The limited attention given nationalism and internationalism in the history of science makes them the poor relatives of this discipline. The relative neglect of two phenomena that were coincidental with the creation of modern science organization, and also shaped it in so many ways, is not easy to explain. The presupposition that science is and has always been universal – an assumption that will be examined presently - has made inquiries into the influence of nationalism seem irrelevant, even inappropriate. It is somewhat ironic, then, that the most common form of inquiry into the modern science organization that emerged in the late nineteenth century is the national disciplinary history. Also, that despite the universalist ethic with which George Sarton imbued the discipline of history of science, when it was founded early in this century, its practitioners are still billed as historians of French, German, American, or Scandinavian science. However rich in description and detail, their national disciplinary histories are bound to time and place; they are very rarely comparative. On the whole, national science or nationalism in science – and I will show later how the two are related – as an overreaching concept has hardly begun to be explored.

The inquiry into internationalism in science, too, has suffered from the universalist presupposition. The focal point here has been not so much how universalist ideals in science found practical expression in international scientific activities during the latter part of the nineteenth century but the damage done to those ideals during and after World War I.