Science and Colonialism

... with my research trip to East and Central Africa in 1999, it is a pleasure to acknowledge Lyn Schumaker, Wagaki Mwangi, JoAnn McGregor ... me the courage of my convictions over the years were my mother, Susan Tilley, and my sisters and brother, Barbara, Terry, Kate, and Cary ...

This book is drawn from my Phd thesis defended in January 1999. Much has been written by colonial historians and anthropologists about the differences between the colonial administrations of France and Great-Britain as practised in their tropical African dependencies. In particular there was the famous controversy which occurred on the subject during the 1960s between M. Crowder and H. Deschamps. In fact this controversy was not new. In the 1930s a similar debate took place between French and British specialists in colonial administration. From the British side, the French system was seen as a very decentralised, unified and bureaucratic system the aim of which was the assimilation of native people and whose method was direct rule. By contrast, the British system was regarded as very decentralised, pragmatic and based on indirect rule. Through its native policy it aimed to respect native customs.  French interpretations saw less contrast. French specialists tended to argue that in practice both systems were based on the pragmatic and decentralised system of indirect rule and on a native policy respectful of native customs. Unlike most historians, we will not try in this book to solve this controversy. We will not try to see which of these comparisons is well grounded as far as real practices of colonial government is concerned. We will rather try to answer the following questions: who made these comparisons, what precisely was their object, and why did the French and British disagree on the matter; in other word what was the political issues at stakes?

More than five hundred folio pages of François Valentyn’s multivolume description of the trading empire of the Dutch East India Company, Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën (Old and New East Indies, 1724-1726, five thousand pages in toto), are devoted to the natural history of Amboina. This essay contends that Valentyn’s nature description is not the work of a field naturalist, but rather of a scholar ordering and repackaging existing information, which was already available in a different textual format and in drawings. While the focus of this essay is on Valentyn’s compilation strategy, which targeted a non-expert readership of ‘liefhebbers’, the role of indigenous knowledge in his nature description is also discussed, arguing that it was generally subordinated to a European perspective in Valentyn’s book.

This thesis is an inquiry into the supposed imperialistic and nationalist aspect of nineteenth century zoological societies. By comparing three of the oldest zoological societies, the aim is to get a full view on how these institutions were connected to the colonies and whether the embodiment of an imperialist ideology was an important aspect of the early zoological societies. Subject of research are the Zoological Society of London (1826), the Amsterdam society Natura Artis Magistra (1838) and The Antwerp Royal Society for Zoology (1843).
Chapter 1 serves as an introduction on the founding of each Society. From the mission statements of each Society, it is clear that they aimed to contribute to the building of collective pride, which was often related to national commercial and political successes, as well as royal patronage. The view on nature that was displayed was utilitarian, with the acclimatisation project of the Zoological Society of London as the clearest example.
Chapter 2 explores the ways in which these societies gained their collections and whether a colonial network existed. In general, the animals were donated by members or benefactors. These can be divided into three categories: members of the respective royal houses, foreign politicians or nobility and gifts by colonial officials who were members of the societies. The majority of animals in each garden came from the colonies of the respective country. The act of giving helped constructing a sense of collectivity. Together with the status of the animals as a colonial commodity, this helped strengthen the ideological element of these institutions.
Chapter 3 concerns the way the collections were presented and experienced in the gardens of the societies. Attention is paid to four different topics: architecture, the animals, cases in which exotic humans were showcased and the people who visited these early zoological gardens. Zoo buildings often had a strong exotic influences. The animals were seen and presented as representatives of their colonized homelands. The presence of indigenous handlers, albeit in a working and paid position, helped adding an exotic dimension to a zoo visit. Experiencing all this colonial splendour in the city, provided self-affirming pride to the spectators, most importantly the paying and contributing members and royals.
The conclusion is that there was definitely an imperialist element to these institutions, at least because of the way animals were brought to the zoo either as diplomatic gifts or gifts from colonial officials. However, it was one of many aspects. Zoos were not purely a ‘tool of the empire’, but this aspect of their history is not be ignored either. Moreover the expression of imperialism differed in each zoo researched here.

