Isis, 2005, 96:52–55� 2005 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.0021-1753/2005/9601-0003$10.00

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FOCUS: COLONIAL SCIENCE

Forum Introduction: The EuropeanColonial Science Complex

By Londa Schiebinger*

H istorians of science have, in the past several decades, boarded ships, like ChristopherColumbus or Maria Sibylla Merian before them, and set sail for unknown destinations.

Historical ventures to locales beyond the shores of Europe commingle with the ecumenicalmove toward global history. The colonial turn, as it might be styled, opens up standardaccounts of Europe’s scientific revolution or “big science” to rich and new interpretation.One never sees European science quite the same again.1

This forum presents four all-too-brief historiographic essays on science considered froma colonial or imperial point of view. My charge to authors was to present a thematicdiscussion of work on this topic in their particular fields of expertise, to analyze newscholarly directions, and to pose questions that have not yet been asked or perhaps not yetcompletely formulated. The essays here treat globally, from the sixteenth to the twentiethcenturies, Iberian, British, and French colonial traditions and—to break the national par-adigm—the multicultural Jesuit order.2 These essays are intended as helpful guides forthose of us involved in writing about specific aspects of colonial science and for those ofus who would like to incorporate more of these materials into our courses.

I have chosen to call the forum the European Colonial Science Complex, even thoughMark Harrison opens his essay with a reminder that historically “colonial science” hasreferred to science done in Europe’s overseas territories. Nonetheless, I retain the term“colonial science”; it is used here to mean any science done during the colonial era thatinvolved Europeans working in a colonial context. This includes science done in Europethat drew on colonial resources in addition to science done in areas that were part ofEurope’s trading or territorial empires.3 “Science,” in this context, serves as shorthand forsystematic knowledge of nature and is used broadly in this forum even for natural history

* Department of History, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305-2024.1 This forum offers historiographic essays to complement the rich research papers presented in Roy MacLeod’s

excellent Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise, Osiris, 2000, 15.2 On breaking the national paradigm, see Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British

Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), introduction.3 Steven J. Harris notes that “colonial science” may not describe well Jesuit oversea efforts: to be sure Jesuit

science was tied to state colonizing goals and trading company commercial interests, but it was also stronglydevoted to Christianizing.

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FOCUSand philosophy in the early modern period. To label this complex “European” also distin-

guishes it from the imperial endeavors of other global powers.Historians of colonialism recognize the problems of discussing science in terms of core-

periphery models. Each author in this forum discusses the reciprocal influences and mul-tidirectional flows of materials, knowledge, and people between multiple centers (someEuropean, some not) and diverse peripheries. To further challenge traditional notions ofcolonial relationships, Michael A. Osborne notes that many of the center-periphery rela-tionships we associate with the colonies were true as well in France itself, such as therelationship between Paris and areas such as Brittany, Flanders, and the Basque Country.In a similar mode, I show in my recent work on colonial bioprospecting that university-trained medical personnel “bioprospected” for cures among lay healers inside Europe muchas they did among the Tainos, Arawaks, and slaves in the West Indies.4 One thing thefollowing essays make clear is that indigenous European sciences changed as much as didindigenous non-European sciences over the course of the global encounters sparked byEuropean voyaging and conquest.

One analytic running through these essays is how colonial science—broadly con-ceived—was organized. Colonialism itself included a multitude of different practices.Iberians conceived their “territorial empire” in the New World not as colonies but asviceroyalties or kingdoms joined in a greater federated monarchy. These Spanish-Americanviceroyalties contrasted with Portuguese and Dutch “trading-post empires,” strong espe-cially in the East Indies. North America, Australia, and other areas were primarily “whitesettler colonies.” Finally, European settlement in the Caribbean forged Philip Curtin’s“plantation complex,” in which Europeans conquered and then replaced vanishing nativepeoples with settlers, not primarily from Europe, but from Africa.5

The organization of science within, across, and throughout Europe and its colonies wasequally varied. Science was funded by states, such as France, where from the seventeenthcentury on the king and his ministers mobilized material and intellectual resources centrallythrough the Parisian Jardin du Roi.6 Science was also promoted (often inadvertently) bytrading companies whose physicians, hired on to keep voyagers and settlers healthy inunknown lands, often doubled as medical botanists and naturalists, sometimes on theirown time and at their own expense. Science was also encouraged by scientific societies,such as the Parisian Academie Royale des Sciences and the Society for the Encouragementof Natural History and Useful Arts in Barbados, and private initiative. (Sir Hans Sloane,president of the Royal Society of London, for example, was involved in several privateschemes to search for new and profitable drugs in Virginia and Georgia.) Not all fundingflowed from Europe. The Institute of Colonial Medicine founded in Paris, for example,was financed from Madagascar and Indochina.7 In addition, science was pursued formallyand informally by settlers and merchants, and by gentlemen (and women) through aninformal republic of letters and of species exchange that stretched from Philadelphia intoBatavia, Uppsala, and beyond. Science was also sponsored by religious houses that,

4 Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard Univ. Press, 2004).

5 Much of the terminology here is drawn from Philip Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990).

6 James E. McClellan III and Francois Regourd, “The Colonial Machine: French Science and Colonization inthe Ancien Regime,” Osiris, 2000, 15:31–50, esp. p. 32.

