Science and the British Empire

Author(s): Mark Harrison

Source: Isis , Vol. 96, No. 1 (March 2005), pp. 56-63
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
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 Science and the British Empire
By Mark Harrison*

ABSTRACT

The last few decades have witnessed a flowering of interest in the history of science in
the British Empire. This essay aims to provide an overview of some of the most important
work in this area, identifying interpretative shifts and emerging themes. In so doing, it
raises some questions about the analytical framework in which colonial science has tra-
ditionally been viewed, highlighting interactions with indigenous scientific traditions and
the use of network-based models to understand scientific relations within and beyond
colonial contexts.

I t is no easy task to survey the rapidly expanding literature on science and British im-
perialism. Quite apart from the difficulty of doing justice to existing scholarship, one
must grapple with thorny, if not insurmountable, problems of definition. Although Britain
began to establish its first colonies in North America in the sixteenth century, there was
no concept of “empire”—as we understand it—until much later, perhaps not until the
nineteenth century. Even the adjective “British” meant little to most inhabitants of the isles
until well after the Act of Union of 1707.1 This immediately presents a problem for his-
torians looking at the first centuries of colonial expansion, as most scientific work before
the mid-nineteenth century was not conducted in formal colonies but under the auspices
of corporations such as the English East India Company or individuals working indepen-
dently of the state. In this respect, the British Empire stands in marked contrast to the
French, where the state was involved actively in science from the eighteenth century.
There is then the problem of “science” itself. Although historians have always acknowl-
edged the changing face of science in the colonies, their concept of “science” in early
phases of colonization has tended toward anachronism. They have projected modern no-
tions of science on to activities that are far better understood as natural philosophy, thereby
wrenching explorations of nature from their proper context. The essentializing of colonial
scientific work as colonial science has also led historians to portray it as more coordinated
and unified than it usually was, ignoring dimensions of science that were not directed by
the state or the East India Company. Moreover, colonial science is often seen as essentially
different from science practiced in noncolonial contexts. It is typically portrayed as deriv-
ative, instrumentalist, and exploitative, with colonial scientists seen as mere fact gatherers,
making few theoretical contributions in their own right. There is some substance to these
claims, but they paint a very partial picture of scientific work in the British colonies. Recent

* Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, 45/47 Banbury Road, Oxford, 0X2 6PE.
1
Nicholas Canny, “The Origins of Empire: An Introduction,” in The Origins of Empire, ed. Nicholas Canny,
vol. 1 of The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), p. 1.

Isis, 2005, 96:56–63

䉷 2005 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
0021-1753/2005/9601-0004$10.00

