| Author | : Zaheer Baber |
| Publisher | : SUNY Press |
| Total Pages | : 316 |
| Release | : 1996-05-16 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 9780791429204 |
Investigates the complex social processes involved in the introduction and institutionalization of Western science in colonial India.
| Author | : Andrew Goss |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 339 |
| Release | : 2021-07-05 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 1000404854 |
The focus of this volume is the history of imperial science between 1600 and 1960, although some essays reach back prior to 1600 and the section about decolonization includes post-1960 material. Each contributed chapter, written by an expert in the field, provides an analytical review essay of the field, while also providing an overview of the topic. There is now a rich literature developed by historians of science as well as scholars of empire demonstrating the numerous ways science and empire grew together, especially between 1600 and 1960.
| Author | : Peter Gottschalk |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press, USA |
| Total Pages | : 442 |
| Release | : 2013 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0195393015 |
Peter Gottschalk offers a compelling study of how, through the British implementation of scientific taxonomy in the subcontinent, Britons and Indians identified an inherent divide between mutually antagonistic religious communities. England's ascent to power coincided with the rise of empirical science as an authoritative way of knowing not only the natural world, but the human one as well. The British scientific passion for classification, combined with the Christian impulse to differentiate people according to religion, led to a designation of Indians as either Hindu or Muslim according to rigidly defined criteria that paralleled classification in botanical and zoological taxonomies. Through an historical and ethnographic study of the north Indian village of Chainpur, Gottschalk shows that the Britons' presumed categories did not necessarily reflect the Indians' concepts of their own identities, though many Indians came to embrace this scientism and gradually accepted the categories the British instituted through projects like the Census of India, the Archaeological Survey of India, and the India Museum. Today's propogators of Hindu-Muslim violence often cite scientistic formulations of difference that descend directly from the categories introduced by imperial Britain. Religion, Science, and Empire will be a valuable resource to anyone interested in the colonial and postcolonial history of religion in India.
| Author | : Moritz von Brescius |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 429 |
| Release | : 2018 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : 1108427324 |
A path-breaking study of national, imperial and indigenous interests at stake in a controversial German expedition to British India.
| Author | : Deborah R. Coen |
| Publisher | : University of Chicago Press |
| Total Pages | : 444 |
| Release | : 2018-07-19 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 022655502X |
Today, predicting the impact of human activities on the earth’s climate hinges on tracking interactions among phenomena of radically different dimensions, from the molecular to the planetary. Climate in Motion shows that this multiscalar, multicausal framework emerged well before computers and satellites. Extending the history of modern climate science back into the nineteenth century, Deborah R. Coen uncovers its roots in the politics of empire-building in central and eastern Europe. She argues that essential elements of the modern understanding of climate arose as a means of thinking across scales in a state—the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, a patchwork of medieval kingdoms and modern laws—where such thinking was a political imperative. Led by Julius Hann in Vienna, Habsburg scientists were the first to investigate precisely how local winds and storms might be related to the general circulation of the earth’s atmosphere as a whole. Linking Habsburg climatology to the political and artistic experiments of late imperial Austria, Coen grounds the seemingly esoteric science of the atmosphere in the everyday experiences of an earlier era of globalization. Climate in Motion presents the history of modern climate science as a history of “scaling”—that is, the embodied work of moving between different frameworks for measuring the world. In this way, it offers a critical historical perspective on the concepts of scale that structure thinking about the climate crisis today and the range of possibilities for responding to it.
| Author | : James Delbourgo |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 411 |
| Release | : 2008-09-25 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1135899096 |
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.
