SDRAWKCAB:

Poskett links these geopolitical developments to intellectual ones, and much of his book's originality lies in these linkages. The chapter on 19th-century biology, for example, is not simply a survey of the global reception of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. It is an argument for the connection between biology, war, and nationalism, a connection captured in the phrase "struggle for existence." Biology was a battlefield, with naturalists using martial metaphors in their theories and gathering specimens in the course of military expeditions. This was true across the globe: in Napoleonic Egypt, in the newly independent Argentina, in a Japan wracked by civil war, and in modernizing China. The titles of other chapters hint at similar arguments: "Newton's slaves," "Industrial experiments," "Genetic states," and so on. This is not just a history of science. It is a history of the modern world seen through the lens of science.

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