Kapil Raj

Beyond Postcolonialism … and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science

This essay traces the parallel, but unrelated, evolution of two sets of reactions to traditional idealist history of science in a world-historical context. While the scholars who fostered the postcolonial approach, in dealing with modern science in the non-West, espoused an idealist vision, they nevertheless stressed its political and ideological underpinnings and engaged with the question of its putative Western roots. The postidealist history of science developed its own vision with respect to the question of the global spread of modern science, paying little heed to postcolonial debates. It then proposes a historiographical approach developed in large part by historians of South Asian politics, economics, and science that, without compromising the preoccupations of each of the two groups, could help construct a mutually comprehensible and connected framework for the understanding of the global workings of the sciences.

Introduction: circulation and locality in early modern science

The essays in this issue of the British Journal for the History of Science have been selected from the papers presented at an international conference on Circulation and Locality in Early Modern Science held in October 2007 at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles. It was initiated and organized by Mary Terrall and myself and hosted by the UCLA Center for Seventeenthand Eighteenth-Century Studies. The aim of the workshop was to examine the many ways in which scientific knowledge, instruments, texts and practitioners moved around the globe in the early modern period. This in itself is, of course, no novel theme. Indeed, as the positivist foundations of the history of science weakened in the 1970s and 1980s, attention radically shifted from recounting its inexorable progress grounded in a perception of knowledge as being disembodied and universal – an ‘everywhere and nowhere’ view – to demonstrating the crucial importance of the historical, cultural, social, gendered and geographical contexts of its production.1 Contingencies of place thus came to acquire key importance in recent sociological and historical studies of science.2 This trend was also in concert with, and indeed in significant measure inspired by, Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology on the one hand, and microhistorical approaches inaugurated by scholars such as Edoardo Grendi and Carlo Ginzburg on the other, as well as by Clifford Geertz’s anthropological insights into the ever-local nature of knowledge across cultural divides.3

The historical anatomy of a contact zone Calcutta in the eighteenth century

Founded in 1690 as an entrepôt by the English East India Company, Calcutta has been at the intersection of a number of heterogeneous long- and short-range networks of trade, finance, diplomacy, law, crafts and learning. This article explores the history of the first century of its existence during which it grew from insignificance to become the second most important city of the British Empire. During this period Calcutta also emerged as a world-city of scientific knowledge making in botany, geology, geodesy, map-making, geography, history, linguistics and ethnology. Calcutta thus provides an excellent case study of the co-construction of knowledge and urbanity in the early modern context of globalisation. As a contact zone between different ethnic, professional and religious communities, each with their specific knowledge practices, this article shows that new forms of knowledge, many at the heart of the second scientific revolution, were produced in this city through attempts at recognising and managing difference in this cosmopolitan context.

18th‐Century pacific voyages of discovery, “big science”, and the shaping of an European scientific and technological culture

Abstract The European exploration of the Pacific Ocean in the latter half of the eighteenth century is usually presented as part of the Enlightenments quest for pure knowledge, knowledge which was shared freely in the “Republic of Letters”. In this essay, however, these expeditions are set against the background of a ferocious struggle between western European states to dominate the world, bringing together national political, commercial, military, and learned institutions, showing them to be more akin to todays “big science” than to an activity of free‐minded, autonomous, gentlemen. The holistic approach developed to apprehend “big science” in todays world is thus used to reexamine scientific cooperation as well as the circulation of men, objects, texts (including maps) and ideas in the politico‐economic context of early modern Britain, France and Holland, the relationship between this “big science” and eighteenth‐century, western European society, and how these shaped European scientific culture and identity. The paper ends with some reflections on the contrast between “big scientific” activity in the two periods.

Circulation and the Emergence of Modern Mapping: Great Britain and Early Colonial India, 1764–1820

It is commonly believed that modern cartography and the surveying activity on which it is based are a purely Western invention introduced into the rest of the world in the course of European colonial expansion. To take an example, in his book on the British geographical surveys of South Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Matthew Edney states that ‘cartographic culture’ is the transplanting from Europe to India by the British elites of what he calls a ‘spatial architecture rooted in non-Indian mathematics and structures’. ‘For the British in India’, he states, the measurement and observation inherent to each act of surveying represented science. By measuring the land, by imposing European science and rationality on the Indian landscape, the British distinguished themselves from the Indians: they did science, the Indians did not, unless in a limited way and then only at the express request of a British official…The practising of cartography—the making of surveys and the compilation of maps—was quintessentially at once a scientific and a British activity.

