Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp.

373388, 2009

Putting knowledge in its place: science,

colonialism, and the postcolonial
SUMAN SETH

This special issue of Postcolonial Studies is divided into two parts. In the first,
three leading scholars of postcolonial science studies*a philosopher, an
anthropologist, and an historian (although each wears several hats)*have
been asked to contribute short, programmatic essays on a theme of their
choosing, focusing less on providing a state of the field and more on
directions for future research and analysis. In the second part, three historians
have offered papers on topics of particular current interest: the history of
cartography and colonialism; botany and empire; and the history of method
outside Europe. In the essay below, I offer an overview of secondary
scholarship on, in turn, colonialism and science, and postcolonial technoscience, before turning to a discussion of the articles making up the issue.
The idea that science and technology were among the gifts that Western
imperial powers brought to their colonies was an integral part of the
discourse of the civilizing mission, one vaunted by both proponents and
critics of the methods of colonialism.1 The political unity of India, more
consolidated, and extending further than it ever did under the Great Moguls,
wrote Karl Marx in 1853, was the first condition of its regeneration. That
unity, imposed by the British sword, will now be strengthened and
perpetuated by the electric telegraph. The fruits of science, that is, could
achieve by peaceful means what had previously only been possible through
violence. Elites within colonized nations, while rejecting the notion that
science was imported from the West, often shared such sentiments about
sciences positive and transformative powers, speaking a language of
modernity that*however uneasily*allied them with imperialist officials.2
Decolonization movements, however, quickly began to call into question any
vision of science as a positive enterprise that merely accompanied*and did
not aid or support*a rapacious colonialism. In 1959, Frantz Fanons essay
on Medicine and Colonialism made clear to French audiences that the
complicity of doctors with state-sanctioned barbarism was not limited to the
National Socialist atrocities punished in the Nuremberg trials a dozen years
earlier. Medical officials and psychologists played an integral role in the
oppressive and interrogative practices of a dying colonialism.3 Soon
thereafter, Phillip Curtins works on European images of Africa described
the medical breakthroughs, particularly with regard to quinine prophylaxis,
that had made possible the wide-spread colonisation of the continents
interior.4 Medicine, in Daniel Headricks later terminology, was one of the
ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/09/04037316 # 2009 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies
DOI: 10.1080/13688790903350633

SUMAN SETH

most important tools of empire, to be counted along with the power of

steamships and machine guns.5
The civilising mission, of course, had fallen into spectacular disfavour by
the last quarter of the twentieth century. Michael Adas, in his Machines as the
Measure of Men, was forced to work hard to recover the ideology of the
mission as a legitimate topic of historical inquiry: as more, that is, than mere
cynicism or instrumentalism, covering the real economic, military and
political goals of European powers.6 In the wake of the social turn in the
history of science, scholars of science and colonialism have emphasised not
only the discursive or ideological power of science, but also the ways in which
Western scientific knowledge has been co-constituted with colonialism.7 As
the editors of a recent collection of studies on colonial botany have noted,
The expanding science of plants depended on access to ever farther-flung
regions of the globe; at the same time, colonial profits depended largely on
natural historical exploration and the precise identification and effective
cultivation of profitable plans.8 Londa Schiebinger, linking early modern
efforts to current practices, has termed such botanical projects colonial
bioprospecting.9 Harold J. Cook, in a detailed analysis of medicine and
natural history during the Dutch golden age, has argued that one should see
commercial enterprises in the Dutch empire (the worlds largest by the midseventeenth century)*rather than religion and particularly the Reformation*as the key resources for the scientific revolution.10 Colonial
holdings were crucial for the development of astronomy (British astronomers
quipping that theirs was an empire upon which the sun never rose), while
astronomical observatories were absolutely necessary components of the
grand projects of colonial cartography.11 Tropical medicine may provide the
most obvious example of a field developed as a direct result of colonial
endeavours.12 Peder Anker has argued that we should see ecology as an
imperial science as well, founded as it was as a means of aiding Danish
control of foreign environments and then broadened by British and South
African scholars to meet the British Empires environmental problems and
social needs.13 Helen Tilley has suggested that such sciences of empire, while
intended to support and further metropolitan colonial ideologies, could also
prove subversive of them.14 Historians of physics have noted that attempts to
understand the action of the telegraph were essential for the development of
modern electrodynamic theory.15 Undersea telegraph wires, at the same time,
linked Britain to its imperial holdings while being, in themselves, products of
such linkages, insulated using a product derived from the sap of South-East
Asian trees.16 One cannot imagine Charles Darwins work being possible
without his access to plant and animal specimens derived from several
European empires.17 The racialised practices of colonial administration in the
last half of the nineteenth century, in turn, drew heavily on the content and
status of Darwinian biology and natural history. The history of almost all
modern science, it has become clear, must be understood as science in a
colonial context.18
The examples above have been chosen in large part to emphasise the roots
of contemporary science in the projects and practices of colonialism. As
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important to the overall project of excavating the relationships between

