Science in the Service of Empire

Science in the Service of Empire PDF

Author: John Gascoigne

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1998-06-08

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9780521550697

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Joseph Banks is one of the most significant figures of the English Enlightenment. This book places his work in promoting 'imperial science', in the context of the consolidation of the British State during a time of extraordinary upheaval. The American, French and Industrial Revolutions unleashed intense and dramatic change, placing growing pressure on the British state and increasing its need for expert advice on scientific matters. This was largely provided by Banks, who used his personal networks and systems of patronage to integrate scientific concerns with the complex machinery of government. In this book, originally published in 1998, Gascoigne skilfully draws out the rich detail of Banks' life within the broader political framework, and shows how imperial concerns prompted interest in the possible uses of science for economic and strategic gain. This is an important examination of the British State during a time of change and upheaval.

Science and Empire

Science and Empire PDF

Author: B. Bennett

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-09-13

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0230320821

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Offering one of the first analyses of how networks of science interacted within the British Empire during the past two centuries, this volume shows how the rise of formalized state networks of science in the mid nineteenth-century led to a constant tension between administrators and scientists.

Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire

Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire PDF

Author: Sarah Irving

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-09-30

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1317315227

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Represents a history of the British Empire that takes account of the sense of empire as intellectual as well as geographic dominion: the historiography of the British Empire, with its preoccupation of empire as geographically unchallenged sovereignty, overlooks the idea of empire as intellectual dominion.

Science and Empire in the Atlantic World

Science and Empire in the Atlantic World PDF

Author: James Delbourgo

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2008-09-25

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 1135899096

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Science and Empire in the Atlantic World is the first book in the growing field of Atlantic Studies to examine the production of scientific knowledge in the Atlantic world from a comparative and international perspective. Rather than focusing on a specific scientific field or single national context, this collection captures the multiplicity of practices, people, languages, and agendas that characterized the traffic in knowledge around the Atlantic world, linking this knowledge to the social processes fundamental to colonialism, such as travel, trade, ethnography, and slavery.

Medicine, Trade and Empire

Medicine, Trade and Empire PDF

Author: Palmira Fontes da Costa

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-03

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 131709817X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Garcia de Orta’s Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563) was one of the first books to take advantage of the close relationship between medicine, trade and empire in the early modern period. The book was printed in Goa, the capital of the Portuguese empire in the East, and the city where the author, a Portuguese physician of Jewish ancestry, lived for almost thirty years. It presents a vast array of medical information on various drugs, spices, plants, fruits and minerals native to India or adjoining territories. In addition, it includes information concerning indigenous methods of healing as well as a far-reaching assessment of ancient and modern authors on Asian materia medica. Orta’s book had a market in Asia but was particularly valuable to a European audience. It soon attracted the attention of various European authors and printers by providing the basis for adaptations, commentaries and editions in various languages, prompting a successful and complex trail of medical knowledge in transit. Authored by an interdisciplinary team of prominent international scholars, the volume takes into account recent historiographical trends and provides a contextualized and innovative analysis of the histories and reception of the Colloquies. It emphasizes the value of the work to historians today as a symbol of the impact of geographical expansion and globalization in a sixteenth-century medical world.

India and the British Empire

India and the British Empire PDF

Author: Douglas M. Peers

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-02-09

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0192513524

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

South Asian History has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance over the past thirty years. Its historians are not only producing new ways of thinking about the imperial impact and legacy on South Asia, but also helping to reshape the study of imperial history in general. The essays in this collection address a number of these important developments, delineating not only the complicated interplay between imperial rulers and their subjects in India, but also illuminating the economic, political, environmental, social, cultural, ideological, and intellectual contexts which informed, and were in turn informed by, these interactions. Particular attention is paid to a cluster of binary oppositions that have hitherto framed South Asian history, namely colonizer/colonized, imperialism/nationalism, and modernity/tradition, and how new analytical frameworks are emerging which enable us to think beyond the constraints imposed by these binaries. Closer attention to regional dynamics as well as to wider global forces has enriched our understanding of the history of South Asia within a wider imperial matrix. Previous impressions of all-powerful imperialism, with the capacity to reshape all before it, for good or ill, are rejected in favour of a much more nuanced image of imperialism in India that acknowledges the impact as well as the intentions of colonialism, but within a much more complicated historical landscape where other processes are at work.