56

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research reveals a much richer tapestry, one that calls into question many of the basic S
assumptions that historians have made about science in the colonies and, indeed, the very
notion of “colonial science.”
First, it is necessary to understand how the notion of “colonial science” came into being
and how it has been refined over the years. An appropriate starting point is George Basalla’s
seminal essay on “The Spread of Western Science” (1967), which had a formative influence
on much historical scholarship on British science through to the 1980s. Writing at a time
when modernization theory was in the ascendant, Basalla posited a universal model for
the diffusion of Western science, from an initial phase of exploration—in which colonies
provided raw data and materials for scientific analysis in the West—through to formal
colonial dependence and, ultimately, to independence.2 However, by the 1970s Marxist
critiques of neocolonialism—particularly the work of “dependency” theorists such as Paul
Baran, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein3 —had generated a mood in which
the role of science in colonial expansion was viewed more critically. Basalla’s chronology
remained influential, but science came to be seen increasingly as an instrument of imperial
control rather than the key to development. Dependency seemed to be intrinsic to the
relationship between the imperial “core” (or “metropole”) and its colonial “periphery.”4
One particularly important study at this juncture was that of Michael Worboys, who
showed that many scientific initiatives in the metropolis and the crown colonies stemmed
from the policy of “constructive imperialism” in the mid-1890s. From then until the 1940s,
he argued, the chief function of colonial science was the location and evaluation of new
resources for the purposes of imperial development.5 Echoing a point made earlier by
Donald Fleming, Worboys stressed the applied nature of colonial science and maintained
that few British scientists working in the colonies had an appetite for theory.6 However,
during the 1980s, historians were beginning to find that a single model of colonial science
could not encompass its varied trajectories in different parts of the empire. Scientific in-
dependence was clearly easier to achieve in “white settler colonies,” such as Australia,
than in tropical Africa, for example. The former were more likely to benefit from what
Daniel Headrick later termed the “relocation” of technologies, with non-Europeans being
actively discouraged from gaining expertise in subjects such as engineering.7 This had
2
George Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science,” Science, 1967, 156:611–622.
3
See Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957); Andre Gunder
Frank, “The Development of Underdevelopment,” Monthly Review, 1966, 18:17–31; and Immanuel Wallerstein,
The Modern World-System, 3 vols. (New York: Academic Press, 1974–1980).
4
Carlo M. Cipolla, European Culture and Overseas Expansion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970); Lucile H.
Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanical Gardens (New York:
Academic Press, 1979); Vincente Navarro, Medicine under Capitalism (New York: Prodist, 1976); Vincente
Navarro, ed., Imperialism, Health, and Medicine (London: Pluto Press, 1982); Meredeth Turshen, The Political
Ecology of Disease in Tanzania (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1984); Daniel R. Headrick, The
Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1981).
5
Michael Worboys, “Science and British Colonial Imperialism, 1895–1940” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. Sussex, 1979).
Most of the chapters of this thesis were subsequently published separately: “The Emergence of Tropical Medicine:
A Study in the Establishment of Scientific Speciality,” in Perspectives on the Emergence of Scientific Disciplines,
ed. Gerard Lemaine, Roy MacLeod, Michael Mulkay, and Peter Weingart (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), pp. 76–
98; “The Discovery of Colonial Malnutrition between the Wars,” in Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies,
ed. David Arnold (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 208–225; “The Imperial Institute: The State
and the Development of the Natural Resources of the Colonial Empire, 1887–1923,” in Imperialism and the
Natural World, ed. John M. MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 164–186.
6
Donald Flemming, “Science in Australia, Canada, and the United States: Some Comparative Remarks,” in
Proceedings of the 10th International Congress of the History of Science, 1962 (Paris: Hermann, 1964), p. 182.
7
Daniel Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism (New York:

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58 FOCUS—ISIS, 96 : 1 (2005)

long-term consequences for economic development in the tropical colonies, establishing

patterns of dependency on the West. The settler colonies, by contrast, were able to establish
a much greater degree of autonomy. By the 1920s, self-governing dominions such as
Australia had loosened their ties with the mother country and were becoming players in
an international scientific arena increasingly dominated by the United States. It was no
longer clear what the term “colonial science” was supposed to denote, beyond some vague
notion of dependence on metropolitan centers.8
As historians came to recognize the diversity and dynamism of the periphery, Roy
MacLeod’s concept of a “moving metropolis” began to seem more appropriate than con-
ventional ways of portraying the colonial relations of science. In MacLeod’s scheme, local
centers such as Sydney and Calcutta could take on a measure of autonomy and authority
while remaining within a framework of imperial dominance.9 Other dimensions of colonial
science also came to the fore from the late 1980s, as scholars began to incorporate insights
derived from the works of Michel Foucault and Edward Said. Science was increasingly
viewed as an agent of cultural imperialism, which reflected the dominance and superiority
of the West.10 It was argued that anthropologists, doctors, and others played an important
role in the creation of racial and Orientalist stereotypes,11 and a number of studies stressed
the vital formative influence that colonial expansion had on the emergence of “scientific
racism.”12 Historians also became increasingly aware of the spatial ordering of colonized
societies, analyzing the role of cartography and geography in the control and exploitation