| Author | : Sabine Clarke |
| Publisher | : Studies in Imperialism |
| Total Pages | : 206 |
| Release | : 2018-09-05 |
| Genre | : Great Britain |
| ISBN | : 9781526131386 |
This book is open access under a CC BY license. This is the first account of Britain's plans for industrial development in its Caribbean colonies - something that historians have usually said Britain never contemplated. It shows that Britain's remedy to the poor economic conditions in the Caribbean gave a key role to laboratory research to re-invent sugarcane as the raw material for making fuels, plastics and drugs. Science at the end of empire explores the practical and also political functions of scientific research and economic advisors for Britain at a moment in which Caribbean governments operated with increasing autonomy and the US was intent on expanding its influence in the region. Britain's preferred path to industrial development was threatened by an alternative promoted through the Caribbean Commission. The provision of knowledge and expertise became key routes by which Britain and America competed to shape the future of the region, and their place in it.
| Author | : Sidney Perkowitz |
| Publisher | : Joseph Henry Press |
| Total Pages | : 248 |
| Release | : 1998-11-23 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 9780309065566 |
In Empire of Light, Sidney Perkowitz combines the expertise of a physicist with the vision of an art connoisseur and the skill of an accomplished writer to offer a unique view of the most fundamental feature of the universe: light. Empire of Light discusses the nature of light, how the eye sees, and how our understanding of these phenomena have emerged over the ages, including the role of light in the development of quantum physics. The author examines the making of electrical light and its integration into commerce, telecommunications, entertainment, medicine, warfare, and every other aspect of our daily lives. And he presents the role of light in the search for the beginning and the end of the universe, as astronomers with their instruments penetrate ever deeper into the sky. Visible light spans the spectrum between infrared and ultraviolet, but this book reaches across many other spectra as well--from the cave paintings at Lascaux to Mark Rothko's stark blocks of color in today's art museums, from Plato's speculation that the eye sends out rays to Ramon y Cajal's discovery that vision actually works in the opposite way, from Tycho Brahe's elegant antetelescope measurements of planet positions to the Hubble telescope's exquisite sensitivity to light from billions of light years away. What are the biological and neurological processes of perceiving visible light? How does a person typically scan a scene? Do you see red or blue the same way I do? What are our physiological reactions and emotional responses to light? Perkowitz explores these and many other fascinating questions, drawing together the experiences, achievements, and perspectives of a diverse cast of characters, including Galileo, Einstein, Newton, Van Gogh, and Edison. Empire of Light is written so that lay readers will readily grasp the scientific principles and science professionals will readily appreciate the human experience. It will impart new wonder to the daily experience of light in our world. Sidney Perkowitz is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Physics at Emory University. His work has appeared in national publications such as The Sciences, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, and Technology Review.
| Author | : Catherine Delmas |
| Publisher | : Cambridge Scholars Publishing |
| Total Pages | : 235 |
| Release | : 2010-10-12 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1443825964 |
The issue at stake in this volume is the role of science as a way to fulfil a quest for knowledge, a tool in the exploration of foreign lands, a central paradigm in the discourse on and representations of Otherness. The interweaving of scientific and ideological discourses is not limited to the geopolitical frame of the British empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but extends to the rise of the American empire as well. The fields of research tackled are human and social sciences (anthropology, ethnography, cartography, phrenology), which thrived during the period of imperial expansion, racial theories couched in pseudo-scientific discourse, natural sciences, as they are presented in specialised or popularised works, in the press, in travel narratives—at the crossroads of science and literature—in essays, but also in literary texts. Contributors examine such issues as the plurality of scientific discourses, their historicity, the alienating dangers of reduction, fragmentation and reification of the Other, the interaction between scientific discourse and literary discourse, the way certain texts use scientific discourse to serve their imperialist views or, conversely, deconstruct and question them. Such approaches allow for the analysis of the link between knowledge and power as well as of the paradox of a scientific discourse which claims to seek the truth while at the same time both masking and revealing the political and economic stakes of Anglo-saxon imperialism. The analysis of various types of discourse and/or representation highlights the tension between science and ideology, between scientific “objectivity” and propaganda, and stresses the limits of an imperialist epistemology which has sometimes been questioned in more ambiguous or subversive texts.
