The Outline of History by the English writer H. G. Wells (1866-1946), first published in 1920, was a bestseller and a cultural phenomenon during the interwar period. As a disciple of Thomas Huxley and Darwinism, Wells narrates a universal history from the origin and evolution of life and mankind to the aftermath of the Great War. The Outline pioneered an approach that integrating human history, popular science, and political vision in a genre that is called “Big History” today. The popularity of the Outline was not only a Western phenomenon. It also received widespread attention, popularity, and debates among Chinese readers. Although Wells had never been to China, he acquainted and interacted with several Chinese intellectuals, including Liang Qichao, Ding Wenjiang, Fu Ssu-nien, and Chen Yuan, during his writing and revision of the Outline. They criticized, helped, and influenced Wells’s writing about China. Wells’s opinions reflected some long-held general views of Western sinologists on China; meanwhile, these Chinese intellectuals expressed their visions of cultural reforms or criticism of traditional Chinese institutions.
Since the introduction and translation of the Outline into China in the late 1920s, it had profound influence on the writing of general history in China. In this presentation, I will show how Wells’s unconventional work of universal history, particularly its “scientific” depictions of the prehistoric past and the idealist cosmopolitan future, impacted Chinese authors and readers. It also reveals the cultural legacy of Well’s crossover evolutionary epic in a broader global context.

This talk will present how, through a recent collaborative project, we explored an underestimated function of science popularization. Clearly in line with the political turn in the historiography of science popularization, it emphasised that such an activity is never politically neutral. Specific views of the social order are embedded in the literary forms in which science is narrated. Building on the pioneering works that has recently included science in the history of cultural diplomacy, and in particular of the cultural diplomacy of the Cold War, our collective work explicitly aimed to explore science popularisation as cultural diplomacy.
We have chosen a privileged field to do so: UNESCO's actions in the field of science popularization during the first years of its existence. It has been clearly shown that the USA actively tried to shape UNESCO towards an anti-communist position from the very beginning (Graham, 2006 & 2015). However, these studies did not deal with science, which was considered "a less controversial area of UNESCO's programme compared to information and culture". On the contrary, by looking at the very practices of science popularisation, we show how cultural dispositifs such as exhibitions, science clubs, fairs, magazines and children's books are political battlegrounds shaped by international power relations and through which diplomacy is also conducted, thus helping to move this historiographical tradition towards a more global approach beyond the national framework.

To conclude, Charlotte Bigg will provide commentary including a historiographic survey of the Symposium's themes.