Raj and Saunier both challenge the notion that Europe is a closed container and a self-defined space. They claim that Europe was defined in relation to other parts of the world and that non-Europeans played a critical role in this process. The same insight could be applied to the history of the United States. Placing the early history of the North American colonies in the context of competing European empires highlights the ways in which different regions were shaped by European commercial and intellectual networks. Through expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the United States began to more actively shape global networks and in the process to define a unified national identity. It also began to more actively participate in the global production of knowledge. An avenue for further research might be the impact of US participation in European and then North American expansionary networks on the development of US scientific institutions. In particular, American philanthropic initiatives in the areas of global health and economic development in the second half of the twentieth century have profoundly shaped US scientific practices and institutions.  Most historians have privileged the perspective of US aid agencies and scientists and have not adopted the kind of approach advocated by Raj. Much of this scholarship is still assumes that knowledge is diffused outward from Euro-American experts and it gives relatively little consideration to the role of non-Western actors and research practices.

Jan Koura, Mattie Dungy