Oxford Univ. Press, 1988); Arun Kumar, “Colonial Requirements and Engineering Education: The Public Works
Department, 1847–1947,” in Technology and the Raj: Western Technology and Technical Transfers to India,
1700–1947, ed. Roy MacLeod and Deepak Kumar (New Delhi: Sage, 1995), pp. 216–234; Deepak Kumar,
Science and the Raj, 1857–1905 (New Delhi: Oxford, 1995).
8
Ian Inkster, “Scientific Enterprise and the Colonial ‘Model’: Observations on Australian Experience in His-
torical Context,” Social Studies of Science, 1985, 15:677–704; David Mackay, In the Wake of Cook: Exploration,
Science and Empire, 1780–1801 (London: Croom Helm, 1985); Roy MacLeod, ed., The Commonwealth of
Science: ANZAAS and the Scientific Enterprise in Australasia, 1888–1898 (Melbourne: Oxford Univ. Press,
1988); Roy MacLeod and Philip F. Rehbock, eds., Nature in Its Greatest Extent: Western Science in the Pacific
(Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1988); R. W. Home, ed., Australian Science in the Making (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988); R. W. Home and Sally G. Kohlstedt, eds., International Science and National
Scientific Identity: Australia between Britain and America (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991); Jan Todd, “Science at the
Periphery: An Interpretation of Australian Scientific and Technological Dependency and Development Prior to
1914,” Annals of Science, 1993, 50:33–58.
9
Roy MacLeod, “On Visiting the ‘Moving Metropolis’: Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science,”
in Scientific Colonialism: A Cross-Cultural Comparison, ed. Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg (Washing-
ton, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), pp. 217–249.
10
See Lewis Pyneson, Cultural Imperialism and the Exact Sciences: German Expansion Overseas, 1900–
1930 (New York: P. Lang, 1985); Lewis Pyneson, “Why Science May Serve Political Ends: Cultural Imperialism
and the Mission to Civilize,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 1990, 13:69–81; Michael Adas, Machines
as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,
1989).
11
See Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1985); idem, Inscribing the Other (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1991); Malcolm
Nicolson, “Medicine and Racial Politics: Changing Images of the New Zealand Maori in the Nineteenth Century,”
in Arnold, Imperial Medicine (cit. n. 5), pp. 66–104; Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and
African Illness (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
12
Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982); Nancy
Stepan, “Biology and Degeneration: Races and Proper Places,” in Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, ed.
Sander L. Gilman and J. Edward Chamberlain (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 97–120; Seymour
Drescher, “The Ending of the Slave Trade and the Evolution of Scientific Racism,” Social Science History,
Autumn 1990, 14:415–450; Henrika Kuklick, The Savage within: The Social History of British Anthropology,
1885–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991); Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995); W. P. Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and
Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne Univ. Press, 2002).

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of newly acquired territories. It emerged that imperial mapping was intimately connected S
to notions of race, with colonized peoples represented as closely tied to nature. Distinctions
between races were often gendered, too: certain physical and climatic features were as-
sociated with manly and martial races, others—particularly the tropics—with femininity.
Such ideas served to legitimate and explain the imperial order.13
The influence of Foucault is apparent as well in works that have examined the coloni-
zation of subject populations through regimes based on knowledge and control of the body.
This has led to a revival of interest in urban planning and public health, for example,
spatial ordering having been identified as an important element in surveillance and social
control.14 Studies of clinical medicine and psychiatry in the colonies have also made much
use of Foucault, in addition to the works of the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, whose criticisms
of colonialism were based on his experiences in the French colony of Algeria.15 Most of
these works have stressed the disciplinary functions of colonial health measures, but it is
evident that even the most urbanized colonial states usually lacked the infrastructure nec-
essary for the successful exertion of “biopower.” Perhaps in view of this, much of the most
recent scholarship on matters relating to health has focused not on mechanisms for state
control but on how medical science and technology transformed notions of personal and
national identity. Historians have begun to examine the assimilation of Western notions of
disease, hygiene, and sexual health into indigenous cultures, exploring the cultural impact
of commodities such as soap powder and disinfectants. Vernacular print cultures and ad-
vertisements have provided excellent sources for such studies and have revealed hybridized
discourses on health, which synthesized Western and indigenous concepts of cleanliness.
Women played a particularly important role in respect to the latter, but masculine identity
was also transformed in accordance with modern conceptions of fitness and disease.16

