Day 59 : Book Excerpt : Science and Empire

In the 1950s and 1960s, studies by American social scientists such as Walter Rostow popularized a view of agrarian societies as ‘traditional’ communities that were constrained by long-term fatalism and stagnation. For Rostow, as for other early exponents of modernization theory, a major cause of this inertia lay in traditional peoples’ attitudes towards science and the physical world, which he described as ‘pre Newtonian’. The Newtonian moment was symbolic of a watershed in  world history when western man [sic] came to believe the external realm was subject to knowable laws, and thus capable of systematic manipulation. The transition to a ‘modern growing society’ was marked by econ omic, political, social, and most of all, attitudinal transformations which cleared the way for the fruits of modern science and technology to be fully exploited in ways that would secure sustained economic growth. One’s physical environment came to be seen as an ordered world rather than simply ‘given’ by providence, which if understood rationally could be managed in ways that yielded greater productive surpluses and material progress.

Writing at about the same time, and through a similar lens, George Basalla produced his now classic essay on ‘The Spread of Western Science’. Basalla asked the question: how was the ‘modern’ scientific tradition, which began in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, diffused subsequently beyond its original boundaries to the rest of the world? As an explanation, he proposed a three-stage model of the process of transmission. In the initial phase of contact with other lands, European observers – many of them explorers, travelers, missionaries and other amateurs – survey, collect and appraise the flora, fauna and physical features of these new lands in their search for potential sources of wealth or settlement. In time, this period of reconnaissance gives way to a second, more substantial phase of ‘colonial science’ when the number of scientists involved and the range of activity expands considerably until it encompasses the full spectrum of scientific endeavor as it exists in the metropolitan ‘core’. Despite such growth, colonial scientists remain dependent on European scientific institutions for training and affiliation, as well as on European scientific societies and journals for professional recognition. However, colonial science contains in embryonic form the seeds that, with the rise of nationalism, will eventually develop into an independent, ‘native’ scientific tradition. Colonial science is thus best seen, according to Basalla, as an evolutionary phase in the transmitting of Western science to the non-Western world. And like Rostow’s trope of ‘take off’ to self sustaining economic growth, self-reliance in scientific matters can only be achieved by consciously struggling to eradicate the barriers of resistance posed by non-European philosophical, religious and cultural beliefs.

A substantial body of historical research on science, expertise and imperialism has been produced since the publication of Basalla’s seminal study, much of it critical of the diffusionist assumptions and progressive stages that underpin his model. Inspired by new directions in development studies, historians of science in the 1970s took a more radical turn as they began to incorporate the insights of dependency and underdevelopment theory into their work. Basalla’s own analysis helped lead the way with its depiction of colonial science as dependent on an external scientific culture. Another early analysis was offered by Donald Fleming, who described the ‘reconnaissance of natural history’ tradition that dominated science in Australia, Canada and the United States until the end of the nineteenth century, as displaying a distinct ‘colonial posture’. Investigators in all three countries, he noted, remained foragers and collaborators, focused on the local and particular, while the highest responsibilities of collating data and devising universal theorems were reserved for scholars working at universities in Britain, France and Germany. But whereas Basalla and Fleming saw this dependency as transitional and relatively benign, others have viewed the derivative, fact-gathering nature of colonial science as symptomatic of the unbalanced relationship that imperial ism fostered between Europe and much of the rest of the world. Building on the insights of dependency theorists, scholars in the 1970s and 1980s directed their attention increasingly to science as an instrument of imperial control and exploitation. The imperial ‘metropole’ and its colonial ‘satellites’, to use Andre Gunder Frank’s analogy, were bound together in a system of unequal, extractive exchange in which knowledge and specimens as much as industrial raw materials flowed back to Europe, but rarely the other way.

~~Science and Empire -by- ed. Brett M. Bennett and Joseph M. Hodge