Science in the Service of Empire

Science in the Service of Empire PDF Author: John Gascoigne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521550697
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book

Book Description
Joseph Banks is one of the most significant figures of the English Enlightenment. This book places his work in promoting 'imperial science', in the context of the consolidation of the British State during a time of extraordinary upheaval. The American, French and Industrial Revolutions unleashed intense and dramatic change, placing growing pressure on the British state and increasing its need for expert advice on scientific matters. This was largely provided by Banks, who used his personal networks and systems of patronage to integrate scientific concerns with the complex machinery of government. In this book, originally published in 1998, Gascoigne skilfully draws out the rich detail of Banks' life within the broader political framework, and shows how imperial concerns prompted interest in the possible uses of science for economic and strategic gain. This is an important examination of the British State during a time of change and upheaval.

Science in the Service of Empire

Science in the Service of Empire PDF Author: John Gascoigne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521550697
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book

Book Description
Joseph Banks is one of the most significant figures of the English Enlightenment. This book places his work in promoting 'imperial science', in the context of the consolidation of the British State during a time of extraordinary upheaval. The American, French and Industrial Revolutions unleashed intense and dramatic change, placing growing pressure on the British state and increasing its need for expert advice on scientific matters. This was largely provided by Banks, who used his personal networks and systems of patronage to integrate scientific concerns with the complex machinery of government. In this book, originally published in 1998, Gascoigne skilfully draws out the rich detail of Banks' life within the broader political framework, and shows how imperial concerns prompted interest in the possible uses of science for economic and strategic gain. This is an important examination of the British State during a time of change and upheaval.

Science and Empire

Science and Empire PDF Author: B. Bennett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230320821
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Get Book

Book Description
Offering one of the first analyses of how networks of science interacted within the British Empire during the past two centuries, this volume shows how the rise of formalized state networks of science in the mid nineteenth-century led to a constant tension between administrators and scientists.

Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire

Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire PDF Author: Sarah Irving
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317315227
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book

Book Description
Represents a history of the British Empire that takes account of the sense of empire as intellectual as well as geographic dominion: the historiography of the British Empire, with its preoccupation of empire as geographically unchallenged sovereignty, overlooks the idea of empire as intellectual dominion.

Science and Empire in the Atlantic World

Science and Empire in the Atlantic World PDF Author: James Delbourgo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135899096
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

Get Book

Book Description
Science and Empire in the Atlantic World is the first book in the growing field of Atlantic Studies to examine the production of scientific knowledge in the Atlantic world from a comparative and international perspective. Rather than focusing on a specific scientific field or single national context, this collection captures the multiplicity of practices, people, languages, and agendas that characterized the traffic in knowledge around the Atlantic world, linking this knowledge to the social processes fundamental to colonialism, such as travel, trade, ethnography, and slavery.

Medicine, Trade and Empire

Medicine, Trade and Empire PDF Author: Palmira Fontes da Costa
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131709817X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book

Book Description
Garcia de Orta’s Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563) was one of the first books to take advantage of the close relationship between medicine, trade and empire in the early modern period. The book was printed in Goa, the capital of the Portuguese empire in the East, and the city where the author, a Portuguese physician of Jewish ancestry, lived for almost thirty years. It presents a vast array of medical information on various drugs, spices, plants, fruits and minerals native to India or adjoining territories. In addition, it includes information concerning indigenous methods of healing as well as a far-reaching assessment of ancient and modern authors on Asian materia medica. Orta’s book had a market in Asia but was particularly valuable to a European audience. It soon attracted the attention of various European authors and printers by providing the basis for adaptations, commentaries and editions in various languages, prompting a successful and complex trail of medical knowledge in transit. Authored by an interdisciplinary team of prominent international scholars, the volume takes into account recent historiographical trends and provides a contextualized and innovative analysis of the histories and reception of the Colloquies. It emphasizes the value of the work to historians today as a symbol of the impact of geographical expansion and globalization in a sixteenth-century medical world.

