Imperial Scientists, Ecology, and Conservation

Imperial scientists have appeared in a number of our chapters: Cleghorn, protagonist of forest conservation in India; Willcocks, the self-critical dambuilder extraordinary in Egypt and India; Simpson, the plague doctor, and Bruce, who researched trypanosomiasis in southern Africa. The early centuries of empire preceded professionalization, but scientific interests were even then at its heart. Species transfers were, as we have suggested, a long-term preoccupation and closely related to scientific enterprise. The maritime empires that characterized the last half-millennium depended upon nautical technology and navigation science, and this distinguished them from preceding, more geographically restricted, land empires. Naval power and the expansion of shipping permitted a different social geography of empire, linking Europe to the Americas, the tropics, and the southern temperate zones, and partly bypassing the torrid task of conquest in Europe and the Muslim world. Shipping carried the freight of trading empires, literally and metaphorically. Especially from the mid-nineteenth century, scientists were central actors in imperial development. They helped to pioneer new technologies that facilitated discovery, and vastly more effective exploitation, of hidden natural resources, such as gold, oil, and rubber. A growing arms gap underpinned the European power bloc and conquest was so rapid and so widespread in the later decades of the nineteenth century not least because it was relatively easy and inexpensive. Constraints imposed by environment and disease were gradually driven back, by dams, boreholes, and the partial prophylaxis against malaria. Communications, based around steam and iron, telegraphs, railways, and roads were the ‘tentacles of progress’ in the new empire, opening up new routes for exploitation. They bound together increasingly modern, planned cities, zones of hydraulic imperialism, mining, and similar enterprises. Scientists and science in empire have received intense critical attention over the last couple of decades. This is especially so in African history and social sciences which, from their inception as self-conscious areas of academic enquiry, in the dying days of colonialism, tried to write from the vantage point of Africans and to decolonize European minds. From the late 1970s, when it was clear that African nationalist narratives and ambitions had been corrupted, Africanists tended to evince an unease with modernization and development, so closely linked to both the late colonial and nationalist projects.