En 1801, quand Pierre Victor Malouet (1740-1814) publie sa Collection de mémoires sur les colonies, le souvenir de son entrée dans la Marine en 1764 lui rappelle qu'à l'époque, il était loin de s'imaginer qu'un jour il serait envoyé en Guyane en tant qu'administrateur. Débarquant à Cayenne en octobre 1776, il y occupe la fonction de commissaire ordonnateur jusqu'en août 1778. Cet administrateur pragmatique, travailleur infatigable, propriétaire à Saint-Domingue, que l'historiographie présente souvent comme un réformateur éclairé, s'efforce pendant les deux années qu'il passe en Guyane à mettre en place un plan de développement pour cette colonie. Dans un contexte international marqué par la perte de la plupart de ses possessions outre-mer, suite au traité de Paris de 1763, la France ambitionne de faire de la Guyane la plaque tournante de son dispositif colonial. Celle-ci doit devenir un verrou stratégique, capable d'assurer la protection et le ravitaillement des îles à sure des Antilles. Ce regain d'intérêt pour cette colonie oubliée suscite de nombreux projets de mise en valeur au sein du ministère de la Marine, dont celui que Pierre Victor Malouet est chargé de mettre en place en 1776.
Fondée sur un problématique qui porte sur l'interaction du savoir, du pouvoir et du voyage, l'étude du plan de Malouet en Guyane donne à observer comment s’organise, comment s’appréhende et se planifie le développement d’une colonie marginale et éloignée, ou presque tout est à faire. Mobilisant les ressources historiographiques portant sur les sciences et techniques dans un contexte colonial, sur la Guyane sous l'Ancien Régime et sur Pierre Victor Malouet, il s'agit de livrer une analyse de l’application concrète et de la construction, à la lumière de l'expérience locale, d’un projet administratif et technique, capable d'extraire la Guyane de son marasme. En nous attachant à l'étude d'un parcours individuel, que nous connectons à un contexte colonial attentif aux sciences et techniques, nous souhaitons donner une lecture alternative à celle généralement admise de cet administrateur, en mettant en lumière des aspects peu étudiés du personnage de Malouet.

This paper demonstrates how the diffused western medical-zoological knowledge about snakes and their venoms was transformed, modified and improved during the British colonial encounter with the snake-ridden Indian landscape from the 1780s to the 1910s. It focuses on a particular colonial condition, engendered by the presence of a huge number of venomous snakes and their victims, within which meticulous toxicological research gradually made the colonial physician-naturalists able to differentiate between the effects of the toxin of elapine snakes and that of the viperine species. That venoms of different noxious categories have different biochemical characteristics and act diversely was an important finding which, ultimately became instrumental in rectifying many misconceptions in western ophiological knowledge, questioning the efficaciousness of a 'universal' panacea for snake poisonings derived in and imported from France, and finally inventing category-wise effective antidotes in British India.

This lecture will explore the colonial historical legacies that inform the contemporary debate on the future of the indigenous communities of the Andaman Islands, particularly the Jarawas. It begins by drawing attention to a recent debate around a Supreme Court order of March 2013 and follows its implications on the future trajectories of tribal welfare policy. It argues that frequently shifting positions on 'mainstreaming' or 'preserving' the Jarawa and other indigenous communities is reflective of a larger policy dilemma facing the Indian state in the Andaman Islands. It locates the political genealogy of this dilemma in the colonial 'framing' of the Andaman Islanders as a people of 'scientific value' but an 'administrative liability.' This lecture traces the constitutive moments through which science and colonial political rationality converged in the production of this ambivalence around the Andaman Islanders and created the conditions of their perpetual vulnerability to successive colonial projects. It argues that the present dilemmas of tribal welfare policy can only be addressed by attempts historicize and thereby question the colonial categories that continue to see the Islands as 'terra nullius' or 'empty space' and the Andaman Islanders as mere links, or traces in the scientific narratives of human evolution.

