That science is fundamentally universal has been proclaimed innumerable times. But the precise geographical meaning of this universality has changed historically. This article examines conceptions of scientific internationalism from the Enlightenment to the Cold War, and their varying relations to cosmopolitanism, nationalism, socialism, and 'the West'. These views are confronted with recent tendencies to cast science as a uniquely European product.

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The new field of the history of knowledge is often presented as a mere expansion of the history of science. We argue that it has a greater ambition. The re‐definition of the historiographical domain of the history of knowledge urges us to ask new questions about the boundaries, hierarchies, and mutual constitution of different types of knowledge as well as the role and assessment of failure and ignorance in making knowledge. These issues have pertinence in the current climate where expertise is increasingly questioned and authority seems to lose its ground. Illustrated with examples from recent historiography of the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, we indicate some fruitful new avenues for research in the history of knowledge. Taken together, we hope that they will show that the history of knowledge could build the expertise required by the challenges of twenty‐first century knowledge societies, just like the history of science, throughout its development as a discipline in the twentieth century, responded to the demands posed by science and society.

This essay analyzes the exhibition "Scienza Universale," which was to be a central part of the 1942 world's fair in Rome. Although in the end World War II kept the fair from happening, the plans for the exhibit were finished, and they allow for an in-depth analysis of the propagandistic uses of science in fascist Italy. The essay investigates what the regime sought to accomplish with a public display of science, why it chose to stress science's universal character, and how various stakeholders' motives played out in the exhibit design. Although fascism is not generally known for either its embrace of science or its internationalism, in this instance both played a major role in the way the state presented itself. "Universal Science," as depicted in the exhibit, carried messages that were meant to promote a fascist conception of civilization and world order and to stake out Italy's position vis-à-vis Nazi Germany in particular.

In the years around 1910, two plans for establishing a World Capital were simultaneously promoted from Belgium and the Netherlands. From the sea resort of Scheveningen, the Dutch physician Pieter Eijkman and his assistant Paul Horrix campaigned to build such a city on the outskirts of The Hague. Designed by the rising young architect Karel de Bazel, their "Intellectual World Centre", or "Athens of the Future" as the press also called it, was projected around the Peace Palace, the designated home of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. At the Hague Peace Conference of 1899, government representatives had decided to establish such a court, after which the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie had volunteered to provide it with appropriate accommodation. Eijkman now wanted to surround the Peace Palace with a city of hotels, an international congress hall and, especially, academies of science -all grouped around a Monument for International Brotherhood (Fig. 1). Every academy, moreover, possessed a separate research institute with state-of-the-art facilities where "the most eminent scientists of all civilized nations" would come to work for "say, one week a year" (1) . Thus, his World Capital was meant to stimulate world peace and to advance scientific research at the same time.In the same period, internationalists in Belgium were launching similar initiatives. Brussels was already the seat of more international organizations than any other city in the world, second only to Paris in terms of congresses.