7 Michael A. Osborne, A Medicine of Race and Place: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France, manu-script in preparation.

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unlike states and trading companies, often operated promiscuously across state authoritiesand commercial interests.

Another analytic running through these essays concerns who did colonial science andto what ends. Much scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s emphasized science “in the serviceof empire” or as an agent of cultural imperialism. And so, in many respects, it was:Europeans devised taxonomies and nomenclatures in order to comprehend and often ap-propriate colonial subjects and territorial resources; these European-made categories thentended to be taken to represent objective and universal ways of knowing. Scholarship inthe 1990s broadened historical analysis by recovering “indigenous science.” But, as JorgeCanizares-Esguerra points out in his paper here, the opposition drawn between indigenousEuropean and indigenous non-European sciences tends to reify dichotomous notions ofidentity. What is surprising, and emphasized here, is the rich mix of traditions that moldedcolonial science. What is also surprising is the respect Europeans often had for non-European knowledge and how this changed over time and place. These latter two pointsrequire further investigation. Initial research indicates major shifts in attitude between theearly modern period—when the Spanish crown sent Francisco Hernandez into New Spainor when, as Steven J. Harris points out, Louis XIV sent Jesuits to China for the purpose“of acquiring knowledge from foreign countries”—and the nineteenth century, whenheavy-handed European chauvinism disparaged “native” knowledges of all sorts. Thisshift, of course, is neither unilinear nor uniform, and Harrison makes the point that evenat the “High Noon of [the British] Empire” (the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-turies), there was far more reciprocity between indigenous European and various indige-nous non-European science than conventional models recognize.8 This mixing of traditionswas greatly furthered by Jesuit missionaries who offered the crowns of contending Euro-pean powers their expertise in languages, astronomy, and materia medica, for example, inexchange for access to souls in remote and far-off places. As Harris notes, “in both thelinguistic and Latourian sense, Jesuits were masters of translation.”

In addition to better understanding shifting European attitudes toward non-Europeanknowledge, we are beginning to develop richer notions of who did science. Harrison, forexample, describes how different groups of indigenous scholars in India pragmaticallyapproached Western science, some rejecting it completely, others embracing selected as-pects. Harris notes that the Chinese exercised similar judgment in relation to Jesuit sciencein the sixteenth century. Canizares-Esguerra has emphasized the independent science tra-ditions of Spanish Creoles in New Spain, who, educated at their own universities andresponding to their own interests, often rejected such European staples as Linnaean tax-onomy and binomial nomenclature. Osborne highlights important information about hownaturalists and scientists were trained, in the French case whether by the navy, at theParisian Jardin du Roi, or colonial schools established in either France or its overseasterritories. Science throughout the world was actively produced through an extensive mix-ing of peoples and their knowledges.

Another question of note is which European sciences became premier colonial sciences.Osborne offers comparisons of France’s financial investment in various colonial territories(in the late nineteenth century) and in various sciences. This information suggests that

8 On this point, see also Harold J. Cook, “Global Economies and Local Knowledge in the East Indies: JacobusBontius Learns the Facts of Nature,” in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics, ed. Londa Schiebingerand Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), pp. 100–119.

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FOCUSsciences, such as medical botany, cartography, and metallurgy, that contributed to colo-

nization were more highly funded than others. Canizares-Esguerra offers the interestingnotion that Iberian losses to other European countries in wars over naming, surveying, andremembering led to losses in territory. These are topics that require more research.

One area of colonial science that begs for more research is gender.9 Canizares-Esguerrain his essay points to the masculinist imagery and ethos associated with voyaging chivalriccosmographers. Harrison notes scholarship that has revealed associations between Westernnotions of femininity and the “enervating” tropics in the widely circulated conception ofthe “effeminate” Bengali, for example. Osborne points to the role of colonial nurses andthe astonishing numbers of women enrolled in a medical school opened in Algiers in 1857.Importantly, Harris notes that the Society of Jesus—so active in forging colonial science—never founded a “female order.” Neither did most monarchs, trading companies, or sci-entific societies field many women naturalists. The specific configurations of gender re-lations in Europe and the colonies that kept women out of the field also molded knowledgein specific ways.10 What knowledge was picked up and what discarded, what knowledgewas assimilated or transmutated because of European and colonial notions of gender is anexciting area open for further exploration.

There are several important aspects of the colonial science complex not highlightedhere. One is intracolonial exchange—the movement, for example, of useful colonial sta-ples, such as cochineal, nutmeg, sugar, rubber, and coffee, and the knowledge associatedwith them—between European colonial gardens and experimental stations, on the onehand, and between non-Europeans (such as African slaves and Tainos, for example), onthe other. Another is the African diaspora of people, plants, and knowledge that resultedfrom the colonial slave trade. African contributions to rice cultivation in the Carolinas orto materia medica in the Caribbean, though often unintended, nonetheless resulted fromEuropean colonization and the slave trade.11

What follows is a whirlwind tour of approaches, issues, questions, and areas ripe forfurther investigation. While this forum cannot begin to cover all times, places, and topicsimportant to colonial science, we offer it as spur to research into questions of how knowl-edge traveled and translated between cultures.

9 Related to this point, I was sorry not to find another woman to author an article for this forum; many wereinvited.

10 Schiebinger, Plants and Empire (cit. n. 4).11 Judith Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard Univ. Press, 2001).