Hi all, I am doing an on-going mega-thread for those of you who may want to use Science without Leisure in the classroom.

The book has something for everyone, from professional historians and social scientists to curious undergraduates.

First things first, the book focuses on Istanbul, 1660-1732.

Depending on the course you are teaching, the book may fall under:
1) Early modern history
2) Urban history
3) Global history
4) Ottoman history
5) Islamic history
6) Early modern science and medicine
7) Islamic science
8) Mediterranean history
9) Practices and pratitioners

The use of the word "leisure" in the title was deliberate. So, if you are a social scientist teaching about:

1) education
2) political economy
3) Great Divergence
4) inflation and culture
5) Bourdieu
6) modernity
7) Orientalism

You may find something of interest in the book.

Then, there is the issue of framing and debates. The book may be read as saying something about:

1) Decline, Ottoman and Islamic
2) Cultural history and the notion of culture in general
3) Academic labor
4) Bourdieu's sociology of science, which Bourdieu never fleshed out.

Especially on this issue, truly Bourdieusian analyses of natural science are quite rare -- mainly from Yves Gingras. So, if you are tired of assigning "The specificity of the scientific field" from Bourdieu and having your students not understand it, I may be able to help.

I also quite a bit of Aristotle, because, you know, Bourdieu's sociology of science borrows a lot from the Nicomachean Ethics. As a side note, I think my general political alignment is “Aristotelian socialist”.

You may also find that the book is a little edgy. For example, I wrote the book with the recognition that our efforts to go beyond canonical figures in the history of science may lead to (often inadvertent and self-defeating) anti-intellectualism.

I also believe that a global history of science has to address current ground realities across the globe. As my esteemed colleague Steve Feierman would say, what good is solving Tanzania's problems in your book if people in Tanzania can't read what you said?

Furthermore, I often find that solving cultural issues (especially White Supremacy) in the "West" -- and these issues are overwhelmingly the ones global books address -, may exacerbate comparable problems in the "non-Western" countries that we are studying.

So the book has a modest proposal to look more into social and economic conditions and to go beyond black-boxed cultures. I have some very discussable (debateable?) things to say about these issues because I did not hedge very much in the book.

Here are some ideas about how to assign parts of the book, with some pairings.

A. Are you looking to globalize your history of science syllabus? Do you want to go beyond what I call "week" globalism, where you devote like a week to each part of the world? I may be able to help.

Let's say, you want to teach early modern astronomy from a global perspective. The first thing is to globalize the "about what" of early modern astronomy. This is a general problem, I think, because most accounts of globalization and globalism are still Eurocentric.

Even within Europe, there is a certain amount of Eurocentrism because, well, if you are talking about women's participation in philosophy, you are still taking that high, rare and almost exclusively white male (by 17c at least) activity as that which everyone must do.

The fact is, theory is the least interesting part of science from a social science perspective. People usually want "the goods" that science provides, but don't care for "the clarity" that science provides.

Thus, if you take a theoretical reference point (like Newton's Principia) and you try to globalize that, you may find you can only manage a weak account of transmission or a very mild interest. There is a place for that, but I don’t think global is the right word for it.

That's because theory, despite its universalism, is the rarest of interests and is also the hardest to move around because it requires a lot of shared education. Practical things, lower order abstractions, etc. always travel better.

Global early modern astronomy is not about the center of the universe. The center of the universe debate is of interest to few and is but some foam on a massive wave of practice. It's about astrology, calendars and navigation.

Most, almost all, astronomical texts from the period will be of this type. And the most common type of document is going to be, from the Maya to Indonesia, the almanac.

We don’t yet have a global survey of almanacs — and that’s probably the most massive early modern science project you could ever undertake, right next to drugs -, but you can use sample almanacs, any almanac, to show the daily concerns within which astronomy is meaningful.

My book’s Chapter 4 offers a somewhat more modest option and pairs well with works that put astrology and calendars front and center. Such as

Nathan Sivin, "Copernicus in China or, Good Intentions Gone Astray" in Science in Ancient China. Researches and Reflections, (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995)

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~nsivin/from_ccat/cop.pdf

And, if you haven’t taught any European astronomy in your course:

Robert S. Westman, Copernican Question, Montreal Review, July 2012
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Copernican-Question-Prognostication-Skepticism-and-Celestial-Order.php