Working Our Way Back: Colonial Science in Light of Postcolonial Thought

2018 ◽  
pp. 147-160
Author(s):  
John A. Weaver
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Science

Feminist History of Colonial Science

Hypatia ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-254
Author(s):  
Londa Schiebinger
Keyword(s):  
Feminist History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial Science

scholarly journals Plant Capitalism and Company Science: The Indian Career of Nathaniel Wallich

2008 ◽  
Vol 42 (5) ◽  
pp. 899-928 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID ARNOLD
Keyword(s):  
Forest Conservation ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Botanic Garden ◽  
Professional Advancement ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Plant Life ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
Indigenous Plant ◽  
Colonial Science

AbstractThe career of the Danish-born botanist Nathaniel Wallich, superintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Garden from 1815 to 1846, illustrates the complex nature of botanical science under the East India Company and shows how the plant life of South Asia was used as a capital resource both in the service of the Company's economic interests and for Wallich's own professional advancement and international reputation. Rather than seeing him as a pioneer of modern forest conservation or an innovative botanist, Wallich's attachment to the ideology of ‘improvement’ and the Company's material needs better explain his longevity as superintendent of the Calcutta garden. Although aspects of Wallich's career and botanical works show the importance of circulation between Europe and India, more significant was the hierarchy of knowledge in which indigenous plant lore and illustrative skill were subordinated to Western science and in which colonial science frequently lagged behind that of the metropolis.

‘Leaving a record of their coming’

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-296
Author(s):  
Bridgitte Barclay
Keyword(s):  
Atomic Age ◽  
Positive Material ◽  
Past Injustices ◽  
Colonial Science

Creature from the Black Lagoon (Arnold US 1954), perhaps the quintessential and most enduring atomic-age creature feature, is a rich text for ecocritical analysis. Not only does the film heavily emphasise extinction and evolution in its narration and plot line, but the film is full of tensions that both calcify problematic Anthropocenic narratives and erode them. The film offers us a way of critiquing Anthropocenic histories and ongoing narratives without erasing racial and colonial injustices. It also offers us a way to imagine other stories - other ways of writing on our world - that engage material entanglements, disorient colonial and anthropocentric perspectives and create empathy. Recognising the film’s rocky Anthropocenic and extinction narratives enables a more fluid approach. Reading through water, emphasising evolutionary entanglements, brings into high relief past injustices against humans and nonhumans, and it engages a palimpsest effect, where an awareness of our muddled materiality helps us write over hierarchical pasts. Framing the film ecocritically by reading extinction and evolution emphasises the tensions of Anthropocenic violence (through colonial science and Anthropocenic erasures) and of positive material entanglements (through empathy and disorientation).

Colonial science and technology

2013 ◽  
pp. 438-461
Author(s):  
John Gascoigne ◽  
Sara Maroske
Keyword(s):  
Science And Technology ◽  
Colonial Science

Colonial Science:

2009 ◽  
pp. 154-187
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Science

Locality in the History of Science: Colonial Science, Technoscience, and Indigenous Knowledge

Osiris ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 221-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Wade Chambers ◽  
Richard Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Knowledge ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial Science

scholarly journals “No former travellers having attained such a height on the Earth’s surface”: Instruments, inscriptions, and bodies in the Himalaya, 1800–1830

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lachlan Fleetwood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Himalaya ◽  
Colonial Science

East India Company surveyors began gaining access to the high Himalaya in the 1810s, at a time when the mountains were taking on increasing political significance as the northern borderlands of British India. Though never as idiosyncratic as surveyors insisted, these were spaces in which instruments, fieldbook inscriptions, and bodies were all highly prone to failure. The ways surveyors managed these failures (both rhetorically and in practice) demonstrate the social performances required to establish credible knowledge in a world in which the senses were scrambled. The resulting tensions reveal an ongoing disconnect in understanding between those displaced not only from London, but also from Calcutta, something insufficiently emphasized in previous histories of colonial science. By focusing on the early nineteenth century, often overlooked in favor of the later period, this article shows the extent to which the scientific, imaginative, and political constitution of the Himalaya was haphazard and contested.

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