Networks of knowledge, or spaces of circulation? The birth of British cartography in colonial south Asia in the late eighteenth century

Of the many domains of history, there is at least one – the history of science – that has since its institutionalization in the interwar years, always proclaimed its universal status. Indeed, George Sarton, often referred to as the father of the discipline, famously characterized it as ‘the only history that can illustrate the progress of mankind.’ He went on to assert that ‘We can thus reconstruct, or help to reconstruct, as it were, the development of the human genius, that is, not the intelligence of any single man or group of men, but that of mankind as a whole.’ What, however, did Sarton mean by this assertion? How, for him and for Isis, the journal he founded in 1913, and which was to become the flagship organ of the budding discipline of the history of science, did this claim translate into a history of mankind? In its early years – the interwar period – the history of science was conceived as a metascientific project in which the sciences themselves participated: ‘For most scientists,’ writes Peter Dear, ‘the past of their disciplines was an integral part of the science itself.’ The history of science as published in Isis was thus addressed primarily to scientists on an expectation of contemporary usefulness — the motive resided in the belief that history possesses an educative, heuristic or polemical value. The appraisal Sarton thus sought to present was the sum total of all human knowledge where ‘human’ and ‘knowledge’ were each conceived of as a harmonious whole, a unity, in which ‘the progress of each branch of science is a function of the progress of the other branches’. The contents of Isis thus included contributions on the history of various sciences in India, Japan, the Arab world, China, and ancient Egypt, to name but a few. In spite of its resolutely positivist and cumulative history of ideas perspective, far removed from present-day perceptions, the philosophy behind the journal in its early decades was resolutely that of the unity of mankind encapsulated in what Sarton labelled ‘the New Humanism’. ‘The progress of science,’ he wrote, ‘is not due to the isolated efforts of a single people but to the combined efforts of all peoples’. The aim of the discipline and its flagship journal was to offer an account of how peoples all over the world had contributed to one great project that could elevate them above their petty nationalistic and religious differences. To be sure, the majority of articles concerned the history of modern science partly because, as Sarton later explained, its development

Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen: Making L’Empereur’s Jardin in Early Modern South Asia

In recent years there has been increasing interest in the strategies employed by Europeans for gathering natural-historical, ethnographic, and geographical knowledge beyond the confines of the metropolis in the context of European expansion. Academic attention has focused in two main directions. One examines the specificity of these modes of ‘field’ inquiry in contrast to the more common focus in science studies on knowledge making in the controlled setting of the laboratory.1 The other looks at the genre of ‘instructions to travellers’—often written by sedentary men of science in Europe—aimed at teaching travellers what to observe in foreign lands, how to regulate and standardize their gestures and techniques when collecting the requisite objects, and, finally, how to report on them.2

Conexões, cruzamentos, circulações. A passagem da cartografia britânica pela Índia, séculos XVII-XIX

Este artigo recupera o papel dos cartografos indianos na construcao da ciencia cartografica britânica e a maneira como o saber-fazer local (ainda que em contexto colonial) se projectou na metropole. Mostra-se, assim, como a ciencia cartografica na India antecipou em larga medida as realizacoes entao em curso na Gra-Bretanha. A nocao passiva de difusao, substituem-se as nocoes mais activas, de recepcoes, de representacoes e de apropriacoes historicamente situadas. Com este estudo sobre cartografia, o autor poe em evidencia a cooperacao entre elites indianas e britânicas. O saber-fazer indiano – protagonizados pelo que chama de cartografos subalternos – e em especial a tecnica da agrimensura foram plenamente reconhecidos pelas instituicoes coloniais militares e fiscais, que se esforcaram por o desenvolver. Sem por em causa a relacao entre saber/poder nos processos coloniais, Kapil Raj define zonas de negociacao e mostra mesmo como os saberes produzidos por elites nao ocidentais se projectaram no Ocidente e o transformaram.

Book Reviews : MATTHEW H. EDNEY, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843, Chicago/London, University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 458

The Survey of India, although named thus only in 1878, represents one of the earliest modem scientific and technological enterprises in the world, dating back to the mid-eighteenth century. Arguably, it comprised the technical backbone of the British administration in India. Known mainly for its maps, the Survey was also a pioneer in the invention and production of social statistics, made substantial contributions to geodesy, and undertook the conception, manufacture and maintenance