science and colonialism, however, have been studies of what were, for some
time, considered pseudo-sciences*unworthy of investigation within the
history of science except as pathologies because of their obvious bias in
service of social concerns: fields including race science, anthropometry,
craniometry, Lombrosian criminology and so on. As Nancy Stepan wrote in a
now-classic work on The Idea of Race in Science,
The scientists who gave scientific racism its credibility and respectability were
often first-rate scientists struggling to understand what appeared to them to be
deeply puzzling problems of biology and human society. To dismiss their work as
merely pseudoscientific would mean missing an opportunity to explore something important about the nature of scientific inquiry itself.19

Work following Stepans account and Stephen Goulds more North American-focused The Mismeasure of Man, has offered increasingly nuanced
pictures of the multiple roles that scientific understandings of race played
within colonial contexts. Students of South Asian history, in particular, have
followed George Stocking in emphasising the significance of philology, rather
than or in addition to biology, as a crucial science of race in the first half of
the nineteenth century*effectively until the late 1850s, when the Sepoy
Rebellion (1857) fundamentally altered British attitudes towards their Indian
colony, and Darwins Origin of Species (1859) offered a coherent and
scientifically respectable way to replace monogenetic accounts of human
physical difference with effectively polygenetic ones.20 Those working on the
history of medicine, meanwhile, have offered often dramatically different
taxonomies and chronologies for the history of race compared with their
colleagues in the history of science.21 Indeed, Warwick Anderson, studying
what he has termed the midlevel mundane theorizing that commonly occurs
when one does science or practices medicine in a society a long way from
Europe, has argued that the conceptual foundations of metropolitan
biologist discourse on race were largely irrelevant to racialist thinking in
far-flung peripheries. It seems to me, he has written, that in the Australian
context [concepts like monogenism, polygenism, social Darwinism, and
eugenics] may be malapropisms that distract us from working out how racial
theory*with whiteness as its central figure*was produced and transacted
among colonial scientists and ordinary doctors.22
In thus recovering race-science as once-objective science, such studies have
provided important resources for those wishing to deconstruct contemporary
scientific projects*one thinks automatically of the human genome diversity
project and attempts to market racially-specific pharmaceutical products*
which are reinstituting race as a central popular and technical concept in the
biological and medical sciences.23 At the same time, for the historian, they
have emphasised the constitutive role of science and medicine for colonialism:
constitutive in the sense that they functioned not merely as a tool for a
project already imagined, but as a means of conceptualising and bringing into
being the colonial project itself.
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The complement, of course, to a taxonomic interest in describing the

