Abstract This article examines the intervention of the French secular geographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville in the 1730s dispute over the figure of the Earth. D'Anville championed a method best described as “armchair geography.” By critically integrating the Cassinis' geodetic results from France with Jesuit reports from Qing China, he furnished geographical evidence for the Cassinian prolate Earth. His work was more than scholarly compilation: it depended on a trans-Eurasian knowledge network established under the auspices of the French Crown and the Académie and implemented by the Jesuits, which made Far Eastern information reliable and comparable. This network enabled d'Anville to wield Eurasian evidence in a Parisian scientific dispute without leaving Paris, and provoked discussion among scholars, Jesuits, and academicians. By restoring d'Anville's place in the controversy, this article shows how armchair geography allowed a secular geographer to intervene meaningfully in a debate usually reconstructed through its intra-European, Académie-centred, and expeditionary protagonists.
Abstract This article examines how scientific objects became tools of personal advancement and institutional negotiation in late 19th-century Europe. Focusing on the unpublished correspondence between Swedish orientalist Carl Landberg (1848–1924) and Italian archaeologist Luigi Pigorini (1842–1925), it explores how object donation operated as a transactional practice embedded in strategies of self-legitimation. Drawing on recent scholarship in the material history of science, the article adopts a dual framework: Samuel Alberti's emphasis on the symbolic value attributed to museum objects and Kapil Raj's focus on the agency of scientific intermediaries. From this perspective, donations—manuscripts, ethnographic items, and funds—emerge not as neutral contributions but as performative acts aimed at securing recognition and affiliation. Landberg's efforts to insert himself into Italy's academic and political elites through gifts reveal how museums functioned as arenas of informal diplomacy, where the circulation of objects was inseparable from the circulation of prestige. By reconstructing a microhistory of transnational exchange, the article contributes to decentered historiographies of science that challenge center–periphery models and foreground the entanglement of knowledge, material culture, and ambition.
Abstract This article examines the emergence of Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI), the Space Age's reiteration of the question of the existence of other civilizations in the universe, at the intersection of astronautics and astronomy, showing how it became a unifying concept across national and disciplinary boundaries under Cold War conditions. It centers on Czechoslovak engineer Rudolf Pešek's mid-1960s efforts within the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) to organize an international CETI symposium in Prague. Although the symposium never took place due to the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the actions taken to enable it provide insight into how CETI's history is rooted in a specific political context. The article highlights the interest in CETI among certain Warsaw Pact members, focuses on the unique position of Czechoslovakia and the scientific collaboration within the IAA, despite difficulties in astronomy-related internationalism and increasing local tensions in Czechoslovakia, pushing for CETI's validation. The case offers new geopolitical and epistemic perspectives on current historiography, as it demonstrates how CETI was not simply a scientific enterprise. Rather, coproduced through the geopolitical dynamics of the period, it functioned as a diplomatic tool embedded in international relations.
Abstract This article revisits the often-overlooked European precursors to industrial ecology, focusing on two distinct but conceptually aligned traditions that emerged in Belgium and Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. It challenges the prevailing US-centered narrative that locates the field's origins in a 1989 Scientific American article by Frosch and Gallopoulos, arguing instead that a richer and more philosophically grounded intellectual history can be found in earlier European efforts. The Belgian tradition, led by ecologists Paul Duvigneaud and Gilles Billen, sought to apply the concept of the ecosystem to cities, regions, and national economies. Their work anticipated modern material flow analysis and treated urban and industrial systems as metabolic entities, extending scientific ecology into the social and industrial domains. Parallel to this, the German Starnberg/Darmstadt group developed the concept of Soziale Naturwissenschaft (Social Natural Science), rooted in Gernot Böhme's theory of “finalization” of science. This approach reframed ecology as a normative and philosophical endeavor that must incorporate socially constructed environments and industrial infrastructures into its scope. While these European traditions ultimately failed to coalesce into a lasting research program or institutional framework, their intellectual legacies continue to resonate in contemporary sustainability discourses. This paper argues that revisiting these “roads not taken” could provide industrial ecology with a more robust epistemological foundation and reorient the field toward a deeper environmental ethic. By integrating the Belgian methodological rigor with the German philosophical critique of technocratic modernity, a distinctively European variant of industrial ecology could emerge—one that prioritizes the reproduction of nature over the pursuit of circularity for its own sake. In light of ongoing ecological, political, and economic crises, the article calls for renewed attention to forgotten scientific ideas as potential guides for shaping more sustainable futures.
Abstract The 1972 study The Limits to Growth , based on the computer simulation model World3, served as a catalyst for the development of numerous follow-up models. Between 1974 and 1981, several of these projects were presented at conferences hosted by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). The field that emerged from this exchange became known as Global Modelling and is widely regarded as a crucial precursor to later Integrated Assessment Models. This paper examines the struggles in constructing this proclaimed new discipline. It argues that Global Modelling—and the scientific turning point it came to represent—was constituted largely through mythmaking, disciplinary boundary work, invocations of community, and repeated references to Thomas Kuhn's concept of paradigms to confer prestige. Highlighting the rhetoric surrounding the World3 model and the subsequent establishment of Global Modelling is necessary to understand the divergent narratives about the field's trajectories. It illustrates how contestation over Global Modelling's status provided the matrix for how the field is remembered.
