Ciencia e Imperialismo

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Science and ImperialismAuthor(s): Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys

Source: Isis, Vol. 84, No. 1 (Mar., 1993), pp. 91-102Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society

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CRITIQUES& CONTENTIONS

S c i e n c e a n d Imperialism

By Paolo Palladino* and Michael Worboys**

N RECENT YEARS the historian of science Lewis Pyenson has shifted his atten-

tion from the history of the "new physics" in Wilhelmine Germany to that of

physicsand

astronomyin the

outpostsof nineteenth- and

early twentieth-centurycolonial powers, chiefly those of Germany, the Netherlands, and France.' It is verywelcome that an increasing number of historians are now studying the relationshipbetween science and imperialism, broadeningthe scope of the history of science from

its traditionalEuropean and American focus. It is even more welcome that such a

senior figure as Pyenson should have been so productive in this area, drawing at-

tention to the place of science in empires other than the British. But Pyenson's in-

terest in the relationship between science and imperialism does not seem to stem

from any concern about the problem of imperialism, of why and how one peopledominates another. He believes that we should pay greater attention to this subjectbecause it leads to a

verydifferent

appreciationof the

placeof science in

societythan is common among those he terms "the radical relativizers and their epigoni the

strong-programCimmerians, whom historiansof science do well to disregard."2This

critical attitude toward post-Mertonian social historians and sociologists of science,who are interested in showing how economic, political, and social considerations

shape the development of scientific knowledge and practice, is motivated by Pyen-son's desire to arrest what he sees as the steady disintegration of the program for

the history of science set forth earlier this century by William Osler, George Sarton,and Max Weber. Following in their footsteps, and in those of neoconservative cul-

tural critics like Allan Bloom and George Steiner, Pyenson wishes to draw attention

* Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, En-gland.

** History, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield S11 8UZ, and Wellcome Unit for the History of

Medicine, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, England.Earlier versions of this paper were discussed with Diana Barkan, Jonathan Harwood, Michael Os-

borne, Skuli Sigurdsson, and Steven Sturdy, whom we would like to thank for their valuable comments.The opinions expressed here are entirely our own.

Lewis Pyenson, Cultural Imperialism and Exact Sciences: German Expansion Overseas, 1900-1930

(New York: Lang, 1985); Pyenson, Empire of Reason: Exact Sciences in Indonesia, 1840-1940 (Leiden:Brill, 1989); and Pyenson, "Habits of Mind: Geophysics at Shanghai and Algiers, 1920-1940," His-torical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 1990, 21:161-196.

2 Lewis Pyenson, "Why Science May Serve Political Ends: Cultural Imperialism and the Mission to

Civilize," Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 1990, 13:69-81, on p. 78.

Isis, 1993, 84: 91-102

?1993 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.

0021-1753/93/8401-0005$01.00

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PAOLO PALLADINO AND MICHAEL WORBOYS

to the value of the scientific mode of inquiry as one of the highest intellectual

achievements of the Enlightenment.3

By chronicling the great "civilizing mission" of the "exact" sciences, Pyensonseeks to challenge the contextualist and relativist programs of social historians and

sociologists. He believes that if the dominant historical movement of the late nine-

teenth century and early twentieth century, namely "savage and ubiquitous" impe-rialism, can be shown to have had no influence on the physical and astronomicalsciences he studies, then those programsare worthless. From a number of case stud-ies-an approach he decries when it is adopted by others-Pyenson proceeds toconfirmhis doubts.4He finds, first, thatthe practicesin these "exact"sciences showed

no evidence of any "transmutation"produced by imperialism; and second, that onlythe "exact" sciences had any significant social and political impact on life in the

colonial dependencies, and this precisely because they were so patently free of any

imperialist taint.These bold claims, if they were as substantial as Pyenson wishes, would constitute

a significant attack on some major achievements in the history of science of recent

decades: the realization of the value of social historical and sociological approachesfor understandingthe development of science, and the increasing acceptance of the

history of science as part of the broader discipline of history. History of science isno longer only about the great and the good and their "contributions" to the canonsof what Pyenson regards as peculiarly Western forms of knowledge. It is now alsoabout institutions supportingscientific work and about the place of science in chang-ing social and economic structures and relations. It is also about how this social

context in turn can influence the formation and validation of scientific knowledge.5Besides being particularlyfruitful methodologically, the examination of these is-

sues has led historians of science to explore new areas like the relationship between

science and imperialism, and this has expanded and enriched our community of prac-titioners.6 As the development and place of science in the world outside of Europeand North America receive more attention, many more historians from Africa, Asia,

3 Lewis Pyenson, "What Is the Good of History of Science?" History of Science, 1989, 27:353-389,on p. 353; and "Why Science," p. 70. For Pyenson's alignment with Bloom and Steiner see his ref-erences to them in "What Is the Good?" p. 353; and in Pyenson, Neohumanism and the Persistence

of Pure Mathematics in Wilhelmine Germany (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, 150)

(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983), pp. 2, 6. Like Bloom and Steiner, Pyenson iscommitted to a strong form of intellectualism that verges on idealism; this intellectualist bias is clearlyreflected in his unification of the disparate resources called upon by social historians and sociologiststo explain the social origins of scientific discourse and practice under the term ideology.

