The Routledge Handbook of Science and Empire

Andrew Goss, Andrew Goss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000404876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la ciencia

The Routledge Handbook of Science and Empire introduces readers to important new research in the field of science and empire. This compilation of inquiry into the inextricably intertwined history of science and empire reframes the field, showing that one could not have grown without the other.

The volume expands the history of science through careful attention to connections, exchanges, and networks beyond the scientific institutions of Europe and the United States. These 27 original essays by established scholars and new talent examine: scientific and imperial disciplines, networks of science, scientific practice within empires, and decolonised science. The chapters cover a wide range of disciplines, from anthropology and psychiatry to biology and geology. There is global coverage, with essays about China, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand, India, the Middle East, Russia, the Arctic, and North and South America. Specialised essays cover Jesuit science, natural history collecting, energy systems, and science in UNESCO.

With authoritative chapters by leading scholars, this is a guiding resource for all scholars of empire and science. Free of jargon and with clearly written essays, the handbook is a valuable path to further inquiry for any student of the history of science and empire.

1

Introduction

An imperial turn in the history of science

Andrew Goss

For the last three decades, empire—alongside related terms such as colonialism and global history—has been a productive category of analysis in the history of science.¹ Science and its history is no longer just a narrative of Western civilisation, with historians only occasionally glancing to China, India, and the Middle East. The history of science can only be understood, or even told, with close attention to the connections, exchanges, and networks that extended beyond the learned societies, universities, gardens, laboratories, and research institutions of Europe and the United States. What previously had been thought of as a footnote—the diffusion of science from the metropoles of Europe to the colonial territories of Asia, Africa, and the Americas—has emerged as a vibrant and exciting sub-discipline. Since the 1990s, an entire new historiography has sprung up with an interest in the conditions, practices, and findings of imperial, colonial, and global science. This volume brings together 27 essays by experts in this field, and surveys multiple ways in which careful attention to the imperial, colonial, and global contexts of science enriches our understanding of the development of early-modern and modern science.

The purpose of this handbook is to introduce the reader to the most important new research and results in the field of science and empire. A rich literature has been developed by historians of science as well as scholars of empire demonstrating the numerous ways science and empire grew together, from the fifteenth century until now. Starting three decades ago, research about science in colonial settings began to reveal that neither science nor empire could have existed without each other. A mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship developed between science and empire, and this spawned complex systems, institutions, and networks which were not only interwoven, but supported, nurtured, and sustained each other. This insight has led to a new way of thinking, an imperial turn, in the history of science. In particular, since the imperial turn, historians of science have investigated the creation of new disciplines of expertise in colonial and imperial contexts. They have explicated the contribution of local Indigenous systems of knowledge to imperial expertise. They have pointed to the importance of networks of knowledge that crossed political, social, and cultural boundaries and which entangled knowledge brokers, material objects, and imperial agents. Finally, they have shown that decolonisation was not a simple matter of newly independent nations and their scientists taking over the reins of formerly colonial efforts, but it was a process in which imperial knowledge was slowly reshaped into new systems, institutions, and disciplines. This handbook is a compilation of the results of this new way of thinking.

Making and sustaining empire required systems and procedures for organising increasingly complex information about nature, land, and people. Governing elites and officials sought ways to channel information from its imperial territories to the centre, and employed those who could provide this in an organised fashion. An emphasis on ordering imperial knowledge in turn created multifaceted relationships between scholars, explorers, rulers, Indigenous experts, and imperialist officials. Generating practical, imperial knowledge was rarely done at court, but instead in the provinces and territories of empire, where scholars, local officials, and Indigenous knowledge brokers created and invented the methods of imperial science. The scholarly relationships and knowledge networks then spawned their own histories and narratives, sometimes overlapping with European political and culture systems, sometimes not. One finding of the new literature is that these networks of expertise existed independently from European institutions of science; they happened in contexts that little resembled the traditional Western scholarly environment. This shaped both the new disciplines of science, including natural history, cartography, anthropology, and meteorology, all of which thrived in the imperial environment, and the political regimes that consumed and sometimes funded this knowledge. Different disciplines, regions, and empires created different forms of expert knowledge and science, and it has proven impossible to write this into a single narrative of global science.

As the essays in this volume attest, a lot more is known about the individuals, research programmes, and goals that shaped imperial science than even just 20 years ago. Just as importantly, this literature has moved past the narrower guideposts which had earlier defined research about science in imperial and global contexts. Empire has not traditionally been at the centre of the historiography of science. Textbook histories of the scientific revolution, from Herbert Butterfield’s The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800 (1949) to Steven Shapin’s The Scientific Revolution (1996), look only rarely past the European scholarly settings.² And when empire is invoked, in studies about natural history for example, imperial politics or economics is little remarked on. In much of this literature, empire is context only, an expanding global arena for scientists to gather data and develop theories.