Science journalism in Hindi showed remarkable advance with the onset of the twentieth century, in a context that was shaped by the evolution of a specific form of the language, as well as by the emergence and growth of the anti-colonial freedom movement, yoked to the idea of cultural and economic nationalism. The many literary periodicals that flourished in this period provided a platform for regular science writing. Vigyan, the first popular science magazine in Hindi, began publication in 1915. It contributed profusely to the Hindi writings on and about science in pre-Independence India. This study, by way of a critical review of the writings in Vigyan, lays out the influences and motivations that led to this huge impetus to Hindi science writing in the early twentieth century. It throws light on the motivations of the agents who negotiated the process of translation of science in Hindi in colonial India. The chapter exemplifies translation of science as an aspect/component of establishing the hegemony of a language.

In this article I analyse the institutionalization from the 1930s on of a science of colonial administration in the UK, which meant to be comparative. The idea behind this science was to compare colonial governments and administrations, most notably in French and British empires. In this article I see how the institutionalization of this science in the UK led to battles between Cambridge, Oxford Universities and the LSE.

This conference aims to foster a conversation between historians of early modern science and scholars working on post-1800 science (the humanities and social sciences included) on continuities and discontinuities in how scholars conceived of epistemic vices. Deadline for submissions: June 15, 2017.

Science journalism in Hindi originated in the late nineteenth century. Hindi literary periodicals provided the first platform for science to be discussed along with literature. The onset of the twentieth century witnessed a remarkable advance in Hindi literary writing, and science writing also flourished with this advance. A remarkable overlap and a complementary relationship between the development of Hindi literature and Hindi commentaries on sciences is evident. Equally important in this context was the backdrop provided by a politically contentious process of evolution of a 'modern,' 'standard' Hindi, and by the anti-colonial freedom movement, yoked to the idea of cultural and economic nationalism. The paper surveys certain popular periodicals that regularly published essays and commentaries on science and scientific subjects. These periodicals were instrumental in shaping the popular discourses on science. The paper also underlines an overwhelming effort by the intelligentsia to seek a philosophical commensurability between modern science and 'traditional' schools of thought. It concludes that the predominance of these characteristics in Hindi science journalism was a reflection of the agenda of the Hindi intelligentsia, shaped by linguistic nationalism framed alongside or in conjunction with a revivalist perspective.

Saksi ang huling bahagi ng ika-19 na dantaon sa panaka-nakangpagbaba’t pagtaas ng populasyon sa kapuluan. Isinaad napangunahing sanhi ng malaking kabawasan sa bilang ng tao ay angpagdapo at paglaganap ng sakit, tulad ng kolera sa kapuluan sa mgataong nabanggit. Kaalinsabay ng pagbaba’t pagtaas ng populasyonsa kapuluan, nasaksihan din sa kasagsagan ng dantaon angmalawakang pag-unlad ng agham na ginamit ng mga Espanyolbilang kanilang kalamangan sa hakbang ng kolonisasyon. Gayunman, hindi maitatatwa na nagdulot din ng positibong aspekto ang kolonyal na agham sa kapuluan. Umusbong sakapuluan ang iba’t ibang uri ng ciencia colonial na nag-ambag sapag-unlad ng kapuluan. Isang uri ng kolonyal na aghamnamayagpag ay ang edukasyong medikal. Sa akda, susubukangbigyang katwiran ang edukasyong medikal at iba pang kaugnay nalarangan bilang tugon ng pamahalaan sa mga suliraningnakaugnay sa sakit sa kapuluan. Sa pamamagitan ng datos ngpopulasyon at demograpiya, ilalahad ng akda ang naging epekto ngpagkalat ng sakit sa bilang ng tao. Nakatuon ang akda sainstitusyunal na kasaysayan ng Facultad de Medicina y Farmacia ngUnibersidad ng Santo Tomas na lunan ng mga medicos namagsisilbing instrumento ng pamahalaang kolonyal sa hakbangupang sugpuin sa suliraning pangsakit sa Pilipinas. Sa huli, ilalahadng akda ang naging resulta ng edukasyong medikal bilang tugonsa pagsugpo sa suliranin.