4 Pyenson, "Why Science," pp. 78 "savage and ubiquitous" imperialism, and p. 70: "Case studies

(the term is redolent of hospital psychiatric wards) multiply, as unilingual young men and women withno historical or scientific training-and indeed, with no general humanistic background-set off to

inventory scientific achievement with unsympathetic detachment and clinical prose."5 For Pyenson's larger historical project see "What Is the Good?" See also the integration of medical

and social history in Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years,1830-1910 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987); and, for the influence of social context on the formationof scientific knowledge, Charles E. Rosenberg, "Towards an Ecology of Knowledge," in The Orga-nization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-1920, ed. Alexandra Oleson and John Voss (Balti-more: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 440-455. The increased scope of the discipline is evidentfrom the contents of mainstreamjournals such as Isis, the British Journal for the History of Science,and the Journal of the History of Biology during the last decade or so.

6 E.g., the conference entitled "Science and Empires" held in Paris in April 1990 drew speakers and

participantsfrom five continents; see Patrick Petitjean, Catherine Jami, and Anne-Marie Moulin, eds.,Science and Empires: Historical Studies about Scientific Development and European Expansion (BostonStudies in the Philosophy of Science, 136) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992).

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SCIENCE AND IMPERIALISM

and South America are encouraged to pay greater attention to science. Pyenson, in

many ways, has led this expansion of our intellectual horizons and has gained a justand considerable

reputation amongthe

emerging groupof historians of science in

the third world and those with an interest in the history of third world science. But

we think that Pyenson is offering them a model that will bring a returnto a narrowlydefined history of Europeanachievements and that will simply continue to subjugatethe history of, for example, Indonesia and Algeria to that of the West. It is based

on a very narrowrange of theoretical resources and is presented with a rhetoric that

will do nothing to make history of science more attractive to new scholars. Pyenson's

program is therefore both intellectually impoverished and politically insensitive. It

deserves close scrutiny.In this essay we first discuss Pyenson's fundamentaldistinction between the "ex-

act" and"descriptive"

sciences. After this we turn to thequestionable

notion of

imperialism built into his argument, and then discuss the problematic dependencymodel of diffusion that underpins it. Finally, we consider the relationship between

science and political power. In the conclusion we offer what we feel is a more

open, ecumenical, and exciting historical agenda for the study of science and im-

perialism.

THE "EXACT" SCIENCES

A greatnumberof historiansof science may appreciate Pyenson's overriding concern

to highlight the special significance of the scientific mode of inquiry for the devel-opment of contemporarycivilization, a concern that is shared even by some whom

Pyenson would probably want to dismiss as relativists.7 However, the case he artic-

ulates against the contextualist and relativist programfor the history of science is far

from convincing.

Pyenson's argumentabout the place of physics and astronomy in imperial expan-sion and the accompanying claims about the inadequacies of social historians' and

sociologists' appreciationsof the history of science rest on the traditional(and often

unquestioned) division of the sciences into "exact" and "descriptive."8 More pre-

cisely, Pyenson believes that as long as scientists are simply collecting data and there

is no disciplinary consensus as to how these data should be assembled or givenmeaning, it is to be expected that they should be orderedquite differently by different

groups and that preference for one or another ordering may be influenced by ideo-

logical-"external"-considerations. That a body of scientific knowledge in this

primitive "descriptive," 'inductive," or "qualitative" stage of life should be loaded

with such unscientific baggage is for Pyenson totally unsurprising. However, in his

view this baggage is displaced from scientific discourse as the empirical record be-

comes more complete and the theoretical framework in which it fits more articulate

7See, e.g., Yves Gingras and S. S. Schweber, "Constraints on Construction," Social Studies of

Science, 1986, 16:372-383; or Mary Hesse, "Socializing Epistemology," in Construction and Con-straint: The Shaping of Scientific Rationality, ed. ErnanMcMullin (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Univ.

Press, 1988), pp. 97-122.8

Pyenson's distinction between "exact" and "descriptive" sciences and views on their relationshipto one another are taken from T. S. Kuhn, "Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions in the De-

velopment of Physical Sciences," in The Essential Tension (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1977), pp.31-65.

