Economics has always had two connected faces in its Western tradition. In Adam Smith's eighteenth century, as in John Stuart Mill's nineteenth, these might be described as the science of political economy and the art of economic governance. The former aimed to describe the workings of the...

The presence of classical architectural features in modernWestern architecture shows that knowledge from ancient timeswas travelling through both space and time. Yet despite surfacesimilarities, the architecture of revival was very different to that ofantiquity. The classicistic architecture of...

This paper examines pre-colonial interaction among polities along the Konkan coast, from Surat to Goa, during the long half-century c.1680-1756. Specifically it uses the dynasty of the Angrias, who were deemed pirates by the European powers but were actually an integral part of the Maratha...

The facts of social sciences are ones that stem from scientificexpertise, but in the social world, everyone is their own expert.Everyone lives in society, and experiences either first-hand, orclosely second-hand, the same phenomena that social scientistsinvestigate. Consequently, people are not...

During the same period in which political decisions became increasingly indistinguishable from decisions about science and technology, science and technology became increasingly incomprehensible to all but a few specialists. Maintaining a healthy participatory democracy under such conditions...

Economic measurements are generated by complicated systems of measurement involving economic and bureaucratic processes. Whether these measuring instruments produce reliable numbers: ‘facts’ that travel well, depends on the qualities of these systems. Ideas from metrology, and from the...

Chronicling the history of science and health popularisation in the United States, John C. Burnham sees a decline from the Victorian “men of science” to a situation in the mid-1980s where what passed as the popularisation of science consisted of little more than a litany of unrelated facts....

The development of David Ricardo’s economic theory of distribution -the laws that determine the share of output between the economic classes -depended on specific connections at several levels between two practicalsciences of the early 19th century, namely experimental agriculture andpolitical...