From colonial science to scientific independence: Australian reef geomorphology in the nineteenth century

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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IRELAND, COLONIAL SCIENCE, AND THE GEOGRAPHICAL CONSTRUCTION OF BRITISH RULE IN INDIA, c. 1820–1870

The Historical Journal ◽

10.1017/s0018246x09990318 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 52 (4) ◽

pp. 963-987 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

BARRY CROSBIE

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

British Empire ◽

Scientific Practice ◽

Colonial State ◽

British Rule ◽

Irish People ◽

British Colonial ◽

Global Exchange ◽

Geological Research ◽

Colonial Science

ABSTRACTThis article examines the role that Ireland and Irish people played in the geographical construction of British colonial rule in India during the nineteenth century. It argues that as an important sub-imperial centre, Ireland not only supplied the empire with key personnel, but also functioned as an important reference point for scientific practice, new legislation, and systems of government. Occupying integral roles within the information systems of the colonial state, Irish people provided much of the intellectual capital around which British rule in India was constructed. These individuals were part of nineteenth-century Irish professional personnel networks that viewed the empire as a legitimate sphere for work and as an arena in which they could prosper. Through involvement and deployment of expertise in areas such as surveying and geological research in India, Irishmen and Irish institutions were able to act decisively in the development of colonial knowledge. The relationships mapped in this article centre the Irish within the imperial web of connections and global exchange of ideas, technologies, and practices during the long nineteenth century, thereby making a contribution towards uncovering Ireland's multi-directional involvement in the British empire and reassessing the challenges that this presents to existing British, Irish, and imperial historiography.

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The Bengali Pharaoh: Upper-Caste Aryanism, Pan-Egyptianism, and the Contested History of Biometric Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Bengal

Comparative Studies in Society and History ◽

10.1017/s001041751700010x ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 59 (2) ◽

pp. 446-476 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Projit Bihari Mukharji

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

South Asian ◽

Genomic Research ◽

Human Variation ◽

Historical Account ◽

Colonial Era ◽

History Of ◽

Colonial Science

AbstractExtant South Asian histories of race, and more specifically biometrics, focus almost exclusively upon the colonial era and especially the nineteenth century. Yet an increasing number of ethnographic accounts observe that Indian scientists have enthusiastically embraced the resurgent raciology engendered by genomic research into human variation. What is sorely lacking is a historical account of how raciology fared in the late colonial and early postcolonial periods, roughly the period between the decline of craniometry and the rise of genomics. It is this history that I explore in this article. I argue that anthropometry, far from being a purely colonial science, was adopted by Indian nationalists quite early on. Various distinctive shades of biometric nationalism publicly competed from the 1920s onward. To counter any sense that biometric nationalism was teleologically inevitable, I contrast it with a radical alternative called “craftology” that emerged on the margins of formal academia amongst scholars practicing what I call “vernacular anthropology.” Craftology and biometric nationalism continued to compete, contrast, and selectively entangle with each other until almost the end of the twentieth century.

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Troubles with Identity

Anthropological Journal of European Cultures ◽

10.3167/ayec.2007.160109 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 16 (1) ◽

pp. 147-156 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Aleksandar Boskovic ◽

Ilana van Wyk

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Nineteenth Century ◽

South African ◽

British Colony ◽

Important Field ◽

Colonial Science

Anthropology began in South Africa with the work of nineteenth century missionaries like Alexandre Junod (Hammond-Tooke 1997; Thornton 1998) and as such it fits nicely into the cliche´ of a ‘colonial’ science. However, even at its humble beginnings in the former British colony, anthropology was much more than that (Thornton 1983; Cocks 2001); it served as an important field where different points of opinion collided or converged, but also as an important laboratory for different political experiments – some of which had lasting and devastating effects on South African societies.

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