Science and Empire ─ Knowledge and Networks of Science Across the British Empire, 1800-1970

This new survey of scientific endeavor within the British Empire is the most wide-ranging yet published, examining the interconnections between science, the British Empire, and the emergence of a globalized world. It identifies and analyzes the web of scientific networks crisscrossing the British Empire through which scientific knowledge and authority were produced, circulated and legitimated, critically engaging with new ways of thinking about networked connections across space. It offers a comparative perspective that surveys a variety of scientific initiatives and circuits, including networks of agronomists, anatomists, botanists, foresters, geologists, marine biologists, oceanographers and physicists. As they chart the evolving practices, strategies, theoretical ideas and agendas among research scientists, technical advisers, imperial administrators, and native peoples in Africa, Australia, Britain, India and elsewhere; each chapter combines rigorous research with theoretical reflection based on the latest literature, as well as serving as a useful introduction to that literature.

BRETT M. BENNETT received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Texas at Austin, USA. Since January 2011, he has been a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. He specializes in the environmental and scientific histories of British imperialism in the Indian Ocean region in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. His publications include articles in Itinerario, Environment and History, the International Review of Social History, the Journal of the History of Biology, and the British Scholar Journal.

JOSEPH M. HODGE is an Associate Professor of Modern British and British Imperial History and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at West Virginia University in Morgantown, WV, USA. He is author of Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism, published in 2007 by Ohio University Press, and he has also published several articles in leading historical journals including the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, the Journal of Southern African Studies, Agricultural History, and the Journal of Modern European History.