93








and mathematically precise or "exact."9Pyenson goes on to argue therefore that casestudies showing how imperialism affected the development of any sciences other

than the "exact" ones cannot be used to support any general claims about the social

nature of scientific knowledge. A meaningful claim can emerge only from studiesof the impact of "external"factors on the "exact" sciences. In fact, the only suchclaim thatmeets with Pyenson's qualified approvalis Paul Forman's attemptto relatethe birth of the "new physics" to peculiarities of German "culture"during the earlytwentieth century. There are, of course, many other interesting and convincing stud-

ies that could be cited, and their number is ever increasing.10Pyenson's argument clearly echoes the historiographicaldiscussions that followed

the publication of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Today, how-

ever, growing numbers of historians of science view the distinctions between "in-ternal"and "external"factors, and between "exact" and "descriptive"sciences, that

were so crucial in the 1960s as specific to debates at that time and now superseded.1Pyenson wishes to swim against this current.

Pyenson's case is based, first, on a misrepresentationof the contextualist and rel-ativist program. He argues that if the general claims of this approach were sound,then one should be able to detect, for example, the "clear presence of imperialistideology and practice in publications of physics and astronomy which are producedin imperialist settings." He claims, however, that physics and astronomy were in-variant across the political, economic, and social gap separating the imperial me-

tropolis and its colonial periphery. Whether this is a valid empirical finding is amoot point, as Pyenson starts from the presumption that "because discourse in the

exact sciences is insular, activity in physics, astronomyandmathematics is especiallysuited as a cultural probe."12But the whole point of the contextualist and relativist

programis to take nothing about science as given or timeless. The aim instead is to

explore how boundariesbetween scientific and social considerations arose and have

changed historically. For example, no distinctions were made between the languageof politics and that of science in early seventeenth-century England, but now theseare very different.13 How did this happen? To answer this question one can begin,like Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, by studying rival theories of knowledge,

9 This picture of the development of science, as a body of knowledge initially "constrained" by"external" forces and progressively "liberated" from these bonds, is reminiscent of Joseph Ben-David's

"sociology of error." See Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist's Role in Society: A Comparative Study

(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971); and cf. BarryBarnes, Interests and the Growth of Knowl-

edge (London: Routledge, 1977). It also seems to be influenced by Imre Lakatos's distinction betweencontexts of discovery and justification: Imre Lakatos, "Falsification and the Methodology of ScientificResearch Programmes," in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Lakatos and Alan Musgrave(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 91-196.

10See Pyenson, "Why Science" (cit. n. 2), pp. 70, 77-78; and Paul Forman, "Weimar Culture,

Causality, and Quantum Theory: Adaptation by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a HostileIntellectual Environment, 1919-1929," Hist. Stud. Phys. Sci., 1971, 3:1-115. The state of the artreached by the "Cimmerians" a decade ago was reviewed and catalogued in Steven Shapin, "Historyof Science and Its Sociological Reconstructions," Hist. Sci., 1982, 20:157-211.

" T. S. Kuhn, The Structureof Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1970).The contemporary manifestation of these debates is discussed in Charles E. Rosenberg, "Woods orTrees? Ideas and Actors in the History of Science," Isis, 1988, 79:565-570.

12

Pyenson, "Why Science" (cit. n. 2), p. 81, n. 32; and Pyenson, "Pure Learning and PoliticalEconomy: Science and European Expansion in the Age of Imperialism," in New Trends in the History

of Science, ed. R. P. W. Visser et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), pp. 209-278, on p. 211.13Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experi-

mental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), p. 342.

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such as those championed by Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes, without assumingthat ultimately there is only one that can truly capture the order of nature. Instead,when one of these theories of knowledge becomes dominant, the contextualist and

relativist programseeks to explain how social processes and social forces determinethat outcome. Thus, moving to another country, we find that in late seventeenth-

and early eighteenth-century France a body of professional scholars enjoyed strong

royal patronagebecause by building a theoretical system that unified all naturalphe-nomena throughthe mathematicallanguage of Newtonian mechanics they lent quasi-

theological legitimacy to the efforts of the monarchy to undermine all independentcenters of political power. Here the "exact" sciences played an explicitly ideologicalrole.14 A century and a half later the position of the French state was quite different,but the intellectual orientations and the social organization of the "republic of sci-

ence" established earlier were too strongly entrenched to be reformed for the new

state: the scientists charged with the task of reform were so imbued with the cultureof this republic that they could not envision any alternative organization.15Not sur-

prisingly, the nineteenth-century"exact" sciences seem to some historians of science

to have been immune to social influences. But most social historians and sociologistsof science would rememberthat this relative immunity of physicists and astronomersto political pressure, a major theme in Pyenson's studies of the "exact" sciences in

Algiers, Batavia, and Shanghai, was the consequence of intellectual orientations andinstitutionalpositions established throughsocial negotiations under historical circum-stances that no longer obtained in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century so-

ciety. Colonial physicists' and astronomers' relative immunity to the mundane pol-

itics of the Age of Empire may simply have been a reflection of the social andpolitical position of metropolitan physics and astronomy; that immunity does not

stand as evidence against the social history or sociology of science.16

With regardto the second linchpin of Pyenson's argument, the distinction between

the "exact" and "descriptive" sciences, no one has yet defined the rites of passagefrom one to the other. Indeed, most historians seem to have followed Kuhn in re-

garding the distinction as specific to nineteenth-century physics, and perhaps inap-propriatefor other sciences at other times.17 Furthermore,that all forms of scientific

discourse should have in fact aimed, and may still aim, toward a mathematicallyexact discourse provides no strong evidence against the historicist and sociological

position. On the contrary, it has been argued that this tendency was socially deter-

14Roger Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1663-1803

(Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1971), pp. 35-57. See also David Lux, Patronage and Royal Sciencein Seventeenth-CenturyFrance: The Academie de Physique in Caen (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press,1989); and Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump.