natures of colonial subjects were attempts to control and mould colonial
subjectivities.24 Informed by Michel Foucaults works on discipline, medicine,
and biopower, a number of scholars have explored the role of public health
and hygiene projects in colonizing the body, emphasising the corporeality of
the quotidian practices of colonialism. Avoiding sometimes monolithic
invocations of state power and medicine, Mark Harrison, importantly,
has sought to demonstrate specific connections between heterogeneous
medical theories and often conflicting conceptions of the best means of
achieving political control within the colonies. The debate over choleras
aetiology, for example, was simultaneously a debate over the locus of colonial
administrative power. If cholera were caused by local environmental
conditions, then only those officials familiar with India could hope to deal
with it. Were the disease caused by bacterial pathogens, on the other hand,
then these could be studied in the metropole, with measures appropriate for
all colonies determined by centrally-located officials. [C]holera theory and
the very question of locality lay at the heart of debates about how to govern
India and about the nature of Imperial responsibilities.25 Warwick Andersons studies of the colonial Philippines and Ruth Rogaskis analysis of treatyport Tianjin provide other examples of the ways in which the problems of
medical knowledge were the problems of colonial order.26
The relationship between technoscientific knowledge and post-colonial
orders has been the subject of increasing*if, until recently, rather sporadic*
discussion in science and technology studies (STS) in the last two decades.
Although Sandra Harding, among others, has been drawing the attention of
mainstream STS to the existence of postcolonial science studies since the
early 1990s, in 1998 Warwick Anderson could still bemoan the absence of a
post-colonial history of medicine. Since then, three special issues of journals
in the field have been dedicated to postcolonial science and technology studies
and the latest edition of The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies now
includes an entry, penned by Anderson and Vincanne Adams, on Postcolonial Studies of Technoscience.27 As in other areas of research, the uses of
the term postcolonial are disparate, but certain obvious commonalities
stand out. All the works in the field are sceptical of the rationalising,
homogenising, and universalising assumptions of nave scientism and its
apotheosis in modernisation theory. David Turnbull has suggested that the
projects of re-thinking modern forms of knowledge need not only to recognise
modernitys messy, contingent, unplanned and arational character, but even
to celebrate it.28 Helen Verran, similarly, sees political opportunity in
conflicts between epistemes that are not reducible to questions of the success
or failure of diffusionary scientific knowledge. Describing the epistemic
oppositions between Yolngu Aboriginal understandings of worrk and
scientific conceptions of prescribed burning, Verran invokes the notion of
a postcolonial moment. Elaborating a postcolonial moment, she writes,
involves both making separations, and connecting by identifying sameness.
But sameness here is not a dominating universalizing. On the contrary,
sameness in a postcolonial moment enables difference to be collectively
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enacted.29 As Verrans work makes clear, a second element of postcolonial

science studies is its rejection of incommensurability as a means of understanding epistemic difference and, in general, the eschewal*as analytic rather
than actors categories*of the binaries that so profoundly structured colonial
discourse.
In problematising the completeness of such colonial dichotomising, science
studies scholars have found particularly useful Homi Bhabhas notion of the
inevitable failure of colonial mimicry and the hybrid subjectivities to which
such failures give rise.30 As part of the civilising mission, science played two
contradictory roles in colonial discourse, at once making clear to the natives
the kind of knowledge that they lacked (which omission justified colonialism
itself), and holding out the hope that such knowledge could be theirs. The
hope, for the British, was that the staging of science in exhibitions and
museums would force an acknowledgement from marvelling natives of the
justness of British rule. And yet, such acknowledgement could only come
from one capable of reason already. Seeking from Indians the recognition
of Western knowledges authority but unwilling to acknowledge them as
knowing subjects, Gyan Prakash has argued, the British had to regard
Indians as always less than adequate, always lacking some key attribute. This
justified colonial dominance, but it also conceded that the colonial project
would never achieve complete success, the Indians would remain unconquerable in the last instance.31 At the interstices of an implacable opposition
between Western science and native unreason, then, was produced a liminal,
hybrid subject. As natives were denied the status of knowing subjects in terms
of scientific knowledge, colonial discourse became filled with the utterances
of subjects knowing little concrete, but speaking much, spreading rumours
and adapting universal knowledge to the particularist demands of indigenous
religion. It was thus that second sight, Hindu reverence, and subaltern
rumours emerged as forms in which Indians found a place as knowing
subjects. Even if overdetermined to be less than appropriate, the native
response could not be ignored.32 For Akhil Gupta, development discourse*
Orientalism transformed into a science for action in the contemporary
world33*provides the location for a different kind of destabilising mimicry,
one rooted in the sanitised historicism that provides the logic for modernisation projects. Representations of the (Wests) past are crucial to development
discourse, for they prove that progress has, in fact, taken place. The
developed West, that is, has been where underdeveloped nations are now
and hence is the source of information on how to proceed to a developed
future. That past, however, is almost always put forward as a depoliticised
one, presented in the measured tones of the stylized facts of economic
abstraction. Yet the very political present of developments current effects
serves to open up for inspection the violence that made the Wests
development possible at all.
Faced with the violence of its effects in the Third World, development discourse
forces the West to confront a version of its own childhood in which colonial

