Scientific History
* Book: Scientific History: Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the End of the Cold War. By Elena Aronova. University of Chicago Press, 2021
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Review
Ian Hesketh:
"Scientific History by Elena Aronova uncovers a previously hidden history of the interactions and experiments of scientists and historians who sought to produce unified knowledge of the human past.
It is an analysis that takes the reader on a seemingly idiosyncratic journey
- from the reception of Comtean positivism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the origins of the synthetic and total approach of the Annales school;
- from the establishment of Marxism and historical materialism in the early Soviet Union to the large-scale evolutionary histories of H. G. Wells and Julian Huxley;
- and from UNESCO’s History of Mankind project to the rise and decline of quantitative and computational methods during the Cold War.
What links these diverse historiographical approaches is that they are all forms of “scientific history,” which is Aronova’s “shorthand for the diverse ways in which scientists and historians reconciled the techniques, approaches, and values of science with the writing of history”. While this definition of scientific history is quite broad and could in theory include a diverse array of approaches not explored here, further coherence is achieved via the methodology—“Russia as method” — which uses “Russia as an anchoring point” to highlight the way certain scientific histories were established in conversation with Russian politics and perspectives. There is also a central event that directly links many of the figures discussed throughout: the Second International Congress of the History of Science, which was held in London in 1931. …
The development of scientific history in the Soviet Union understandably followed a different trajectory given that Marxism offered a competing vision of historical progress to that of positivism. While Nikolai Bukharin’s scientific history was somewhat of a reconciliation of these traditions as he advocated for a “historical materialism” that was a synthesis of the natural and social sciences, at the Second International Congress of the History of Science he stressed that what differentiated this from other supposedly scientific historical methods was the radical combination of theory and practice that lay at the center of Marxism itself. Perhaps more innovative was Nikolai Vavilov’s scientific history. Better known as a leading Soviet geneticist, Aronova shows how Vavilov synthesized the botanical and geographical sciences to challenge Eurocentric and linear narratives of human development. He argued from evidence derived from a massive study of historical, linguistic, and genetic data concerning the domestication of plants and animals that there were multiple, autonomous centers throughout the globe where agricultural civilization emerged, not just the singular point of origin in the so-called Fertile Crescent, which was the dominant view at the time. Aronova makes the point that Vavilov’s focus on the cultivation and distribution of plants and animals as a method for understanding the shape and direction of human history before an era of written records was not unlike the geographical approach employed by the Annales school that has received much more historiographical attention."