15 See Robert Fox and George Weisz, "The Institutional Basis of French Science in the Nineteenth

Century," in The Organization of Science and Technology in France, 1808-1914, ed. Fox and Weisz

(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 1-28; and Eda Kranakis, "Social Determinants of

Engineering Practice: A Comparative View of France and America in the Nineteenth Century," Soc.Stud. Sci., 1989, 19:5-70.

16 See Wolfgang Van den Daele and Peter Weingart, "Resistance and Receptivity of Science to Ex-

ternal Direction: The Emergence of New Disciplines under the Impact of Science Policy," in Perspec-tives on the Emergence of Scientific Disciplines, ed. G6rard Lemaine et al. (Chicago: Aldine, 1976),pp. 247-275.

17 Kuhn's position on this is somewhat ambiguous, though we have taken what we believe to be themost appropriatehistorical reading.

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mined, and that the very language of logic and mathematics that underpins this tax-

onomy of the sciences can be shown to be socially constituted.'8

It seems to us that the boundaries between "internal" and "external"factors and

taxonomies of scientific disciplines should not be taken as timeless, fixed concepts,but should themselves become objects of inquiry. Why these objects should be de-

fined and institutionalized quite differently by different communities of scientists in

different social situations and in different periods of history is an exciting historical

question that, we believe, can be understood only by means of the sociological ob-

servations so despised by Pyenson. In fact, social historians and sociologists of sci-

ence have already put these analytical tools to work, in the very ways Pyenson rec-

ommends, in order to understand the place of science in modern "civilization."'9

ON THE NATURE OF IMPERIALISM

That Pyenson's characterizationof the different sciences is inadequateto supporthis

case against contextualists is only one of the problems besetting his discussion of

the relationshipbetween science and imperialism. Pyenson has acknowledged in one

comparative study that imperialism comes in different forms-sometimes cultural,sometimeseconomic, or political, or social, or scientific-and thatit comes in changingcombinations of any of these.20 No single meaning can be attached to imperialism.However, interest in diversity is for Pyenson more a matter of words than of his-

toriographical practice: apart from this single broad comparative study, he has fo-

cused exclusively on "cultural mperialism" and on the "civilizing mission." He fails

to explicate these terms, and others that are usually associated with imperialism,such as exploitation and domination, find no place in his history. There is no rec-

ognition of the links between military, economic, or technological dominance and

cultural hegemony; the "higher" motives of the "civilizing mission" are treated as

quite different from "baser"economic, political, military, and social ones. That the

"civilizing mission" was in fact often experienced in the same way as these other

forms of domination is also consistently ignored.2'More significantly, in the Age of Empire the relationshipsbetween colonial policy

and science, as Pyenson himself recognizes, were far from uniform across imperialboundaries. Not all colonies were the same, and neither were the scientific efforts

in them. There were greatdifferences between the Germanphysical and astronomical

endeavors in tiny Samoa and the large British scientific enterprise in the Indian sub-

continent or developments in a country like Australia. Pyenson's focus on the "ex-

act" sciences and "cultural mperialism" in places like Samoa means that he is study-

18 See Simon Schaffer, "The History and Geography of the Intellectual World: Whewell's Politics of

Language," in William Whewell: A Composite Portrait, ed. Menachem Fisch and Schaffer (Oxford:Clarendon, 1991), pp. 201-231; and David Bloor, "Wittgenstein and Mannheim on the Sociology of

Mathematics," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 1973, 4:173-191.19 Lewis Pyenson and Susan Sheets-Pyenson, "Comparative History of Science in an American Per-

spective," History of Science in America, 1985, 3(3):3-7; cf. Jonathan Harwood, "National Styles inScience: Genetics in Germany and the United States between the World Wars," Isis, 1987, 78:390-

414.20

Pyenson, "Pure Learning" (cit. n. 12).21 Another feature of Pyenson's work is that he looks for the impact of imperialism on individuals,

essentially a few scientists, mostly in small institutions. This biographical approach has been his trade-mark and is typical of a positivistic tradition that tends to marginalize social, economic, and institutionalfactors.

