The growing body of research on interdisciplinarity has encouraged a more in depth analysis of the relations that hold among academic disciplines. In particular, the incursion of one scientific discipline into another discipline’s traditional domain, also known as scientific imperialism, has been a matter of increasing debate. Following this trend, Scientific Imperialism aims to bring together philosophers of science and historians of science interested in the topic of scientific imperialism and, in particular, interested in the conceptual clarification, empirical identification, and normative assessment of the idea of scientific imperialism. Thus, this innovative volume has two main goals. Indeed, the authors first seek to understand interdisciplinary relations emerging from the incursion of one scientific discipline into one or more other disciplines, such as in cases in which the conventions and procedures of one discipline or field are imposed on other fields; or more weakly when a scientific discipline seeks to explain phenomena that are traditionally considered proper of another discipline’s domain. Secondly, the authors explore ways of distinguishing imperialistic from non-imperialistic interactions between disciplines and research fields. The first sustained study of scientific imperialism, this volume will appeal to postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Science and Technology Studies, Sociology of Science & Technology, Philosophy of Science, and History of Science.

How was the character of science shaped by the colonial experience? In turn, how might we make sense of how science contributed to colonialism? Saint Domingue (now Haiti) was the world’s richest colony in the eighteenth century and home to an active society of science—one of only three in the world, at that time. In this deeply researched and pathbreaking study of the colony, James E. McClellan III first raised his incisive questions about the relationship between science and society that historians of the colonial experience are still grappling with today. Long considered rare, the book is now back in print in an English-language edition, accompanied by a new foreword by Vertus Saint-Louis, a native of Haiti and a widely-acknowledged expert on colonialism. Frequently cited as the crucial starting point in understanding the Haitian revolution, Colonialism and Science will be welcomed by students and scholars alike. “By deftly weaving together imperialism and science in the story of French colonialism, [McClellan] . . . brings to light the history of an almost forgotten colony.”—Journal of Modern History “McClellan has produced an impressive case study offering excellent surveys of Saint Domingue’s colonial history and its history of science.”—Isis

Examines how contemporary relations between indigenous and Western nations are shaped by the dynamics of power, the politics of property, and the apologetics of law.

Cameron Strang takes American scientific thought and discoveries away from the learned societies, museums, and teaching halls of the Northeast and puts the production of knowledge about the natural world in the context of competing empires and an expanding republic in the Gulf South. People often dismissed by starched northeasterners as nonintellectuals--Indian sages, African slaves, Spanish officials, Irishmen on the make, clearers of land and drivers of men--were also scientific observers, gatherers, organizers, and reporters. Skulls and stems, birds and bugs, rocks and maps, tall tales and fertile hypotheses came from them. They collected, described, and sent the objects that scientists gazed on and interpreted in polite Philadelphia. They made knowledge. Frontiers of Science offers a new framework for approaching American intellectual history, one that transcends political and cultural boundaries and reveals persistence across the colonial and national eras. The pursuit of knowledge in the United States did not cohere around democratic politics or the influence of liberty. It was, as in other empires, divided by multiple loyalties and identities, organized through contested hierarchies of ethnicity and place, and reliant on violence. By discovering the lost intellectual history of one region, Strang shows us how to recover a continent for science.

A unique resource that synthesizes existing primary and secondary sources to provide a fascinating introduction to the development and dissemination of science within history's great empires, as well as the complex interaction between imperialism and scientific progress over two centuries. Imperialism and Science is a scholarly yet accessible chronicle of the impact of imperialism on science over the past 200 years, from the effect of Catholicism on scientific progress in Latin America to the importance of U.S. government funding of scientific research to America's preeminent place in the world. Spanning two centuries of scientific advance throughout the age of empire, Imperialism and Science sheds new light on the spread of scientific thought throughout the former colonial world. Science made enormous advances during this period, often being associated with anti-Imperialist struggle or, as in the case of the science brought to 19th-century China and India by the British, with Western cultural hegemony.

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.

The Volume Science, Technology, Imperialism And War Interlinks The Concerned Themes To Present A Coherent Analyssis Of The Development Of Related Ideas And Institutions In The Subcontinent. The Chapters On Science, Therefore, Look At The Cognitive And Socio-Historical Aspects Of Science, Relating The Same With The Establishment And Spread Of Imperialism In India; With Its Application To Develop Technologies; And With The Use Of Such Technologies To Fund The Major Preoccupation Of Imperialism - War. Likewise, The Section On Technology Leads The Reader To A Search For Its Very Probable Links With Imperialism And War. The Section On Imperialism Offers Four Themes In The Edited Volume: The First One Deals With Its Theories; The Second With Its Link With Colonialism; And The Third And The Fourth Follow Its Manifestation In The Russian And British Adventures-Chiefly In Central Asia And India. The Depecdence Of Imperialism On War Looms Large. War, The Concluding Theme Of This Exercise, Is The Saturation Point Of Himan Efforts To Subjugate And Dominate Others. The Scholars Writing In This Section Critically Survey The Various Kinds Of War-Conventional, Linited And Nuclear-And A Detailed And Insightful Analysis Of The Cold War By The Editor Completes The Picture. This Volume Will Prove Invaluable To Scholars And Students Of South Asian Studies, History, Political Science And International Relations, And Defence Studies Alike.