While empire may not have traditionally been a category of analysis, writing about naturalists and scientists as explorers, collectors, and discoverers in imperial territories has a long tradition. Whether it is the observation of the transit of Venus during Cook’s first voyage, Humboldt’s expedition to Latin America, Darwin’s voyage of the Beagle, or Eddington’s observations of the solar eclipse in 1919, examples of scientists travelling the globe, to collect and observe, have long been recognised by historians as important for the development of some sciences. But with the focus on the history of ideas, on the development, refinement, and improvement of natural explanations for observed phenomena, the context of empire was secondary to the science produced. Classic treatments of the intellectual history of scientific theories did not hide the importance of global and imperial travel, but have not asked how empire shaped, formed, and altered scientific thinking and practice.³ Although there is a healthy tradition of biographical treatment of and by European imperial scientists, this genre usually framed scientific achievements as happening despite the imperial context, not because of it. The story was of the pioneering and heroic scientists who prepared the imperial territories for the expansion of Western scientific culture. Building on this literature, the historian of science Lewis Pyenson wrote three books that seriously examined the work and lives of some of these scientists. He argued that innovative scientific researchers produced scientific knowledge, in what he called the exact sciences, even when their colonial colleagues ruled and exploited the colonial population ruthlessly. In Pyenson’s argument, exact sciences such as astronomy and physics—unlike anthropology and medicine—transcended the brutality and opportunism of colonialism, and these sciences provided cultural lustre to empire, which was then passed on to colonial subjects, thus redeeming at least some of science even in the face of empire’s racism and economic exploitation.⁴ Pyenson was one of the first scholars to write a collective biography of colonial scholars, but his insistence that exact science was untainted by empire or politics has not held up to closer scrutiny; a critical review in the flagship journal Isis in 1993 by Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys signalled the arrival of empire as a problematic in the discipline.⁵

Even before the imperial turn in the history of science, a small group of scholars in the 1970s and 1980s, most of them not trained in the history of science, had begun to lay the groundwork for understanding the political and economic context of imperial science. They were inspired by a series of new approaches to knowledge and empire—including early efforts by anthropologists to reflect on their discipline’s historical connection to empire. Scholars demonstrated how some imperial scientists were directly involved in the economic and political exploitation of the colony. Naturalists and others at botanical gardens did research which helped European imperial powers exploit natural resources more effectively. As the book-length study by Lucille Brockway demonstrated in the context of Kew Botanic Gardens’ network of scientists, these imperial scientists were embedded within the culture of mainstream metropole science.⁶ Other landmark studies were Daniel Headrick’s two books about science, technology, and imperial economies, and James E. McClellan’s 1992 study arguing that eighteenth-century science in Saint-Domingue facilitated colonial development.⁷ Headrick and McClellan concluded that science was a tool of utility in European colonisation, with science a handmaiden of the colonial state.

The articles in this volume review the scholarship since the insight that global networks of science and knowledge were enmeshed with empire. Early efforts, produced by younger scholars in the years around the turn of the century, focused more squarely on colonial science, that is, science as practised in the European colonies, especially through histories of colonial scientific institutions. Although this approach later showed its limitations, it was methodologically and logistically an appropriate place to start empirical research into the practices of imperial scholarship. In 2000, Roy MacLeod, one of the pioneers whose early work on Australian colonial science had previewed the imperial turn, brought together in one volume the fruits of the early efforts to understand knowledge and power within the colonial enterprise.⁸ Colonial science produced numerous studies that examined how science in the European colonies in Asia and Africa was intertwined with colonial politics, and developed practices and knowledge that were distinct from metropole science.⁹ Nonetheless, the narrowness of these studies, usually defined by a single colony and discipline, was that they failed to account for the ways science transcended colonial boundaries and categories. They did not sufficiently examine the bridging of imperial borders or the inclusion of Indigenous knowledge practices as the basis for expertise. And with the focus on the practices of European-directed science, there was insufficient attention to the ways in which knowledge regimes were resisted and altered by non-Western intermediaries, guides, and go-betweens. In the last decade or two, a multitude of studies have remedied this, and have explored the complexity and ambiguity of imperial science.¹⁰ And we now know that knowledge creation did not neatly conform to the dominant colonial politics. This handbook brings together the findings from a generation of scholarship examining imperial networks of scientists, imperial ways of knowing, and knowledge entangled with colonialism.

