This chapter discusses the history of science since 1750 from a history of the perspective. Science and its history seem little taken up in the historiography of global or world history studies. Science was solidly institutionalized in European universities, in a transnational network of academies and societies of science, astronomical observatories, botanical gardens, hospitals, and in a variety of other niches, many state supported. In the eighteenth century the natural sciences anchored a broad and consequential intellectual and social movement, the Enlightenment. The chapter highlights new connections between science and industry in the nineteenth century. Industrialization and industrial civilization have expanded and spread over the last two hundred years to the point where the Earth is entangled in one interconnected, intertwined, and interdependent global ecology of humans and the natural world. Science and industrial civilization has been the subject of criticism, especially in the postcolonial period following the Second World War.

Text-books are linked directly to the curricula of schools and universities and their history reflects the evolution of institutional teaching. In the sixteenth century, student notes were often printed without the consent of the lecturer/author. Thereby a type of material previously restricted to a fairly local area became accessible throughout Europe; this, in turn, weakened local traditions. While the teaching within individual institutions became less uniform, European universities with similar religious attitudes became more alike, as the same, or similar, text-books became available throughout the Continent. Many grammar, logic and rhetoric text-books were in use in the later Middle Ages, but many had lost their text-book function, themselves becoming the basis for extensive and advanced commentaries. Several of John Vaus's books can be related to his work on the Doctrinale. Vaus explained that he had chosen to work on the Doctrinale because that was the text his students would expect to use.