This open access book considers science and empire, and the stories we tell ourselves about them. Using British Nobel laureate Ronald Ross (1857-1932) and his colleagues as access points to a wider professional culture, Empire Under the Microscope explores the cultural history of parasitology and its relationships with the literary and historical imagination between 1885 and 1935. Emilie Taylor-Pirie examines a wealth of archival material including medical lectures, scientific publications, popular biography, and personal and professional correspondence, alongside novels, poems, newspaper articles, and political speeches, to excavate the shared vocabularies of literature and medicine. She demonstrates how forms such as poetry and biography; genres such as imperial romance and detective fiction; and modes such as adventure and the Gothic, together informed how tropical diseases, their parasites, and their vectors, were understood in relation to race, gender, and nation. From Ancient Greece, to King Arthur’s Knights, to the detective work of Sherlock Holmes, parasitologists manipulated literary and historical forms of knowledge in their professional self-fashioning to create a modern mythology that has a visible legacy in relationships between science and society today.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Thomas Hardy is not generally recognized as an imperial writer, even though he wrote during a period of major expansion of the British Empire and in spite of the many allusions to the Roman Empire and Napoleonic Wars in his writing. Jane L. Bownas examines the context of these references, proposing that Hardy was a writer who not only posed a challenge to the whole of established society, but one whose writings bring into question the very notion of empire. Bownas argues that Hardy takes up ideas of the primitive and civilized that were central to Western thought in the nineteenth century, contesting this opposition and highlighting the effect outsiders have on so-called 'primitive' communities. In her discussion of the oppressions of imperialism, she analyzes the debate surrounding the use of gender as an articulated category, together with race and class, and shows how, in exposing the power structures operating within Britain, Hardy produces a critique of all forms of ideological oppression.

Empire's Nature: Mark Catesby's New World Vision

Over the course of the last thirty years, the investigation of objects at the nano scale has rocketed. Nanoscale scientific research has not only powerfully affected the amount and orientation of knowledge, it has perhaps even more significantly redirected the ways in which much research work is carried out, changed scientists' methodology and reasoning processes, and influenced aspects of the structure of career trajectory and the functioning of scientific disciplines. This book identifies key historical moments and episodes in the birth and evolution of nanoscience, discusses the novel repertory of epistemological concerns of practitioners, and signals sociological propensities. As Galileo's telescope explored the moon's surface four hundred years ago, nano instrumentation now makes it possible to see the surface of single molecules. Moreover, practitioners are able to manipulate individual atoms and molecules at will to produce pre-designed synthetic materials, non-existent in nature. The combinatorial of heightened observational capacity and the tailoring of synthetic artificial materials exhibiting hitherto novel physical properties has widened and transformed the worlds of scientific knowledge and technical artefact. This book invites the question: to what extent does nanoscale scientific research constitute a kind of 'scientific revolution'?