The imperial turn has not produced a single, predominant method or narrative of science and empire. Study subjects have multiplied, so while there continues to be interest in naturalists, anthropologists, and cartographers in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World and the European colonies of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Asia, the number of scientists and sciences, and the number of locations, has grown immensely. No single framework encompasses the richness of the questions about how empires collected, processed, described, and printed expert knowledge of imperial spaces. As Chapter 21 by James Beattie and Ruth A. Morgan argues, science as a category of analysis does not always assist in understanding the creation of imperial expertise. What is clear is that the empires of the early-modern and modern world produced official and unofficial knowledge of the natural world, and these imperial histories are inseparable from the development of modern science.

In Chapter 2 Pratik Chakrabarti examines why the histories of science and empire have remained separate and marginal from mainstream histories of science. He shows how the discipline of the history of science is built on the history of European exceptionalism, in which European science is a unique set of practices not found elsewhere. The authority of the discipline rests upon scholars continuing to reinscribe the singularity of science’s historical location in European culture, even when they do so critically. And the result is a history in which imperial interactions might hybridise science, complicating its global spread, but does not threaten the European origin story of the fundamentals of science. One way forward, Chakrabarti argues, is for historians of science to reconceive of science itself as an imperial knowledge. He suggests that, after a generation of exploring hybrid research done in colonial contact zones, future research must do more, by squarely investigating science as an imperial epistemology.

Many of science’s most potent and long-lasting categories, theories, and approaches grew from imperial roots. The essays by Hugh Cagle (Chapter 14) and Antonio Barrera-Osorio (Chapter 22) examine how even before the end of the fifteenth century, long before the so-called Scientific Revolution, science was being revolutionised in the Portuguese and Spanish Empires. As studies in this book attest, numerous scientific concepts such as race, energy, geological time, biodiversity, and climate, to name only a few, are imperial creations. A challenge of ruling empire, how to create cultural certainty that is clear and consistent across land and peoples defined by complexity and difference, incentivised ruling officials and scholars to create practical data and knowledge of the imperial worlds. What resulted were new imperial cultures, disciplines, and systems of expertise, which later came to be labelled as science. Racial science, as James Poskett reminds us in Chapter 4, is not just to be understood as an intellectual history leading to modern racism, but was a set of scientific practices shaped by imperial sites, technologies, power dynamics, and practices. In Chapter 6, Matthew M. Heaton shows how colonial psychiatry defined normal and abnormal behaviour through imperial experiences, and that these categories were resisted and transformed by colonial subjects. Chapter 3 by Thomas Simpson illustrates how maps and cartography have, as has long been understood, shaped the ability of empires to exert control over people and resources. But he shows how, from the very beginning, maps were not just the creation of imperial elites, but were formed by non-Westerners, many of whom used maps for their own purposes.

After the end of the European empires in the middle of the twentieth century, most scholars, and in particular scientists, downplayed the imperial origins of science. This survives even now in some of the traditions of the history of science. But prior to the fall of European empires that was not the case. It is clear from research into science’s historical archives that disciplines of science that were born inside empires rarely hid their imperial natures. Scientists and statesmen alike saw the need for knowledge which encompassed the vastness of different territories and peoples but also revealed their distinctness...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction: An imperial turn in the history of science
• 2 Situating the empire in history of science
• 3 Cartography and empire from early modernity to postmodernity
• 4 Racial science
• 5 Meteorology and empire
• 6 Colonial psychiatry
• 7 Anthropology and empire
• 8 Natural history collections and empire
• 9 Non-Western collectors and their contributions to natural history, c. 1750–1940
• 10 Energy and empire
• 11 Science, empire, and the old Society of Jesus, 1540–1773
• 12 Networks of knowledge in the Indo-Pacific, 1600–1800
• 13 Between transimperial networking and national antagonism: German scientists in the British Empire during the long nineteenth century
• 14 Iberian science, Portuguese Empire, and cultures of inquiry in early-modern Europe
• 15 The dynamic trajectory of French colonialism and science
• 16 Another empire: Science in the Ottoman lands
• 17 The planting of “colonial” science in Russian soil
• 18 Scientific knowledge in the Qing Empire: Engaging with the world, 1644–1911
• 19 Empire, cultivation, and the environment in Southeast Asia since 1500
• 20 Science and its publics in British India
• 21 From history of science to history of knowledge?: Themes and perspectives in colonial Australasia
• 22 Empires and science: The case of the sixteenth-century Iberian Empire
• 23 Science in early North America
• 24 Science, the United States, and Latin America
• 25 Arctic science
• 26 Science and decolonisation in UNESCO
• 27 Decolonising science and medicine in Indonesia
• Index