed, and the universalist practices of science were attacked as unpatriotic and dangerous within leading scientific nations.