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violence, ecological destruction, the genocide of native peoples and the

repression and displacement of its poor otherwise find no place.34

Unsurprisingly, given (1) the centrality of technical expertise to broad-scale

efforts at state improvement in the twentieth century, and (2) the repeated
failure of such efforts, development projects have drawn considerable
attention from those wishing to unpack and critique the discourses and
practices of modern science, technology, and medicine.35 Conflicts or
disagreements between local or indigenous forms of knowledge and
Western, global, or universal science*particularly those where universal
science seems at best ineffective and at worst profoundly destructive*seem
tailor-made for the kinds of symmetrical controversy analysis that promote
the opening up of black-boxed concepts.36 Yet, perhaps in part as a reaction
to invocations of near-intractable cultural difference as an explanation for
failure by development planners themselves, anthropologists (in particular)
have evinced scepticism towards the very idea of an authentic, systemic, and
autonomous indigenous knowledge as something to be opposed to a
singular scientific knowledge. Local knowledge cannot be simplistically
equated with indigenous knowledge. When we use the term local to signal
the distinctiveness of a context, Adams and Stacy Leigh Pigg have argued
recently, it is crucial to remember that locality is socially and historically
produced in and through a dynamic of interaction. The local is not a space
where indigenous sensibilities reside in any simple sense[.]37 The production
of locality in and through a dynamic of interaction may, in fact, be viewed as
a leitmotif in recent work on global technoscience. Bioprospecting in Mexico,
Cori Hayden has argued, is not merely a channel along which travel local
knowledge, biodiversity, and community or even corporate interests. Rather,
these contracts are implicated in producing, invoking, and giving shape to
these subjects, objects, and interests in the first place.38 Localities, Kapil Raj
notes in one of the historical works to emphasise the point, constantly
reinvent themselves through grounding (that is, appropriating and reconfiguring) objects, skills, ideas, and practices that circulate both within narrow
regional or transcontinental*and indeed global*spaces.39 In Guptas
account, the knowledge of Alipur farmers is hybrid, invoking both humoural
and scientific modes of explanation for the weakness or strength of soil.
Was there then, he asks, any good reason to regard discourses of
development as external and indigenous knowledges of agronomy as
internal to the lives of the inhabitants of Alipur?40 Pigg, looking at
traditional medicine in Nepal, has similarly noted that one cannot analyse
local attitudes towards development without realising the ways in which
such development has already shaped identity in the underdeveloped
world.41 Indeed, as Christophe Bonneuil has shown, we need to pay attention
to the ways in which (techno-)scientific knowledge and its ways of ordering
the world may be both implicated and imbricated in the very indigenous
epistemologies to which it is commonly juxtaposed.42 Where those who have
followed Bhabha, in other words, have seen hybridity as something emergent
from the necessary failures of colonial dichotomies, more recent works see
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hybridity as precedent to (or, at least, coeval with) such dichotomies. New

hybrids may be the result of novel colonial and postcolonial binaries, but hybridity itself is nothing new.43
One should be clear on the novel political stakes currently involved in the
invocation of categories of local or indigenous knowledge. For some time,
demonstrating the existence and systematicity of such knowledge functioned
as an important form of critique and activism in its own right. Describing his
service as an expert witness for the Squaxin Island Tribe in Washington State
in 1999, ethnobotanist Eugene Hull made the point explicitly: ethnobotanical testimony with rare exceptions is supportive of native claims. This is by
virtue of the fact that indigenous knowledge is, as ethnobiologists have
shown, essentially scientific.44 Yet it is no longer clear that such relativising
moves are the weapons of the weak. In an analysis of debates around the
placement of a waste incinerator in present-day Hong Kong, Timothy Choy
has noted that a saturation of Hong Kongs political arenas with both
universalizing and nativizing discourses yields a situation in which, to be
credible, expertise must bear universalizing and particularizing marks
simultaneously.45 The regions Environmental Protection Department invokes the importance of local knowledge while rejecting Greenpeaces overly
US-based analysis at the same time that it brings in an international
consultant to speak to locally appropriate issues. Expertise, Choy suggests,
must meet the postcolonial requirement of local appropriateness. Science does
not leave the building; it simply has to demonstrate that it has particular reasons
to stay. A critical anthropology of expertise, thus, cannot rest on arguments
about the situatedness of scientific claims*not because such arguments are too
relativist to be productive but, rather, because the space of that critique is already
occupied by the state.