This article develops a revisionist history of postwar European sociology through the mid-1960s, arguing that colonial research represented a crucial part of the renascent academic discipline after 1945, especially in Britain, France, and Belgium. Colonies became a privileged object and terrain of investigation and a key employment site for sociologists, engaging 33-55% of the British and French sociology professions between 1945 and 1960. Colonial developmentalism contributed to the rising demand for new forms of social scientific expertise, including sociology. The article begins by showing that sociologists became favored scientific partners of colonial governments, and that this fueled new forms of applied sociology focused on urbanization, detribalization, labor migration, industrialization, poverty, and resettlement of subject populations. The article then establishes the existence of networks of colonial sociologists, charts their size and composition, and reconstructs their relations to neighboring academic disciplines, especially anthropology, and to the metrocentric majorities in their own national disciplinary fields. While some colonial sociologists served colonial powerholders, others pursued more autonomous intellectual agendas, even when they were located in heteronomous conditions and marginal institutions. Colonial sociologists made theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that shaped the subsequent discipline, though usually in unacknowledged ways, foreshadowing transnational and global history, historical anthropology, and postcolonial studies.

Scientific publications and different types of collaboration pattern in pre-independent India are mapped using scientometrics and social network analysis tools. Publication data of Indian authors published before 1947 are downloaded from the Scopus database of Elsevier Science. The study traces the literature growth patterns, core journals, productive authors, authorship collaboration patterns, productive institutions and their collaboration patterns. The result shows that maximum literature was published in the year 1936. The growth of publications during the mid-1930s was evident as many scientific institutions were established by that time. The subject-wise maximum activity was observed in chemistry followed by agricultural and biological science. Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences was the most preferred journals. Universities played the prominent role in scientific research. Some private institutions with ‘nationalistic’ enthusiasm, for example, Indian Institute of Sc...

Scientific publications and different types of collaboration pattern in pre-independent India are mapped using scientometrics and social network analysis tools. Publication data of Indian authors published before 1947 are downloaded from the Scopus database of Elsevier science. The study traces the literature growth patterns, core journals, productive authors, authorship collaboration patterns, productive institutions and their collaboration patterns. The result shows that maximum literature was published in the year 1936. The growth of publications during the mid-1930s was evident as many scientific institutions were established by that time. The subject-wise maximum activity was observed in chemistry followed by agricultural and biological science. Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences was the most preferred journals. Universities played the prominent role in scientific research. Some private institutions with ‘nationalistic’ enthusiasm, for example, Indian Institute of Science and Indian Institute for Cultivation of Science were very productive institutions and also prominent in institutional collaboration. These institutions started in the colonial period continue to be the pillars of modern science in India.

Th e idea for this collection began to emerge during the 1990s, when I started working on the connections between ethnographic discourse and German colonial policy. At that time, colonialism and empires were central topics of discussion in the weekly workshop I ran with David Laitin at the University of Chicago and in the book series David and I edited together. 1 One notable feature of that workshop and book series, however, was that almost none of the scholars working on imperial topics came from sociology. I started to supervise sociology PhD dissertations on imperial topics during the early 1990s, but most of the theoretical and empirical references in these theses came from anthropology and history, and to a lesser extent from po liti cal science, geography, literary criticism, and cultural studies. It seemed that there was almost no disciplinary memory of earlier so cio log i cal work on imperial themes. Scholars of colonialism who had described themselves as sociologists-including

Historians of forestry in Thailand have emphasized the significance of Thai-European encounters in the production of forest knowledges during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the other hand, several works also highlight the correlation between the rise of forestry and the attempt of Thailand to increase its political power into its relatively autonomous vassal state of Lanna, which forms the northern region of Thailand today. Yet, previous scholarship has inadequately paid attention to how the knowledge was being produced, and thereby mistakenly assuming forestry to be a universal knowledge readily transferrable from Europe to other places. This narrative of knowledge transfer, however, fails to consider the interaction between forest knowledge and bureaucratic structure and obscures other dynamics of knowledge production, especially the coproduction of forest knowledges and the Thai nation.