13
On mapping, see Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith, eds., Geography and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994);
Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago:
Chicago Univ. Press, 1997); D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a
British El Dorado (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000). On race, gender, and geography, see Londa Schie-
binger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), chaps. 4–5;
Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengal” in the Late
Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1995); Peter Robb, ed., The Concept of Race in South
Asia (New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995); David Arnold, ed., Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The
Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500–1900 (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 1996); Mark Harrison, Climates and
Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment, and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850 (New Delhi: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1999); Nancy Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2001).
14
See Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991); David Arnold, Colo-
nizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1993); Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994); Lenore Manderson, Sickness and the State: Health and Illness in
Colonial Malaya, 1870–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996); Mridula Rammana, Western Medicine
and Public Health in Colonial Bombay: 1845–1895 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2002).
15
See Vaughan, Curing Their Ills (cit. n. 11); Waltraud Ernst, Mad Tales from the Raj: The European Insane
in British India, 1800–1858 (London: Routledge, 1991); Jock McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry and “the African
Mind” (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995); Jonathan Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Mad-
ness in Colonial Southwest Nigeria (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999); James H. Mills, Madness,
Cannabis, and Colonialism: The “Native-Only” Lunatic Asylums of British India, 1857–1900 (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 2000); S. Kapila, “The Making of Colonial Psychiatry, Bombay Presidency, 1845–1940” (Ph.D.
diss., Univ. of London, 2002); S. Mahone, “The Psychology of the Tropics: Conceptions of Tropical Danger and
Lunacy in British East Africa” (Ph.D. diss., Oxford Univ., 2004).
16
See Judy Whitehead, “Modernising the Motherhood Archetype: Public Health Models and the Child Mar-
riage Restraint Act of 1929,” in Social Reform, Sexuality, and the State, ed. Patricia Uberoi (New Delhi: Sage,
1996), pp. 190–200; Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Clean-
liness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1996); Maneesha Lal, “ ‘The Ignorance of Women Is

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60 FOCUS—ISIS, 96 : 1 (2005)

Interest in indigenous responses to Western science, however, predates current concerns

with the nature of “colonial modernity,” as is evident, for example, from the now extensive
literature on India. Indian historians have long stressed their country’s pragmatic and se-
lective approach to Western science, both before and during colonial rule.17 At one extreme,
indigenous revivalist movements sought to regenerate India’s scientific and medical tra-
ditions; at the other, secular modernizers rejected the past, fully embracing Western ra-
tionality and science.18 But most responses to Western science lay somewhere between
these two extremes. Some Indians sought to naturalize “Western” science, seeing it as part
of a universal scientific tradition, to which India had previously contributed; others at-
tempted to find analogues of Western sciences such as chemistry in the ancient texts of
their own culture.19 Gyan Prakash has gone so far as to claim that Indian scientists such
as the chemist P. C. Ray created “hybrid” forms of knowledge that subverted the dominance
of the West.20 As Pratik Chakrabarti has shown, however, the search for cultural legitimacy
that characterized Indian science in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was dis-
placed by an increasingly dominant discourse of scientific industrialism.21 Contrary to the
claims made by some critics of Westernization,22 this vision of India’s national future
sprang from many sources, including, paradoxically, those that portrayed India as anti-
materialistic.
The work of Prakash and Chakrabarti provides a further reminder of the limitations of
diffusionist conceptions of science.23 Scientific ideas were seldom transplanted fully
formed into colonial soil but were usually adapted and assimilated in significant ways.
Moreover, much of what we think of as Western science was produced in the colonies,
rather than exported to them. For example, colonial expansion was crucial to the devel-
opment of sciences such as botany and geology, in which the collection and comparison
of specimens was paramount.24 Similarly, it provided a spur to the emergence of modern