Ethnobotanists in Mexico, Hayden has shown, have sought actively to

disrupt the transnational neoliberal model of returns from bioprospecting,
targeted at local and indigenous communities who can be enrolled as
stakeholders and stewards of biodiversity.
By casting their net across regional commercial networks instead of territorialized communities as their first point of entry, Bye and his research team [at
the National Autonomous University of Mexico] suggest that the kind of
exchange envisioned by U.S. Government officials, especially, is poorly matched
to the ways medicinal plants move discursively and materially through Mexico.
In its stead, they propose deliberately and dramatically re-setting the stage:
collecting plants in public, while negotiating benefit-sharing contracts through
alliances built on anything but unique claims to authorship/ownership.46

New considerations of locality, it should be clear, have emerged from novel

(if not, historians have insisted, unprecedented) conditions of (apparent)
globality. Often invoked as the cause for an earth-flattening globalisation,
technoscience and medicine in fact serve as exemplary probes into the new
forms of (unequal) power-knowledge co-produced with the deregulation of
markets, the rise of Big Pharma,47 the off-shoring and out-sourcing of both
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labour and life,48 neo-liberal forms of development aid, and international

crises in health and the environment.49 Hybridity remains a buzzword, and
the majority of scholars have recognised that not all hybrid knowledges are
made equal. A few works, however, have turned to the more illuminating
question of what may be termed differential hybridity: the ways in which the
same hybrid knowledge is accorded different values in different contexts.
Vincanne Adams, for example, has discussed efforts by traditional Tibetan
healers to participate in the global trade in pharmaceuticals by demonstrating
the efficacy of local methods of healing under the conditions of randomised
controlled testing. In successful cases*where Tibetan methods pass the
test*one may easily speak of the production of a hybrid form of knowledge.
This knowledge, however, is not available to all.50 While passing the test
allows biomedical practitioners within the United States to prescribe the
medicine, Tibetan healers within the United States may be punished for doing
so, for practising medicine without a licence. That knowledge is hybrid, in
others words, may be considerably less important than how such hybridity is
enacted and regulated in transnational fields; fields in which locality both
comes with and commands a price.
Warwick Andersons account of contemporary connections between
Science Studies and Postcolonial Theory is rather more subdued than the
reading I have offered above. Although Andersons work on bridging the two
areas has provided (and continues to provide) powerful models for both
historians and anthropologists of science, his own sense is that explicitly
postcolonial approaches to science, technology, and medicine have declined
in recent years, replaced by fetishistic and euphoric invocations of globalisation. One might have expected postcolonial theory to have been most useful
in tracking twenty-first-century transnational flows of technoscientific
artifacts, ideas, and subjects and their appropriations, resistances, transformations, and contestations as they travel over the uneven terrain that
colonialism has worked. Instead, for Anderson, studies of science and
globalisation have almost forgotten the colonial. The possibility of seeing
colonial history as an immanent part of contemporary subjectivities has been
disallowed by accounts that overemphasise globality as a new world order, the
result of a paradigm shift that has left the past incommensurable with the
present.
Critical*not merely reconciliatory*postcolonial analyses, he suggests, are
both desirable and possible, but will require a substantial modification to
widely-accepted elements in the toolbox of science studies. The ever-popular
Actor Network Theory (ANT) will require decolonisation and demasculinisation; globality will have to be understood as a locally situated
production; and locality itself will require a more nuanced deployment,
one aware of the ways in which dislocation, transformation, and resistance,
hybridity and partial purification render the quest for a single location for
knowledge production a chimera. For my part, I see the present volume as a
(modest) attempt at an answer for a question Anderson had posed in earlier
programmatic statements concerning postcolonial technoscience, namely:
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what an infusion of materialist science studies might do for postcolonial

