Plants, Power and Knowledge: An Exploration of the Imperial Networks and the Circuits of Botanical Knowledge and Medical Systems on the Western Coast of India Against the backdrop of European Expansionism (original) (raw)
Related papers
2023
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.
Thinking Without the Scientific Revolution: Global Interactions and the Construction of Knowledge
Journal of Early Modern History, 2017
Amongst the many narrative strategies in the recent " global turn " in the history of science, one commonly finds attempts to complement the single European story by multiplying histories of knowledge-making in as many different regional and cultural contexts as possible. Other strategies include attempts to generalize the " Needham Question " of why the Scientific Revolution occurred only in early-modern Europe to the exclusion of other parts of the world, or to challenge the diffusionist vision of the spread of modern science from Europe by attempting to show that non-European scientific traditions already had an understanding of recent European discoveries. These latter strategies seek simply to pluralize the Scientific Revolution without actually unpacking the latter concept itself. This article seeks firstly to show that the " Scientific Revolution " was in fact a Cold War invention intended to bring the freshly decolonized world into the ambit of the West by limiting the conception of modern science to Europe-specific activities and thus delegitimizing other knowledge domains and using the term as a spatially circumscribed chronological marker. Using a broader understanding of scientific activity in the early modern period, and mobilizing relational methodologies, such as circulatory and connected historiographies, the paper then reexamines a well-known history of the Hortus Malabaricus, one of the most celebrated seventeenth-century botanical works, to show the short-and long-range knowledge circulations, intercultural interactions and connections involved in its making to bring out the global nature of scientific activity of the period and illustrate relational approaches to global history.
Early modern natural history: Contributions from the Americas and India
Journal of Biosciences J. Biosci. 37(6): 937–947,, 2012
The early success of its oceanic voyages brought contrary pulls to bear on Europe, with the practical needs of the hour standing in contradistinction to the age-old religious authority, sectarian antagonism and the recovered Greco-Roman intellectual tradition. How in course of time the former triumphed over the latter in the case of natural history is an interesting and instructive line of enquiry. This article examines in some detail how the Materia Medica of the Americas and India were incorporated into the European mainstream.
Secondary Tools of Empire: Jesuit Men of Science in India
1994
The arrival of St. Francis Xavier at Goa on 6th May. 1542, is an even of singular importance. He was the first Jesuit in India, and man others were to follow him for the next two hundred years. Although the spread of the Christian faith was the most important plan of the Jesuits, their activities had a scientific dimension about them also, being the First European men of learning in India. In this paper I will describe their scientific activities and discuss their impact on later political developments.'
Science under European Auspices in 16-18th Century India
Oceanic voyages expanded Europe’s economy, enlarged its world view, and transformed its state of mind. Huge profits were waiting to be made if ships could sail to distant lands and return home safely. For the first time in the history, prosperity did not depend on the blessings of the God or the good will of the king, but on the initiative of the merchants and skills of artisans and sailors. Maritime imperatives diminished the royal and the feudal holds; and enhanced the status of generators of new wealth and knowledge. The French physician Julien La Mettrie would famously declare in 1747 in The Man A Machine: “We are no more committing a crime when we obey our primitive instincts than the Nile is committing a crime with its floods, or the sea with its ravages”. Europe learnt that knowledge lay not in the past but in the future, not in the archives but out in the open. And knowledge meant survival and wealth. Had Europe’s economy remained self-contained, it would probably have had no particular reason to develop modern science.
Perspectives on Science , 2022
In his writings, Francis Bacon emphasized the interrelatedness between the migration of people and knowledge, arguing that Europeans of his time had surpassed the greatest civilizations because of their ability to traverse the world freely. Concentrating on Spanish observers who investigated New Spain’s flora, this article bridges theory and practice by examining the Iberian roots of Bacon’s views. The article examines scientific approaches for acquiring bioknowledge by Iberians who specialized in European medicine, including Francisco Hernández, Juan de Cárdenas and Francisco Ximénez. While the article recognizes the contribution of travellers and expatriates to Spain’s bioprospecting project, it also points to the ways in which the limitations of the transfer of botanical information was acknowledged, and discusses its meaning. By presenting the complexities in the communication of knowledge, I argue, naturalists in the colonies could highlight their unique vantage point in relation to “armchair” specialists in the metropole.
Enlightenment In An Imperial Context: Local Science In the Eighteenth Century
Antonio Lafuente, "Enlightenment in an Imperial Context: Local Science in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Hispanic World", en Roy MacLeod, ed., Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise, Osiris, 15: 155-173, 2000, 2000
This paper aims to assess the figuration of local and metropolitan scientific practices and theories in the eighteenth-century Hispanic Empire by focusing on two colonies: New Spain (Mexico) and New Granada (Colombia). In New Spain, Creole and metropolitan scientists negotiated the assimilation of old local wisdom with new European knowledge in their botanical studies of native plants. Through the openness of both groups of scientists to new ideas, the naturalization of standardized procedures, and the verbalization of old problems in new terminology, the globalization process of scientific practices was successfully integrated there at the local level. In New Granada, less favorably, the Royal Botanical Expedition (1783-1816) provoked disagreement between representatives of the viceroy and of the colony's Creole intelligentsia not only about plant classification systems, but about the proper relationship between scientific and political interests.