2026 European Society for the History of Science/History of Science Society Joint Meeting

The 2026 European Society for the History of Science/History of Science Society Joint Meeting was held in Edinburgh, Scotland in July 2026. The conference theme was ‘Shifting Perspectives: Plural Worlds, Contested Sciences’.

Our paper, ‘Measuring Plural Worlds: Collections, Commodities, and the Making of Colonial Metrology’, gave us an opportunity to share the substantive findings of our research and fieldwork conducted as part of the Colonial Standards project in collaboration with colleagues at the French Institute of Pondicherry. 

In the paper, we argued that museums are well placed to speak to central concerns in the History of Science, namely, the writing of a global history of science, and the historical construction of ‘scientific’ measurement as a body of knowledge and practice in relation to cultures and practices of measurement in regional contexts. We illustrated this by showing how a focus on measuring objects (both material and conceptual) in use in British India can produce richer accounts of colonial metrology and politics over a museological approach that centres particular innovations, people, or events in the history of science.

Simultaneously, we asked how a consideration of museum practice – of provenance research, classification, interpretation, exhibition, and storage of commodities as artefacts – and their politics could impinge on an attempt to write a plural or global history of science based on museum collections.