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Science and Empire pp 3–29Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Science and Empire: An Overview of the Historical Scholarship

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Part of the book series: Britain and the World ((BAW))

Abstract

Over the past few decades a burgeoning new field of historical research has taken shape; one that draws our attention to the relationship that developed between science and British imperialism. Taken as a whole, the resulting corpus of work provides a rich and diverse picture of the part science played in colonial expansion and power. Recent scholarship, in particular, highlights the multi-layered and varied ways in which science supported, justified, and at times challenged, the British colonial enterprise, especially after 1750. What follows in this opening chapter is an overview of some of the more important contributions to the historical scholarship of the last four decades.1 It also situates the approach taken in this book within the wider fields of the ‘new imperial history’ and the history of science. We argue that a networked conception of empire, if engaged critically, offers much potential for future research endeavors in the field. Careful attention must be paid, however, both to the unevenness and inequalities of power that operated within specific networks of imperial science, and to the complex and often hybridized nature of scientific knowledge making in particular geographical and historical contexts.

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Notes

  1. For the historiography on science and the British Empire see: Richard Drayton, ‘Knowledge and Empire’, in P.J. Marshall (ed.) The Oxford History of the British Empire; The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 231–52; idem., ‘Science, Medicine and the British Empire’, in Robin Winks (ed.) The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume V, Historiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 264–76; Mark Harrison, ‘Science and the British Empire’, Isis 96 (2005), 56–63. For other European powers see: Michael Osborne, ‘Science and the French Empire’, Isis 96 (2005), 80–7; Richard Drayton, ‘Science and the European Empires’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 23, 3 (1995), 503–10; Roy MacLeod, ‘Introduction’, in Roy Macleod (ed.) Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise, Special Edition of Osiris 15 (2000), 1–13; Benedikt Stuchtey (ed.) Science Across the European Empires, 1800–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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  2. W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 4. Other classic studies of modernization which extol the efficacy of science and technology include: David Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: The Modernization of the Middle East (New York: Harper, 1958); C.E. Black, The Dynamics of Modernization (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).

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  3. George Basalla, ‘The Spread of Western Science’, Science 156, no. 3775 (May 1967), 611–22.

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  4. Donald Fleming, ‘Science in Australia, Canada, and the United States: Some Comparative Remarks’, Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of the History of Science, Ithaca 26 VIII–2 IX 1962 (Paris: Hermann, 1964), 179–96.

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  5. For his classic statement see Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America; Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967).

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  6. The term ‘sciences of exploration’ comes from Libby Robin, ‘Ecology: A Science of Empire?’, in Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (eds) Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies (Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997), p. 64.

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  7. Glyndwr Williams, ‘The Pacific: Exploration and Exploitation’, in P.J. Marshall (ed.) The Oxford History of the British Empire; The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 563–4; Benedikt Stuchtey, ‘Introduction’, in Stuchtey, Science Across the European Empires, p. 1.

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  8. David Mackay, In the Wake of Cook: Exploration, Science and Empire, 1780–1801 (Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 1985); John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

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  9. Robert Stafford, ‘Scientific Exploration and Empire’, in Andrew Porter (ed.) The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 295.

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  10. For Kew’s role in empire see the pioneering work of Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York: Academic Press, 1979). Also see, Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government.

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  11. Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), pp. 78–9. The term ‘Victorian Superman’ comes from Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 101.

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  12. Robert Stafford, Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration and Victorian Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 223.

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  13. Deepak Kumar, ‘Colonial Science: A Look at the Indian Experience’, in Deepak Kumar (ed.) Science and Empire: Essays in Indian Context (1700–1947) (Delhi: Anamika Prakashan, 1991), p. 7.

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  14. Zaheer Baber, The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization, and Colonial Rule in India (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), chaps. 5 & 6.

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  15. Triangulation is a survey technique that measures a chain or network of triangles spread out across the landscape. See, Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 17.

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  16. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 5–6.

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  17. See Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).

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  18. Daniel Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 7.

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  19. The term ‘signs of modernity’ is taken from Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 7.

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  20. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 1–3.

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  22. Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (London: Zed Books, 1989), p. 63.

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  23. Claude Alvares, Science, Development and Violence (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991).

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  24. Alvares, ‘Science’, in Wolfgang Sachs (ed.) The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (London: Zed Books, 1992), p. 221.

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  28. See Michael Worboys, ‘Science and British Colonial Imperialism, 1895–1940’, PhD diss., University of Sussex, 1979; idem., ‘Science and the Colonial Empire, 1895–1940’, in Deepak Kumar (ed.) Science and Empire, pp. 13–27; idem., ‘British Colonial Science Policy (1918–1930)’, in Patrick Petitjean (ed.) Colonial Sciences: Researchers and Institutions (Paris: Orstom Editions, 1996), pp. 99–111.

