Introduction

This volume is the result of a long journey that started in the hills surrounding Florence during the spring of 2006. It arose from discussions, exchanges, debates, and negotiations among a group of scholars belonging to different generations and coming from a wide array of countries and intellectual training, some of us working on European topics, others on trans-Atlantic or trans-Asiatic ones. What we share is a common interest in, and inspiration from, the now sizeable literature on the practices that shaped “science” in the early modern period, with a special emphasis on the ones bred by the emulation, competition, and conflict that encounters across the globe between different cultural and political entities generated. The locations of these encounters tended to be marked out by the shifting boundaries of Europe’s colonial expansion into other continents, beginning in the sixteenth century. This literature has challenged the “diffusionist” model of the rise of modern science, understood until recently as a “European” concept.1 It has invited us to endorse a highly plastic understanding of the dynamics of negotiations between various fields of knowledge, even entire knowledge systems, and their representatives (not all of them necessarily being anointed practitioners of a recognized discipline), as a result of which “Western” science attained its character.