India and the British Empire

India and the British Empire PDF Author: Douglas M. Peers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192513524
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book

Book Description
South Asian History has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance over the past thirty years. Its historians are not only producing new ways of thinking about the imperial impact and legacy on South Asia, but also helping to reshape the study of imperial history in general. The essays in this collection address a number of these important developments, delineating not only the complicated interplay between imperial rulers and their subjects in India, but also illuminating the economic, political, environmental, social, cultural, ideological, and intellectual contexts which informed, and were in turn informed by, these interactions. Particular attention is paid to a cluster of binary oppositions that have hitherto framed South Asian history, namely colonizer/colonized, imperialism/nationalism, and modernity/tradition, and how new analytical frameworks are emerging which enable us to think beyond the constraints imposed by these binaries. Closer attention to regional dynamics as well as to wider global forces has enriched our understanding of the history of South Asia within a wider imperial matrix. Previous impressions of all-powerful imperialism, with the capacity to reshape all before it, for good or ill, are rejected in favour of a much more nuanced image of imperialism in India that acknowledges the impact as well as the intentions of colonialism, but within a much more complicated historical landscape where other processes are at work.

Beyond Science and Empire

Beyond Science and Empire PDF Author: Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000929086
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book

Book Description
Through ten case studies by international specialists, this book investigates the circulation and production of scientific knowledge between 1750 and 1945 in the fields of agriculture, astronomy, botany, cartography, medicine, statistics, and zoology. In this period, most of the world was under some form of imperial control, while science emerged as a discrete field of activity. What was the relationship between empire and science? Was science just an instrument for imperial domination? While such guiding questions place the book in the tradition of science and empire studies, it offers a fresh perspective in dialogue with global history and circulatory approaches. The book demonstrates, not by theoretical discourse but through detailed historical case studies, that the adoption of a global scale of analysis or an emphasis on circulatory processes does not entail analytical vagueness, diffusionism in disguise, or complacency with imperialism. The chapters show scientific knowledge emerging from the actions of little-known individuals moving across several Empires—European, Asian, and South American alike—in unanticipated places and institutions, and through complex processes of exchange, competition, collaboration, and circulation of knowledge. The book will interest scholars and undergraduate and graduate students concerned with the connections between the history of science, imperial history, and global history.

The Colonial Empire and its Civil Service

The Colonial Empire and its Civil Service PDF Author: Charles Jeffries
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107475023
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book

Book Description
Originally published in 1938, this book provides a history of the civil service in British colonies, as well as a review of the contemporary colonial service. Jeffries also details the financial organisation of colonial governments, as well as a summary of appointments to colonial posts from 1921 to 1936. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in British colonial history.

Empire and the Social Sciences

Empire and the Social Sciences PDF Author: Jeremy Adelman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350102520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book

Book Description
This thought-provoking and original collection looks at how intellectuals and their disciplines have been shaped, halted and advanced by the rise and fall of empires. It illuminates how ideas did not just reflect but also moulded global order and disorder by informing public policies and discourse. Ranging from early modern European empires to debates about recent American hegemony, Empire and the Social Sciences shows that world history cannot be separated from the empires that made it, and reveals the many ways in which social scientists constructed empires as we know them. Taking a truly global approach from China and Japan to modern America, the contributors collectively tackle a long durée of the modern world from the Enlightenment to the present day. Linking together specific moments of world history it also puts global history at the centre of a debate about globalization of the social sciences. It thus crosses and integrates several disciplines and offers graduate students, scholars and faculty an approach that intersects fields, crosses regions and maps a history of global social sciences.

From Knowledge to Power

From Knowledge to Power PDF Author: Harry W. Paul
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521265041
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Get Book

Book Description
France has played a pivotal role in the development of modern science. Especially striking and controversial has been the way in which the state has organized scientific endeavor. After the 1880s reinvigorated university faculties played a key role in the growth of science in France, and many faculty scientists enjoyed close relations with industry, agriculture, the military, and politics. During the Third Republic the idea of governmental responsibility to support research became a dogma, due to the stimulus that science was perceived to give to the French economy. By 1939 a working mechanism of state funding for science, buttressed by a complex scientific ideology, had come into existence and provided the foundations for the development of a new structure of scientific research and education in the postwar era. From Knowledge to Power is the first full-scale treatment of this dramatic expansion of French science between 1860 and 1939.