Part II Paper 2: Sciences and Empires

Paper manager: Charu Singh

Lectures are held in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

This paper surveys the history of science and technology from the late 18th century until the present day. The sciences in this decisive epoch were made for a world increasingly dominated by trade and industrialising economies and punctuated by wars and revolutions at a global scale. New knowledges and technologies both in the natural and the human sciences, emerged and combined, extended their global reach through nation-building, colonial imperialism and decolonisation, and met criticism, challenge and resistance throughout their consolidation. Key institutions were established: scientific associations, teaching laboratories, research institutes, and professionally organised careers and qualifications. Key technologies were developed to set standards and collate data about the natural and social world. This was also the epoch of grand visions of the natural and social order and their secular meanings, whether in thermodynamics and electromagnetism, in engineering and industrial sciences, in astrophysics and cosmology, or in evolutionary theory and racial science. Changes in sciences and technology also sparked human imaginations, inspiring progressive dreams of solving global hunger or securing global communications, and fuelling nightmares of nuclear annihilation, racial conflict and catastrophic climate change.

Aims and learning outcomes

• to acquaint students with fundamental issues in historical writing on the sciences from the late 18th century to the period of decolonisation and aftermath of the Cold War;
• to provide students with an understanding of the principal changes that created the scientific institutions, professionals and practices of the modern world;
• to explore the modern imperial and colonial origins and uses of scientific knowledge;
• to present students with a deeper understanding of how science and technology came to occupy a central place in modern industries and state bureaucracies and especially in the daily lives of peoples worldwide;
• to encourage students to reflect critically on their own experiences of science and technology now, informed by greater knowledge of its recent history.

Lectures

Physical Sciences, Empire and Modernity

Josh Nall, Richard Staley (8 lectures, Michaelmas Term)

This course is about the transformation of the places and practices of the physical sciences in the last two centuries. Particular attention is paid to changes in scientific organisation and material technique. In this period, physical sciences became central to notions of progress and governance, investigated and prominently displayed in laboratories and observatories, workshops and international exhibitions. The politics of imperialism and of technological and economic transformations of modernity through the development of industrial capital were crucial for working institutions and practical conduct of physical sciences worldwide. These changes were marked especially in the material and the instrumental dimensions of physical sciences' enterprises. It is planned that the course include some working sessions with historical collections in the Whipple Museum. Key themes include the imperial role of astronomy and its instrumentation; new lab spaces for teaching and inquiry, involving the role of telecommunications and the advent of radiation sciences and nuclear physics; development of metropolitan spaces of performance, display and education and widely varying models of spectacle and of vision; and the development of electronic computing and sciences of artificial intelligence.

Data, Nature and Technology in the Twentieth Century

Lewis Bremner (4 lectures, Michaelmas Term)

Looking at the last century, this course explores the history of a set of disciplines – including ecology, geology, geography, sociology and anthropology – that have been referred to collectively as the survey sciences. These disciplines use methods of observation, measurement, classification and mapping to aggregate, process and represent large amounts of data about specific aspects of the world – like water, minerals, plants, animals and people. By better understanding their history, we can gain insight into the global exercise of imperial power and its legacy, the links between science and state bureaucracy, the development of industrial capitalism and communism, and the way that each of these related to the extraction of value from territory and populations. At the same time, we will also look around the world at historical trajectories related to the survey sciences that were not determined by empire or the nation-state, and which marshalled technology, expertise and ideas towards sometimes strikingly different ends. Lectures will connect this to the complex and contested history of concepts like 'nature', 'resources' and 'progress'.

Science, State and Society in South Asia

Charu Singh (8 lectures, Michaelmas & Lent Terms)

This course explores the history and anthropology of science and technology in South Asia from the 17th century to the present. During this period, the natural, social and political orders of the region were first conscripted to global scientific networks through European commerce and imperialism; since formal decolonisation in the mid-20th century, South Asian nation-states have continued to participate in transregional technoscience. Science and technology have animated the region's multiple imperial, national and postcolonial projects – as forces for civilisation and enlightenment, political domination and liberation, and economic development and social transformation. These lectures provide an overview of the dynamic relationship between science, state and society in South Asia since 1600, with a focus on the institutions, practices and sociology of actors involved in the production and transmission of scientific knowledge.

Science, Technology and Society in East Asia

Mary Brazelton, Jia Yu, Lewis Bremner (8 lectures, Lent Term)

This course is about how people in modern East Asia sought to understand and organise knowledge about their world. These endeavours involved extensive exchanges of ideas, objects and people, as well as shifting definitions of what constituted science. Topics covered include China's Qing Dynasty and its officials' efforts to cultivate knowledge about their empire, and the impact of Japan's changing relationship with the wider world in the 19th century on the development of science and technology in the region. In the 20th century, the rise of Communism in China and North Korea made the region a critical sphere in the Cold War, and led to novel exchanges in science, technology and medicine. The lectures connect narratives of science and technology in East Asia to themes that motivate other courses on the paper, such as the rise and spread of the university laboratory, the role of empire in the production of knowledge, and the relationships between science and industry.

Anthropologies

Richard Staley (4 lectures, Lent Term)

For much of its history as an idea, literature, field of study and mode of research, anthropology has been too important to be simply a discipline, with great political significance and implications for identity riding on observations issuing from the contact zones between peoples, and little consensus on methods or research aims. This course examines the complex, ambivalent relations that have characterised the emergence of anthropology within imperial powers, and explores how a focus on indigenous agency and anthropological self-critique unsettles perspectives on modernity. Lectures consider anthropologies in expedition and exhibition, the emergence of fieldwork, critical approaches to intelligence and science, and new perspectives on imperial and other economies and markets. Considering the roles that methods and concepts of the natural sciences have played in the development of different versions of anthropology, we explore several examples of anthropologists as activists and public intellectuals.

Preliminary reading

• Agar, Jon, Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012)
• Clancey, Gregory, Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)
• Elman, Benjamin A., A Cultural History of Modern Science in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)
• Endersby, Jim, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)
• Fyfe, Aileen, and Bernard Lightman (eds), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)
• Goss, Andrew (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Science and Empire (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021)
• Hecht, Gabrielle (ed.), Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011)
• Krige, John, and Dominique Pestre (eds), Companion to Science in the Twentieth Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 1997)
• Lightman, Bernard (ed.), Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
• Marsden, Ben, and Crosbie Smith, Engineering Empires: A Cultural History of Technology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005)
• Morus, Iwan Rhys, When Physics Became King (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)
• Oreskes, Naomi, and John Krige (eds), Science and Technology in the Global Cold War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014)
• Porter, Theodore M., Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)
• Raj, Kapil, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
• Slotten, Hugh, Ronald Numbers and David Livingstone (eds), Modern Science in National, Transnational and Global Context (Cambridge History of Science, vol. 8) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)

Resources for Paper 2 on Moodle