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ing an extremely small aspect of imperial science, as measured in terms of personnel,institutions, spending, or publications. This is an extremely unrepresentativebase

from which to offer a model of imperial strategies in science or major insights into

science and imperialism.22Most of the science practicedin and for Europeancolonieswas intended to supportand service economic and political objectives.23The British,

French, German, and other imperial powers established large scientific and technical

departmentsin the colonies, and most had major metropolitan institutions devoted

to research on colonial problems and the training of colonial scientific personnel. In

India, for example, there were universities, research institutes, scientific and tech-

nical services, and voluntary scientific organizations. Interestingly, educational pol-

icy in the early part of the nineteenth century concentratedon the moral and mental

education of Indian elites, and science was not a chosen vehicle for any "civilizingmission." Scientific andtechnical education was introducedthere laterin the century,

and then only to prepare technicians to assist their British masters in subjects ofimmediate economic value-surveying, botany, medicine, and geology.24

The biological, environmental, and medical sciences, in the British Empire as

elsewhere, were the main ones deployed in the effort to harness science to the im-

perial wagon because they were the most useful (as were those branchesof chemical,

physical, and astronomical research relevant to meteorology and surveying). Thus

the first, and until 1900 the most important, imperial scientific institutions were the

botanical gardens. They were set up to facilitate the collection, exchange, and cul-

tivation of economically valuable plants; later, often as the research stations of ag-riculturaldepartments, they housed researchon plant genetics, pathology, and phys-

iology, not to mention entomology. In medicine, the concern to control diseases suchas malaria and other tropical fevers, which acted as impediments to the settlement

and development of certain areas, led to research initiatives and the elaboration of

new etiological models of disease. In every case the imperial context was crucial to

the instigation of research, provided the resources used to solve the problem, and

shaped the form of the knowledge produced.25When it came to programsto improvehealth in the colonies, colonial scientists and administratorsoften found parasitesand vectors more convenient to work with than the indigenouspopulation.The choice

between strategies, and their supporting research programs, knowledge, and prac-

22 Lewis Pyenson, "Science and Imperialism," in Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed.

R. C. Olby et al. (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 920-933, esp. pp. 928-929. In this essay, supposedlya review of current work in the field, Pyenson makes a single remark about the "significant researchnow undertakenon the descriptive sciences," and then cites only Susan Sheets-Pyenson's work on colo-nial naturalhistory museums as an example (p. 922, n. 4).

23 See the survey of scientific institutions in Africa in the 1930s in E. B. Worthington, Science in

Africa: A Review of Scientific Research Relating to Tropical and SouthernAfrica (Oxford: Oxford Univ.

Press, 1938).24 Deepak Kumar, ed., Science and Empire: Essays in Indian Context, 1700-1947 (Delhi: Anamika

Prakashan, 1991); and Satpal Sangwan, Science, Technology, and Colonisation: An Indian Experience,1757-1857 (Delhi: Anamika Prakashan, 1991).

25 Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal BotanicalGardens (New York: Academic Press, 1979); G. B. Masefield, A History of the Colonial Agricultural

Service (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973); J. M. MacKenzie, Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester:Manchester Univ. Press, 1991); John Farley, Bilharzia: The History of Imperial Tropical Medicine

(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991); Maryinez Lyons, The Colonial Disease: A Social History

of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire, 1900-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992); andPaul Cranefield, Science and Empire: East Coast Fever in Rhodesia and the Transvaal (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991).

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tices, was dictated by tangible social considerations. Attention to this "ecology" of

knowledge is absent from Pyenson's work. For example, he contends that "even

colonial climatology is lacking in imperialist inspiration." But in actual fact, duringthe nineteenth century meteorological observatories served quite admirably the stra-

tegic aims of the FrenchEmpire: its settlement, the movement and health of imperial

agents, and the development of cash-crop agriculture.26An importantcomponent of imperialism that is almost absent from Pyenson's writ-

ing is the reaction of the local subject populations. Given his espoused interest in

the "civilizing mission" of science, this ought to have been a prime concern. One

of his few observations on this component shows little empathy with the "colonized":"If scientific knowledge had ceased to issue from a crenellated, fortress-like ob-

servatory in the Sahara, the men inside would have become indistinguishable from

foreign legionnaires; if geophysicists touring the Asian littoral by automobile had

failed to take significant measurements, they would have been little different fromcommercial spies." But most of the geoscientists in Asia and Africa were, in fact,the "commercial spies" of European companies or imperial governments. They were

looking for naturalresources that could be exploited, and their observations were no

less accurate or significant for that. Also, since the military supported geophysicalresearch, local populations could hardly make the distinction between scientist and

legionnaire. Pyenson does mention the destruction of an observatory in Madagascarand notes that indigenes "occasionally did see abstract knowledge as part of their

oppressor's baggage." But in this particularcase the observatory was not just seenas part of the baggage. Rather, it was the very agency that produced maps of the

region for the Frenchforces and enabled them to subdueand govern a subjectpeople.27The reason more observatories were not attacked is that there were so few of them.