Drawing upon analytical tools from Science and Technology Studies (STS), I aim to foreground the power dynamics that conditioned the ways forestry was formed as an expertise and an administrative structure in Thailand. Rather than a transfer, I argue that the process was actually an invention, and despite the name “forestry,” it was a different form of expertise catered to the needs of diverse actors who advocated for different forms of forest knowledges and practices. As the production of forest knowledges was simultaneous with the production of the Thai nation, I will show that the very contentious nature of forest knowledges continued to shape and reshape Thailand’s administrative structure, and the ways in which the Thai nation positioned itself vis-à-vis the Lanna Kingdom, European powers, and the forests.

nowledge is power: the versatile expeditions of botanist Pieter Willem Korthals (1807–1892)

The National Herbarium in Leiden houses a fascinating archive about one of the few botanists of the Committee for Natural History of the Netherlands Indies, Pieter Willem Korthals (1807–1892). The notebooks and reports of his travels in Java, Sumatra and Borneo reveal the hybrid position of Korthals in the colonial world of the Dutch East Indies. Korthals was an experienced botanist who employed methods such as measuring, taking notes and sensual observation at various locales in the Malay Archipelago. His multi-faceted fieldwork tied into the colonial administration’s desire to acquire valuable information about the islands’ human and natural resources. In particular, after the introduction in 1830 of the Cultivation System in Java, the colonial authorities in Batavia were eager to learn more about the system’s efficiency in more remote areas. By drawing upon rich archival sources, this brief essay uses Korthals’ case to shed fresh light on the production of botanical and other knowledge in the for- mer Dutch colony in the East Indies.

La historia y la filosofía de la ciencia tradicional ha reconstruido la temprana ciencia moderna desde la perspectiva de los ingleses, alemanes, holandeses e italianos. En esta conferencia expondré un enfoque conceptual y metodológico menos conocido: la Quaestio de Certitudine Mathematicarum en España y cómo desencadenó la relación entre ciencia y políticas coloniales. El propósito será señalar que algunos matemáticos, astrónomos y filósofos naturales españoles se apropiaron del problema de la incorporación de las matemáticas en la filosofía natural en el marco de las políticas de colonización, lo que llevó a que sus discusiones epistemológicas tuviesen una diferencia de las del resto de Europa: fue una apropiación a través de la traducción de obras como la Esfera de Sacrobosco o el De Revolutionibus de Copérnico y al servicio de las exigencias técnicas del proceso de colonización.

Just logistics? Landing stages as socio-cultural spaces of applied knowledge in the Indo-Pacific world in the 18th century

This paper argues for the significance of landing stages as socio-cultural places of knowledge practice for the cross-oceanic transport of live plants. Focusing on the French attempts to collect nutmeg native to the Maluku Islands in the second half of the 18th century, it explores the role of landing stages across the Malay Archipelago where the French collaborated with local populations and where plant material was being collected, packed, and shipped. By using a praxeological approach rather than examining harbours and landing stages regarding their (architectural) dichotomy, it explores their role via practices and socio-environmental interaction that defined them as places of applied knowledge. Here, I insist on moving away from the Eurocentric concept of the harbour by introducing a more neutral term of ‘landing stages’ determined by logics and logistics being adapted according to situational possibilities and limits.

In an 1874 pamphlet, former missionary to China Paul Perny accused the marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, professor of Chinese at the Collège de France, and his predecessor Stanislas Julien of being imposters. Perny’s Charlatanisme littéraire dévoilé (Literary Charlatanism Revealed) ultimately got him convicted of libel. The complexity of the affair, mixing the practices of learned controversies, the struggle between two rival branches of Sinology, and recourse to the influence of public opinion, allows us to review a century of the conflictual institutionalization of Sinology in France.

RESUMO O artigo aborda a circulação de plantas no espaço colonial francês à época da monarquia parlamentar, utilizando como fonte publicações produzidas pela Marinha francesa e registros da comunicação mantida entre atores baseados tanto em espaços coloniais quanto em espaços metropolitanos. Analisam-se principalmente cartas referentes ao debate sobre a prática da enxertia em plantações de café na Guiana francesa. Conclui-se que práticas de cultivo foram continuamente atualizadas em função da comunicação estabelecida no interior do Ministério da Marinha e das Colônias francês. Assim, demonstra-se em que medida a apropriação cultural de regiões intertropicais por parte de Estados centralizados europeus se deu mediante práticas situadas em ecologias específicas, para as quais colaboraram, em rede, tanto atores em espaços coloniais como em espaços metropolitanos, e em função das quais os "trópicos", enquanto espaço conceitual, tornaram-se cada vez mais complexos. Palavras-chave: história colonial, história ambiental de práticas científicas, sociologia do conhecimento científico.