Beyond Science and Empire

Beyond Science and Empire PDF

Author: Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-23

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1000929086

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Through ten case studies by international specialists, this book investigates the circulation and production of scientific knowledge between 1750 and 1945 in the fields of agriculture, astronomy, botany, cartography, medicine, statistics, and zoology. In this period, most of the world was under some form of imperial control, while science emerged as a discrete field of activity. What was the relationship between empire and science? Was science just an instrument for imperial domination? While such guiding questions place the book in the tradition of science and empire studies, it offers a fresh perspective in dialogue with global history and circulatory approaches. The book demonstrates, not by theoretical discourse but through detailed historical case studies, that the adoption of a global scale of analysis or an emphasis on circulatory processes does not entail analytical vagueness, diffusionism in disguise, or complacency with imperialism. The chapters show scientific knowledge emerging from the actions of little-known individuals moving across several Empires—European, Asian, and South American alike—in unanticipated places and institutions, and through complex processes of exchange, competition, collaboration, and circulation of knowledge. The book will interest scholars and undergraduate and graduate students concerned with the connections between the history of science, imperial history, and global history.

The Colonial Empire and its Civil Service

The Colonial Empire and its Civil Service PDF

Author: Charles Jeffries

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-01-29

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1107475023

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Originally published in 1938, this book provides a history of the civil service in British colonies, as well as a review of the contemporary colonial service. Jeffries also details the financial organisation of colonial governments, as well as a summary of appointments to colonial posts from 1921 to 1936. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in British colonial history.

Empire and the Social Sciences

Empire and the Social Sciences PDF

Author: Jeremy Adelman

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-08-22

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1350102520

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This thought-provoking and original collection looks at how intellectuals and their disciplines have been shaped, halted and advanced by the rise and fall of empires. It illuminates how ideas did not just reflect but also moulded global order and disorder by informing public policies and discourse. Ranging from early modern European empires to debates about recent American hegemony, Empire and the Social Sciences shows that world history cannot be separated from the empires that made it, and reveals the many ways in which social scientists constructed empires as we know them. Taking a truly global approach from China and Japan to modern America, the contributors collectively tackle a long durée of the modern world from the Enlightenment to the present day. Linking together specific moments of world history it also puts global history at the centre of a debate about globalization of the social sciences. It thus crosses and integrates several disciplines and offers graduate students, scholars and faculty an approach that intersects fields, crosses regions and maps a history of global social sciences.

Practical Matter

Practical Matter PDF

Author: Margaret C. Jacob

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 067426469X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

“A highly ambitious and provocative survey of the cultural history of science and industry” from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries (Journal of Modern History). In 1687, the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica sparked a profound transformation in the world. From that event in the late-seventeenth century to the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, science gradually moved to the center Western thought and economic development. In Practical Matter, Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart chronicle this dramatic, epochal shift. Despite powerful opposition on the Continent, a Newtonian understanding gained broad-based acceptance and practical application. By the mid-eighteenth century, the race was on to apply Newtonian mechanics to industry and manufacturing. The ascendancy of the new science culminated in the creating of the Crystal Palace Exhibition, London’s temple to scientific and technological progress. With fascinating insight into the changing culture of industry and higher learning, Jacob and Stewart show that there was nothing inevitable about the Scientific Revolution. “It is easy to forget that science might have been stillborn, or remained the esoteric knowledge of court elites. Instead, for better and for worse, science became a centerpiece of Western culture.”