At the time of Ghanaian independence colonial agricultural science was criticized

for failing to deal with a disease affecting the importantcocoa crop in any manner

satisfactory to the local farmers. The whole subject became highly politicized and

resulted in attempts to create an alternative science that would solve the problem in

ways that were not detrimentalto the producers.28The modem historical researcher

may be able to make fine distinctions about the nature of work in a particular in-

stitution and its functional neutrality, but historically, and from the perspective of a

subject people, military, political, commercial, and scientific colonial personnel were

all potential agents of domination.29This indigenous perspective is nowhere foundin Pyenson's work; all he cares for is the work of scientific missionaries exportingmetropolitan civilization to the colonial periphery.

26Pyenson, "Why Science" (cit. n. 2), p. 72; and Michael Osborne, Civilizing Nature: The Science

and Political Economy of the Exotic in Modern France (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, in press).On variations in perceptions of tropical climates and their relation to different colonial interests in the

Belgian Congo see Mary Douglas, "Environments at Risk," Times Literary Supplement, 30 Oct. 1970,pp. 1273-1275.

27 Pyenson, "Habits of Mind" (cit. n. 1), p. 196; and Pyenson, "Why Science," p. 72. The role ofthis observatory is discussed in G. Grandidier,Le Myre de Vilers, Duchhesne, Gallieni: Quarante anneesde l'histoire de

Madagascar,1880-1920 (Paris: Societe d'Editions

Geographiques,Maritimes et Colo-

niales, 1923). We thank Michael Osborne for this reference.28 W. E. F. Ward, A History of Ghana (London: George Allen Unwin, 1966), pp. 322-350. A fic-

tional account of this episode is given in T. M. Aluko, One Man, One Matchet (London: Heinemann,1964).

29Ashis Nandy, Science, Hegemony, and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity (Delhi: Oxford Univ.

Press, 1990).

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METROPOLIS AND PERIPHERY

Pyenson claims to show that unlike work in the "descriptive" biological and envi-

ronmental sciences, the endeavors in physics and astronomy that he has examinedwere not segregated into products of intellectual metropoles and peripheries. He be-lieves that the work of physicists and astronomers in the colonial outposts of the

French, German, and Dutch empires spoke to a spirit that transcended "the all toohuman conditions of life," a spirit that lifted them above the mundane problemsbesetting their social environment. The work was therefore valued equally with thatof their colleagues in Paris, Berlin, or Amsterdam, and they were fully integratedmembersof a single, universal citadel of exact sciences.30Pyenson claims that, thanksto this solidarity, research institutes and educational establishments for physicists andastronomers in imperial outposts acted as constant and indelible reminders of the

unity of the colonial periphery and its ties to the diverse imperial metropoles.We agree that to discuss the relationshipbetween, for example, physics in Sydneyand London in terms of the now-outmoded concept of metropolitan cores and colo-nial peripheriesis fruitless.3'This is one of the reasons to appreciate Pyenson's work.

However, his conclusion that the site of production is therefore irrelevant is unwar-

ranted. There is little support for it in the example of physics in India, where the-oretical studies dominated experimental ones for pragmatic reasons. Pyenson's as-

sumption of an extraordinarydegree of agreement between physical scientists in

London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Washington, and Tokyo is also questionable.Currentwork in the history of modern physics shows a great deal of cognitive dis-sonance-dissonance that may be the product of different cultural traditions-evenbetween metropolitancenters.32

More significantly, Pyenson denies the value of the "core and periphery"model

for explaining the development of the "exact" sciences, yet relies on it in a more

general and crucial way: he sees only a one-way traffic of culture and civility from

imperial metropolis to colonial periphery. This approach is contraryto the modern

understandingof imperialism, which considers the interactions between metropolesand peripheries and sees an active role for the cultures of subject populations.33If

we look at the colonies through these different eyes, we see that Western methods

and knowledge were not accepted passively, but were adapted and selectively ab-

sorbed in relation to existing traditions of naturalknowledge and religion and other

factors. For example, Indian researchersproduced scientific knowledge highly val-ued in the metropolis which was influenced by indigenous, Indian traditionsof nat-ural knowledge. They did not need to be civilized, and often they resented the as-

sumption that India needed "civilizing." This sentiment fed Indian nationalism and30

Pyenson, "Why Science" (cit. n. 2), p. 70.31 R. W. Home, "The Physical Sciences: String, Sealing Wax, and Self-Sufficiency," in The Com-

monwealthof Science: ANZAASand the Scientific Enterprise in Australia, 1888-1988, ed. Roy MacLeod

(Melbourne: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 147-165. See also Roy MacLeod, "On Visiting the 'Mov-

ing Metropolis': Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science," Historical Records of Australian

Science, 1982, 5(3):1-16; rpt. in Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg, eds., Scientific Colonialism:A Cross-Cultural Comparison (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), pp. 217-250.