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  29. Macleod has detected a similar shift for late nineteenth-century India, where the problem of recurring famines stimulated demands for a more organized and conscious application of scientific knowledge to the development of Indian agriculture and the creation of agricultural departments staffed by specialists in each province. This consolidation reached its zenith in the period 1900–1914 with the setting up of the Board of Scientific Advice under Viscount Curzon to act as a central authority for coordinating the application of science to all economic and agricultural problems. See Roy M. Macleod, ‘Scientific Advice for British India: Imperial Perceptions and Administrative Goals, 1898–1923’, Modern Asian Studies 9,3 (1975), 344–58.

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  30. Sabine Clarke, ‘A Technocratic Imperial State? The Colonial Office and Scientific Research, 1940–1960’, Twentieth Century British History 18,4 (2007); 453–80; Joseph Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007).

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  31. Michael Worboys, ‘The Emergence of Tropical Medicine: A Study in the Establishment of a Scientific Specialty’, in Gerard Lemaine, Roy MacLeod, Michael Mulkay and Peter Weingart (eds) Perspectives on the Emergence of Scientific Disciplines (Chicago: University of Sussex, 1976), pp. 75–98; idem., ‘Manson, Ross and Colonial Medical Policy: Tropical Medicine in London and Liverpool, 1899–1914’, in Roy MacLeod and Milton Lewis (eds) Disease, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion (London & New York: Routledge, 1988); idem., ‘Germs, Malaria and the Invention of Mansonian Tropical Medicine: From “Diseases in the Tropics” to “Tropical Diseases”’, in David Arnold (ed.) Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500–1900 (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996), pp. 181–207.

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  32. Lewis Pyenson, Cultural Imperialism and the Exact Sciences: German Expansion Overseas, 1900–1930 (New York: Lang, 1985); idem., Empire of Reason: Exact Sciences in Indonesia, 1840–1940 (Leiden: Brill, 1989); idem., Civilizing Mission: Exact Sciences and French Overseas Expansion, 1830–1940 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993). For Worboy’s critique of Pyenson see: Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys, ‘Science and Imperialism’, Isis 84 (1993), 91–102.

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  33. On tropical medicine see David Arnold (ed.) Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Roy MacLeod and Milton Lewis (eds) Disease, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion (London: Routledge, 1988); Paul Cranefield, Science and Empire: East Coast Fever in Rhodesia and the Transvaal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); John Farley, Bilharzia: A History of Imperial Tropical Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Helen Power, Tropical Medicine in the Twentieth Century: A History of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, 1898–1990 (London: Kegan Paul, 1999); Douglas Haynes, Imperial Medicine: Patrick Manson and the Conquest of Tropical Disease (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). On other sciences see Stafford, Scientist of Empire; Drayton, Nature’s Government; Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Gregory A. Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Hodge, Triumph of the Expert.

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  34. See, Antionette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds) Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Dane Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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  35. This emphasis on the interconnections between the history of the metropole and periphery can be traced back to historical anthropologists such as Eric Wolf and Bernard Cohn, but has been advocated as a research agenda for imperial history by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler. See, Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge; Fred Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in Cooper and Stoler (eds) Tensions of Empire, p. 4.

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  36. See for example Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); Catherine Hall (ed.) Cultures of Empire A Reader: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Routledge, 2000); Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003).

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  37. David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds) Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 3.

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  38. See Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalization: Networks of People, Goods, and Capital in the British World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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  39. Alan Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’, History Compass 4,1 (2006), 131–2.

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  41. Natasha Glaiser, ‘Networking: Trade and Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire’, Historical Journal 472 (2004), 475–6. The term ‘interactivity of peripheral regions’ is taken from David Hancock, ‘A world of business to do: William Freeman and the foundations of England’s commercial empire, 1645–1707’, William and Mary Quarterly 57 (2000), 3–34.

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  42. Drayton was building on the pioneering work of Christopher Bayly who first drew attention to the interconnections of Britain new imperial age of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (Harlow: Longman, 1989), pp. 100–32.

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  43. Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); idem., Ecology, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History, 1400–1940 (UK: White Horse Press, 1997).

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  44. See Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).

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  51. The term ‘middle ground’ is taken from Richard White’s study of the Great Lakes region of colonial North America. See, Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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  52. Raj uses the term ‘open air’ rather than ‘field’ sciences, ‘to designate knowledge practices that necessarily involve negotiations between specialists and other heterogeneous groups in their very making and certification.’ See Kapil Raj, Relocation Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 14.

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  54. William Beinart, Karen Brown, and Daniel Gilfoyle, ‘Experts and Expertise in Colonial Africa Reconsidered: Science and the Interpenetration of Knowledge’, African Affairs 108,432 (2009), 413–33.

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Authors
  1. Joseph M. Hodge
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Western Sydney, Australia

    Brett M. Bennett (Lecturer in Modern History) (Lecturer in Modern History)

  2. Department of History, West Virginia University, USA

    Joseph M. Hodge (Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies) (Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies)

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© 2011 Joseph M. Hodge

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Hodge, J.M. (2011). Science and Empire: An Overview of the Historical Scholarship. In: Bennett, B.M., Hodge, J.M. (eds) Science and Empire. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230320826_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230320826_1

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-32190-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-230-32082-6

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