theory?
In 1992, Sandra Harding published an essay entitled After Eurocentrism:
Challenges for the Philosophy of Science.51 Foremost among those challenges, she suggested (in one of the first uses of the phrase), was postcolonial
science studies, a field that included both those analysts critical of Western
sciences claims to universality, and arguably more radical commentators who
proposed the further development of alternative epistemologies to make
them more effective for contemporary purposes.52 The voices of a number of
these critics were made familiar to North American Science Studies scholars
through Hardings 1993 collection, The Racial Economy of Science.53 Her
essay here continues a theme explored in a number of her books since the
early 1990s, the idea that feminist and postcolonial theories are strongly
complementary ways of understanding the development and utilisation of
science and technology. Despite this complementarity, however, and in spite
of the existence of a number of specific areas in which the two fields come
together, the two modes of analysis remain largely distinct. If one wishes for a
more systematic engagement between the fields, Harding argues, each will
have to engage with the others strange logic of research: postcolonial
scholars will have to see gender as a useful category of analysis for all areas of
study, not merely those concerned with womens issues; feminist theorists, in
turn, will need to acknowledge and work within frameworks in which
modern Western science is synonymous neither with all science nor with all
forms of modernity.
Harding seems confident that such a project is possible, but it is worth
noting the logic behind such optimism. For, as she discusses, there are many
kinds of both feminism and postcolonialism and not all are equally
reconcilable. The forms of critique within science studies that she takes as
most promising are each those most sympathetic to particular forms of
modern liberal democracy. Describing the strengths of contemporary work
on gender and science in Sciences from Below (2008), she has argued that,
these feminist science accounts do not reject modernity. They have had an
ambivalent relation to the field of postmodernism. In significant ways they are
fully part of the modern valuing of criticism, the growth of knowledge, and more
perfect sciences. They want expanded democratic principles and practices, not
even more desiccated ones.54

In her essay here, she argues that at least one form of postcolonial theory
(that including the works of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Walter Mignolo) is
much like the prevailing feminist one since it
clearly recognizes that, on the one hand, one cannot simply abandon modern
Western sciences and their philosophies. On the other hand, these can be
radically transformed through integration with regional legacies so as to enable
the flourishing of a multiplicity of knowledge traditions and the societies that
depend upon them.

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To produce a science studies that is simultaneously feminist and postcolonial,

one may have to envision multiple modernities capable of rehabilitating the
promise that a unitary modernity once had.
Richard Rottenburgs essay seeks to critique and nuance a recent approach
to the study of relations between politics, medicine, and technoscience in
postcolonial Africa; an approach he terms the therapeutic domination
hypothesis. The hypothesis, in Rottenburgs hands, seeks to describe and
analyse the sociopolitical effects of the confluence of four currents of
biopolitical life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: a
change in the objects and functions of neoliberal governance; the rise of socalled dysfunctional states on the African continent and the internal forms
of violent conflict that have been caused by and have caused their so-called
failure; the globality of the AIDS pandemic and the modes of treatment
developed to allow the continuance of life with the disease; and the worldwide success of universalist discourses of human rights, now with specific foci
on public health and welfare.
The therapeutic domination hypothesis involves two related claims. First,
that the waves of population-level disasters that have affected the African
continent have been used by Western powers to declare states of emergency
and (following Agamben) exception related to questions of public health,
and, second, that such assumed states of exception have licensed new forms of
experimentation and experimentality that mainly benefit the same powers of
the West and global capital. According to the hypothesis, where once states
first collected data and then designed and implemented solutions to
problems, now states of emergency seem to require urgent intervention in
the absence of information, the very question of the presumed efficacy of such
intervention only determinable in the aftermath of its imposition. That there
is at least something to the hypothesis may be discerned in the existence of
new modes of governmentality connected to public health in Africa, shifts in
spatial delimitation from nations to therapeutic territories and*even within
such territories*the eschewal of any plan for uniform coverage in favour of
an archipelagic distribution of aid.
However tempting such a model appears to be, Rottenburg suggests that it
has been overdrawn. We should be sceptical in imagining the telos of
modernity to lie in the state of exception and the horrors it may license. It
is one thing, he notes, to realize that the concentration camp is not a
regression into barbarism but an aspect of modernity, and another thing to
declare the camp to be the modern predicament. As importantly, we should be
rather more careful in our descriptions of what a normal state of
experimentality may be, such that exceptional experimentalism functions
as its inverse. A vast array of literature in science and technology studies speaks
against the thesis that normal modes of experimental action involve
knowledge as a precedent to practice or action*that the production of
knowledge can be considered separate from its implementation or performance. What may be most chilling about a new experimentalist order of
therapeutic domination may not be that it has been allowed by a state of
exception, but that such states have not, in fact, been necessary. Archipelagic,
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experimental, therapeutic territories may, in fact, follow from quotidian,