the House of Illness’: Gender, Nationalism, and Health Reform in Colonial North India,” in Medicine and
Colonial Identity, ed. Bridie Andrews and Mary Sutphen (London: Routledge, 2003); Sarah Hodges, “Conju-
gality, Progeny, and Progress: Family and Modernity in Twentieth-Century India” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Chicago,
1999); G. Attewell, “Authority, Knowledge, and Practice in Unani Tibb in India, c.1890–1930” (Ph.D. diss.,
Univ. of London, 2004).
17
Ahsan J. Qaisar, The Indian Response to European Technology and Culture (A.D. 1498–1707) (New Delhi:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1982); Satpal Sangwan, “Indian Response to European Science and Technology 1757–
1857,” British Journal for the History of Science, 1988, 21:211–232.
18
See, e.g., Dhruv Raina and S. Irfan Habib, “The Unfolding of an Engagement: ‘The Dawn’ on Science,
Technical Education, and Industrialisation: India, 1896–1912,” Studies in History, 1993, 9:87–117; S. Irfan
Habib, “Science, Technical Education, and Industrialisation: Contours of a Bhadralok Debate, 1890–1915,” in
MacLeod and Kumar, Technology and the Raj (cit. n. 7), pp. 235–249; Neshat Quaiser, “Politics, Culture, and
Colonialism: Unani’s Debate with Doctory,” in Health, Medicine, and Empire: Perspectives on Colonial India,
ed. Bisamoy Pati and Mark Harrison (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2001), pp. 317–355.
19
See J. Lourdusamy, “Science and National Consciousness: A Study of the Response to Modern Science in
Colonial Bengal, c.1870–1930” (Ph.D. diss., Oxford Univ., 1999); Sabrata Dasgupta, Jagadis Chandra Bose
and the Indian Response to Western Science (New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999); David Arnold, Science,
Technology, and Medicine in Colonial India, vol. 3, part 5, of The New Cambridge History of India (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), chap. 5.
20
Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1999).
21
Pratik Chakrabarti, Western Science in Modern India: Metropolitan Methods, Colonial Practices (New
Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004).
22
Ashis Nandy, Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scientists (New Delhi: Allied,
1980). Chakrabarti criticizes Nandy’s essentialist division between “India” and the “West.”
23
See also Dhruv Raina, Images and Contexts: The Historiography of Science and Modernity in India (New
Delhi: Oxford Univ., 2003), p. 174.
24
See Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion (cit. n. 4); Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science,
Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000).

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medicine and environmental thought.25 Practitioners of Western medicine found a great S
many opportunities for experiment in the colonies and were sometimes prepared to learn
from indigenous medical traditions.26 We might well expect such interaction in early phases
of colonial rule, but even at the high noon of empire—in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries—there was far more autonomy and reciprocity than conventional mod-
els allow. This is demonstrated by independent and original work in fields such as teleg-
raphy and veterinary medicine and the varied program of research undertaken by the
African Survey between 1929 and 1939. Conceived as a means of standardizing and im-
proving colonial administration across British Africa, the survey produced some unex-
pected and potentially subversive conclusions, providing the basis for a social-ecological
critique of modernity.27
In some cases, too, the work of British scientists continued to be shaped by their ex-
posure to indigenous cultures. Such influences are apparent, for instance, in Qing China,
where British naturalists drew on a range of sources, including folk knowledge and in-
digenous horticultural traditions.28 In British India, the dietary research of Robert Mc-
Carrison and the agricultural practices espoused by Albert Howard were informed by their
observations of local traditions and techniques, while in Egypt William Willcocks devel-
oped a theory of irrigation that owed much to practices in the Nile Valley.29 Imperialism
also had a major impact upon scientific developments in the metropolis, in such disparate
areas as physics, geology, and tropical medicine.30
While historians have begun to recognize the dynamic nature of scientific work in the
colonies, the tendency is still to concentrate on institutions of the colonial state or on
metropolitan patrons such as the geologist Roderick Murchison and the imposing figure
of Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society of London from 1788 to 1820.31 A great

