Abstract
It is great pleasure to reflect on the essays in this collection and to congratulate Joe Hodge and Brett Bennett on bringing together such a high quality and varied set of papers. As someone who is now in their fifth decade of working in the field, I am once again struck by the methodological sophistication and empirical strength of work on science and Empire. Indeed, I want to take as my theme the fact that work in the field has been very much at the cutting-edge historiographically and that this is still too little appreciated within the history of science, technology and medicine community. An inventory of new approaches and methods in the last half century would include, amongst the most important themes, work on: ‘sites’, ‘the practice turn’, how knowledge travels, and ‘big pictures’. With each of these historians of science and Empire were ahead of the game. However, they did not have much impact on the wider field, nor have they enjoyed recognition. This seems to be for three main reasons. Firstly, they were empirically focused, not least as they were often opening up new research areas and defining subjects and issues. As a consequence, they did not broadcast the innovative character of their work and often it was not set in fashionable Edinburgh School or Latourian terms. Secondly, their work was clearly regarded as marginal by mainstream historians of science, where the ‘social turn’, for a while at least, led them to focus on the ‘society of science’, rather than the ‘science in society’ concerns of most historians of science and Empire.
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Notes
Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg (eds) Scientific Colonialism: A Cross-cultural Comparison (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987).
Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar (eds) Making Space for Science: Territorial Themes in the Shaping of Knowledge (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).
Alix Cooper, ‘From the Alps to Egypt (and back again): Dolomieu, Scientific Voyaging, and the Construction of the Field in the Eighteenth Century Natural History’, in Smith and Agar, Making Space, p. 63.
David Wade Chambers and Richard Gillespie, ‘Locality in the History of Science: Colonial Science, Technoscience, and Indigenous Knowledge’, Osiris 15 (2000), 221–40.
Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Elizabeth Whitcombe, Agrarian Conditions in Northern India: The United Provinces Under British Rule, 1860–1900 (Berkeley: California University Press, 1972); Rohan D’Souza, ‘Water in British India: The Making of a “Colonial Hydrology”’, History Compass 4, 4 (2006), 621–8.
John V. Pickstone ‘Working Knowledges Before and After circa 1800: Practices and Disciplines in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine’, Isis 98 (2007), 489–516; idem., Ways of Knowing A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
James A. Secord, ‘Knowledge in Transit’, Isis 95 (2004), 654–72.
Lucille H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion (New York: Academic Press, 1979); Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
Roy MacLeod, ‘On Visiting the Moving Metropolis: Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science’, Scientific Colonialism: A Cross-Cultural Comparison 5,3 (1987), 1–16. Also see, Roy Macleod, ‘Passages in Imperial Science: From Empire to Commonwealth’, Journal of World History 4 (1993), 117–50.
Roy MacLeod and Philip F. Rehbock (eds) Nature in its Greatest Extent: Western Science in the Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1988).
Also see, Sabine Clarke, ‘Pure Science with a Practical Aim: The Meanings of Fundamental Research in Britain, circa 1916–1950’, Isis 101 (2010), 285–311.
Roy MacLeod and Milton Lewis (eds) Disease, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion (London, Routledge, 1988); David Arnold (ed.) Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988); Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982).
Jonathan Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam: institutions of Madness in Colonial Southwest Nigeria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Sloan Mahone and Megan Vaughan (eds) Psychiatry and Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Waltraud Ernst and Bernard Harris (eds) Race, Science and Medicine (London: Routledge, 1999).
George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987); Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.) Colonial Situations: Essays in the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); Helen Tilley and Robert J. Gordon (eds) Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism and the Politics of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
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© 2011 Michael Worboys
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Worboys, M. (2011). Epilogue. In: Bennett, B.M., Hodge, J.M. (eds) Science and Empire. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230320826_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230320826_15
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