32 Pyenson, "Why Science," pp. 80-81, n. 32. On modern physics see S. S. Schweber, "'The

Empiricist Temper Regnant': Theoretical Physics in the United States, 1920-1950," Hist. Stud. Phys.Biol. Sci., 1986, 17:55-98; J. W. Servos, "Mathematics and the Physical Sciences in America, 1880-

1930," Isis, 1986, 77:611-629; and Terry Shinn, "Failure or Success? Interpretationsof Twentieth-

Century French Physics," Hist. Stud. Phys. Biol. Sci., 1986, 16:353-369.33R. W. Home and Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, eds., International Science and National Scientific Iden-

tity: Australia between Britain and America (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991).

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underminedimperial unity; scientific meetings in the 1930s were an importantforumfor the discussion and advancement of Indianindependence. In this context we mightalso note European scientists practicing in India, such as Robert McCarrison and

AlbertHoward, whose researches were creatively shaped by the indigenous culture.34If we turn our attention toward the metropolis, we see that imperialism also af-

fected the development of metropolitan scientific institutions and knowledge. The

importance of empire to the development of the biological sciences in Britain andto specific disciplines like entomology is clear. As Michael Osborne has shown re-

cently, the same can be said for mid-nineteenth-century Parisian medical theory.Other studies have demonstrated the influence of imperialism on the physical sci-ences. In geology, Robert Stafford has shown the importance of empire to the workand ideas of Roderick Murchison and mid-Victorian geology in general. CrosbieSmith and M. Norton Wise have argued that the fundamental contributions of Wil-

liam Thomson and other British physicists and engineers to the development of elec-trodynamics were profoundly influenced by both utilitarian and imperial consider-ations.35In sum, we should take seriously Roy MacLeod's views on the inadequacyof the core-peripherymodel; his preferredview is capturedby the phrase "the mov-

ing metropolis," which highlights the importance of seeing scientific relations as

changing, variable, and polycentric. We should also follow the advice of Nathan

Reingold and MarcRothenberg, who, afterreviewing a number of studies of colonial

science, proposed that "to understand science fully requires an understandingof the

ecology of its environment."36

THE SCIENCES AND POLITICAL POWER

One last problem raised by Pyenson's thesis is how to evaluate the relationship be-tween different sciences and political power. As we have seen, Pyenson bases hisviews on this matter on the following reasoning. Physics and astronomy were, and

always will be, immune to ideological bias by reason of their advanced state ofintellectual development (not to mention their supposed worthlessness in the eyes of

government officials seeking to make science serve imperialism). By virtue of this

immunity to political contamination, these sciences were able to play a far more

powerful and lasting imperial role than the biological and environmental sciencesever did. What is the evidence for this conclusion? Presumably, to answer this ques-

tion one would need to know how to judge the effectiveness of the various linksbetween the different forms of imperialism and the various sciences. Pyenson pro-vides no criteria to guide us here, only an unelaborated notion of the "civilizingmission." While sometimes recognizing that the relationships between imperialismand science were quite varied in different imperial contexts, Pyenson mostly ignores

34 J. N. Sinha, "Science and the Indian National Congress," in Science and Empire, ed. Kumar (cit.n. 24), pp. 161-181; Robert McCarrison, Nutrition and National Health (London: Faber & Faber, 1944);and L. E. Howard, Sir Albert Howard in India (London: Faber & Faber, 1953).

35 Michael Worboys, "Science and British Colonial Imperialism, 1895-1940" (D. Phil. thesis, Univ.Sussex, 1979); Michael Osborne, "The Medicine of 'Hot Countries': Philology and EuropeanSettlementin Algeria, 1830-1870," unpublished manuscript;R. A. Stafford, The Empire of Science: Sir RoderickMurchison, Scientific Exploration, and VictorianImperialism(Cambridge:CambridgeUniv. Press, 1990);Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise, Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin (Cam-bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989); Bruce Hunt, "To Rule the Waves: Cable Telegraphy and the

Making of Maxwell's Equations," unpublished manuscript; and Hunt, "Michael Faraday, Cable Te-

legraphy, and the Rise of Field Theory," History of Technology, 1991, 13:1-19.36 MacLeod, "Visiting the 'Moving Metropolis"' (cit. n. 31); and Reingold and Rothenberg, eds.,

Scientific Colonialism (cit. n. 31), p. xii.

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the possibility that the different links may be due to culturally and historically spe-cific attitudes toward the properplace of science in society. Except in one program-matic paper, he simply glides over the possibility that the different social place of

science and scientists (not to mention the different justifications for supporting sci-ence articulatedin London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Washington, and Tokyo) re-

sulted in different links between science and the imperial vision being articulatedin

the various metropoles, regardless of the disciplines involved. Instead Pyensonchampions the view of science embedded in the rhetoric of science for empire that

prevailed in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany (and Prussia in

particular), a view that was strongly influenced by idealism and the related impor-tance attachedto mathematical studies for the pursuitof "truth."Eugene Cittadino'srecent work on late nineteenth-centuryGerman botanists' researches in Africa and