25
See Mark Harrison, “Tropical Medicine in Nineteenth-Century India,” Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 1992, 25:299–318;
Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environ-
mentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995).
26
C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–
1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996); Mark Harrison, “Medicine and Orientalism: Perspectives on
Europe’s Encounter with Indian Medical Systems,” in Pati and Harrison, Health, Medicine, and Empire (cit. n.
18), pp. 37–87.
27
H. Tilley, “Africa as a ‘Living Laboratory.’ The African Research Survey and the British Colonial Empire:
Consolidating Environmental, Medical, and Anthropological Debates, 1920–1940” (PhD diss., Oxford Univ.,
2001); D. Gilfoyle, “Veterinary Science and Public Policy at the Cape Colony, 1877–1910” (PhD diss., Oxford
Univ., 2002); Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury, “ ‘Beyond the Reach of Monkeys and Men’: O’Shaughnessy and
the Telegraph in India, c.1836–1856,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2000, 37:331–359; idem,
“The Political and Social History of the Telegraph in the Indian Empire” (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge Univ., 2002).
28
Fa-Ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 2004).
29
See William Willcocks, Egyptian Irrigation (London: E. and F. N. Spon, 1899); Robert McCarrison, Nutri-
tion and National Health (London: Faber and Faber, 1944); Louise E. Howard, Sir Albert Howard in India
(London: Faber and Faber, 1953).
30
Robert A. Stafford, Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration, and Victorian Im-
perialism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989); Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise, Energy and Empire:
A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989); S-J. Li, “British Imperial
Medicine in Late Nineteenth-Century China and the Early Career of Patrick Manson” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of
London, 1999); Douglas M. Haynes, Imperial Medicine: Patrick Manson and the Conquest of Tropical Disease
(Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
31
For Murchison, see Stafford, Scientist of Empire (cit. n. 30); for Banks, Brockway, Science and Colonial
Expansion (cit. n. 4); David P. Miller and Peter H. Reill, eds., Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Repre-
sentations of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996); 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
Univ. Press, 1998); Drayton, Nature’s Government (cit. n. 24).

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62 FOCUS—ISIS, 96 : 1 (2005)

deal of research remains to be done on the other networks that constituted colonial science,
the importance of which is particularly evident in the years before 1860. Steven Harris
has already pointed to the importance of corporations such as the East India companies in
sustaining large-scale scientific enterprises during the early modern period and has drawn
attention to the utility of networks as a means of analyzing relationships between them.32
But although many historians have examined scientific work conducted under the auspices
of the English East India Company,33 its activities have still to be considered in their
totality. Other “long-distance corporations,” such as the Levant Company, have scarcely
been examined, yet important work in medicine and botany was undertaken by its em-
ployees, such as the brothers Alexander and Patrick Russell.
These corporations, however, were not the only bodies that enabled or coordinated
scientific work in British colonies prior to the 1860s. By the eighteenth century, science
was a prominent feature of an emerging “public culture”34 and was becoming a popular
gentlemanly pursuit.35 Many practitioners of science and medicine in the East and West
Indies contributed regularly to medical and philosophical journals in Europe and North
America and were participants in a republic of letters that transcended national bound-
aries.36 The botanist William Roxburgh (1751–1815), for example, enjoyed particularly
close connections with like-minded individuals in the Danish colony of Tranquebar, and
it was through them that his work became known in Copenhagen, Strasbourg, Halle, and
Berlin.37 Connections between the British and northern European nations remained highly
significant well into the nineteenth century. For instance, Roxburgh’s successor as super-
intendent of the Calcutta Botanical Gardens was the Danish botanist Nathaniel Wallich
(1786–1854), who became a vital source of information on Asiatic botany for scientists
across Europe.38 Similarly, the German botanist Ferdinand von Mueller (1825–1896), who
became one of Australia’s leading scientists, conducted a prolific correspondence with
botanists all over the world.39
A close analysis of some of these informal scientific networks has the potential to revise
significantly our view of “colonial science,” especially in its early phases. The religious
convictions that united many scientists from Protestant countries—and which underlay
prevailing notions of colonial “improvement”—sometimes harmonized with political
views of a surprisingly radical nature. Several practitioners of science and medicine in the

32
Steven J. Harris, “Long-Distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography of Knowledge,” Config-
urations, Spring 1998, 6:269–304.
33
See Kumar, Science and the Raj (cit. n. 7), chaps. 2–3; Chakrabarti, Western Science (cit. n. 21), chaps. 1–
2; Ray Desmond, The European Discovery of the Indian Flora (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992); and Arnold,
Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (cit. n. 19), chap. 1.
34
Roy MacLeod, “Introduction,” in Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise, ed. Roy
MacLeod, Osiris, 2000, 15:10; William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, “Introduction,” in The Sciences
in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1999), pp. 23–28.
35
See Andrew Grout, “Geology and India, 1775–1805: An Episode in Colonial Science,” South Asia Research,
1990, 10:1–18.
36
For the republic of letters, see, e.g., Lorraine Daston, “The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in
the Enlightenment,” Science in Context, 1991, 4:367–386; Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and
Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995).
37
See correspondence between Roxburgh and Rev. C. John, Tranquebar, Roxburgh Papers, MSS Eur D. 809,
British Library.
38
Desmond, European Discovery (cit. n. 33), chap. 8.
39
See R. W. Home, A. M. Lucas, Sara Maroske, D. M. Sinkora, and J. H. Voigt, eds., Regardfully Yours:
Selected Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller (Bern: Peter Lang, 1998).

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 F
O
FOCUS—ISIS, 96 : 1 (2005) 63 C
U
colonies had connections with that eminent group of dissenting natural philosophers the S
Lunar Society. One such was the astronomer, physician, and experimental philosopher
James Lind (1736–1812), who served as a surgeon in the East India Company before
establishing himself in Britain as a leading physician and man of science. While working
in Windsor as a royal physician, Lind tutored the radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in
natural philosophy and figures in a number of his poems; Lind was also possibly the model
for Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein.40 Others, such as the company surgeons Helenus Scott
(c.1757–1821) and Charles Maclean (1768–c.1826), were linked to radical figures in
Britain, such as the physician and chemist Thomas Beddoes (1760–1808). They declared
their support for causes such as the American and French Revolutions, as well as their
opposition to repressive rule in Britain and its Indian empire.41 However, few colonial men
of science saw any contradiction between their humanitarian aspirations and the more
immediate requirements of empire.42 Indeed, some appear to have believed that imperial
rule—as a form of benevolent despotism—was potentially more progressive than the
corrupt and oligarchical government of Britain.
The more we examine the intricacies of colonial science, the more it seems to be char-
acterized by “multiple engagements,” both within and without individual colonies.43 Co-
lonial scientific relationships no longer seem to resemble a wheel with metropolitan bodies
or patrons at its hub, but what David Wade Chambers and Richard Gillespie have termed
a “polycentric communications network,” with multiple layers of authority and interac-
tion.44 To recognize this is not to ignore the fact that science was woven into the fabric of
colonialism45 but merely to acknowledge that its nature was not defined by colonialism
alone. The term “colonial science” thus seems little more than a label of convenience,
lacking precise definition and of questionable utility.

40
Lind enjoyed a long friendship with James Watt and was the cousin of another member of the Lunar Society,
James Kier: Watt Papers, JWP C1/15 and JWP W/9, Birmingham City Archive. On the Lunar Society, see
Jennifer Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, 1730–1810 (London: Faber and Faber,
2002).
41
Mark Harrison, “Networks of Knowledge: Re-thinking Science and Medicine in Early Colonial India,”
unpublished paper, 2004.
42
Drayton, Nature’s Government (cit. n. 24); idem, “Knowledge and Empire,” in The Eighteenth Century, ed.
P. J. Marshall, pp. 231–252, vol. 2 of The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. William Roger Louis (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1998); Sujit Sivasundaram, “Natural History Spiritualized: Civilizing Islanders, Cultivating
Breadfruit, and Collecting Souls,” History of Science, 2001, 32:417–443.
43
MacLeod, “Introduction” (cit. n. 34), p. 6.
44
D. Wade Chambers and R. Gillespie, “Locality in the History of Science: Colonial Science, Technoscience,
and Indigenous Knowledge,” in MacLeod, Nature and Empire (cit. n. 34), pp. 221–240.
45
Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys, “Science and Imperialism,” and Lewis Pyneson, “Cultural Imperi-
alism and the Exact Sciences Revisited,” Isis, 1993, 84:91–102, 103–108.

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