Asia, which were largely supported by the Berlin Academy of Sciences, suggests

however that the "descriptive" and scarcely mathematical endeavors of these bota-nists could serve to advance the cause of imperialism just as well as those of their

colleagues in the "exact" sciences.37 Much of Pyenson's work is therefore about the

peculiar place of certain sciences in German society and its implications for German

imperial expansion. Such work highlights only one among many possible roles of

science in such expansion.Since, as is suggested by Pyenson, much of the literatureon science and impe-

rialism has focused on the experience of the British Empire, a brief look at thecultural specificities of British science and their implications for the use of scienceto advance imperial goals will confirm the difficulties of Pyenson's model. There is

no evidence that physics or astronomy played any significant role in British imperialpolicy or colonial rule. In the British Empire influence (political power is too strong

a term) went to those scientists and sciences whose activities served or promised to

serve the direct economic and political goals of imperialism. It was such linkagesthat enabled major institutions like the Geological Survey of India, the schools of

tropicalmedicine in Liverpool and London, and the discipline of social anthropologyto grow.38In the 1920s the British scientific elite did participatein discussions about

the emerging concept of Commonwealth, though it was the scientific community as

a whole rather than any particular discipline that was used as a model for imperialfederation. However, the main thrust of British imperial policy after 1918 was to

create research and technical assistance agencies in individual territorieswhere theycould be guided by and best serve local economic and political interests. The relative

influence wielded by scientists in Britain and in Africa who advised on the ground-nuts scheme in Tanzania during the late 1940s is particularly illuminating.39Ad-

vances in methods for exploiting colonial resources brought metropolitan botanists,geologists, and medical researchers greater rewards and professional security than

37 See Pyenson, Neohumanism and the Persistence of Pure Mathematics (cit. n. 3), pp. 1-15, 109-

127; and Eugene Cittadino, Nature as the Laboratory: Darwinian Plant Ecology in the German Empire,1880-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990).

38 Deepak Kumar, "Economic Compulsions and the Geological Survey of India," Indian Journal ofthe History of Science, 1982, 17:289-300; and Michael Worboys, "Manson, Ross, and Colonial MedicalPolicy: Tropical Medicine in London and Liverpool, 1899-1900," in Disease, Medicine, and Empire,ed. Roy MacLeod and Milton Lewis (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 21-37.

39Worboys, "Science and British Colonial Imperialism" (cit. n. 35), pp. 244-294 (on discussions

about Commonwealth); A. H. Bunting, "Agricultural Research in the GroundnutsScheme, 1947-51,"Nature, 1951, 168:804-806; and Alan Wood, The GroundnutAffair (London: Bodley Head, 1950).

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the pursuit of the more esoteric goals of any physicists and astronomers. Viewedfrom this perspective, the relationship between the different sciences, "exact" and

"descriptive," and the politics of imperial control appears refractoryto any simple

explanation.

CONCLUSION

The histories of the different sciences in the race to build empires during the nine-

teenth and early twentieth centuries were undoubtedly very different. However, thesedifferences were not necessarily products of the greateror lesser "exactness" of dif-ferent disciplinary discourses. The contributionexpected of the different disciplinesin expanding imperial control during the Age of Empire was contingent on different

metropolitan cultural and social traditions and on divergent imperial policies and

structures.The impact of science in the colonial and postcolonial history of the dif-ferent indigenous societies was in turna productof the encounters of indigenous and

metropolitan cultures, encounters that are totally absent from Pyenson's vision ofwhat empire meant in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In place of the limited view offered by Pyenson, we want to offer historians in-

terested in the relationship between science and imperial domination an agenda thatis much wider and more rewarding. First, however, we want to emphasize that for

most of humanity, the history of science and imperialism is the history of science.Seen from this perspective, the whole subject takes on a far greater importance; itis throughthe growing number of historians of science from third world and former

colonial countries that the subject will be developed. Science and imperialism is fartoo importantto be regarded only as a test bed for the power of Western civilizationor the defense of arcane historiographical distinctions. Second, we would suggestthat the distinction between "exact" and "descriptive"sciences be abandonedin thiscontext as it has been elsewhere and thathistoriansstudy those sciences and scientific

enterprises that were most important for imperial power. Attention should also be

focused on the development of regional and national scientific communities and onthe reasons for their different places in international science. In the course of ourcomments we have indicated how the history of science can be placed squarely in

the political, economic, and social history of both the imperial powers and the colo-

nial possessions. This shift is importantbecause to understand the interactions be-tween science and empire we must pay greaterattention to the historical and cultural

heritage of both the imperialists and the indigenes, and to how the latter first inter-acted with and then reshaped various forms of knowledge. Our own understandingwill be enriched because our scientific heritage was not unaffected by this process.To follow Pyenson and do otherwise is to perpetuate in a very unwelcome and un-

justified manner the submission of the history of former colonial peoples and soci-eties to that of the West.

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Ciencia e Imperialismo