rather than exceptional, modes of technoscientific action.
Daniela Bleichmars essay on botany and visual culture during the Spanish
enlightenment joins a significant body of work that has considered both the
importance of natural history to the economic aims of imperialism and
the cultural and intellectual importance of imperialism to the development
of natural history. Although economic botany was of deep interest to her
protagonist, Jose Celestino Mutis, economic motives are not the centre-piece
of Bleichmars analysis of the hundreds of images produced by Mutis and his
artistic team. Instead, her emphasis is on re-constructing the visual culture
in which such images were so painstakingly produced. Eschewing any simple
dichotomy between observation and representation, Bleichmar demonstrates
that images played multiple roles within Spains visible empire. Botanical
illustrations helped to discipline the eye of both naturalists and artists; they
served as entry point, instrument, and result of natural historical investigation; they were essential within a culture of gift-exchange and patronage; and
they provided a tool with which to think. If an imperial eye brought certain
objects into sharp focus, however, Bleichmar argues that it did so by a process
of selective blindness. Images preserved the impermanent and transported
the distant, but they did so by excising precisely what made the objects of
illustration so important: the place of their production. The indigenous
(people, plants, soil) were removed even as indigeneity itself*captured on the
page*became a global commodity.
The subject of Charlotte Furths essay, the history of the case method in
China, may be considered doubly provincialised. On the one hand, the case
method has tended to come a poor third in discussions of the essence of
the scientific method, sharing neither in the deductivism of geometry nor in
the inductivism once assumed to govern experimental practice. On the other
hand, although China*as a result of the efforts of Joseph Needham, his
collaborators, and students*is perhaps the most deeply and broadly studied
non-Western nation within North American history of science, it has taken
time for the field to move past Needhams shaping of its central questions.55
The Grand Titration made a powerful case for the inclusion of the nonWestern world in the (pre-)history of modern science. No longer could the
history of ancient science be written solely in terms of the contributions of
classical Greece, all other forms of knowledge reduced to mere technology.
At the same time, however, Needham was insistent on the special character of
modern science as a universal and objective form of knowledge, one that was
born in the European Renaissance and was now the common property of all.
The so-called Needham question, as a result, was fundamentally negative:
why had China failed to undergo a scientific revolution? What were the
causes, in other words, of Chinas epistemic provincialisation, its failure to
achieve modernity?
Contemporary historical and anthropological work on Chinese science has
tended to abandon this question as unhelpful, working instead on scientific
thought On Their Own Terms, as Benjamin Elman phrased it.56 As with
Furths essay, the emphasis has been on a detailed contextualisation of both
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theory and practice. The aim is not the re-construction of a Chinese epistemic
system*rigid, monolithic, and essentialist*to be opposed to similarly fixed
modes of knowing within Europe, but an investigation of the multiple
meanings of method as it is differentially employed in fields as widely
dispersed as those of medicine, the law, theology, and civil service. The case of
the Chinese case is particularly well-chosen for a rejection of essentialism.
Thinking with cases, Furth notes, argues for a multiplicity of field-dependent
methods as well as of practical techniques*epistemological pluralism, if you
will. Song dynasty legal cases are where the work of interpretation in
Chinese law can be seen. In them lie traces, not only of epistemic
commitments, but also of the practices of a legal community, including its
assumptions about the ground of interpretation itself. For scholars working
during the upheavals of the late-Ming, the form of the case encouraged a
different way of philosophizing, one that allowed debate among those who
could rely on no transcendent or unquestioned authority of sagely transmission to fall back on.
The notion of epistemological (and even ontological) pluralism lies, of
course, at the heart of the project of provincialising Europe: the project of
documenting how*through what historical process*its reason, which
was not always self-evident to everyone, has been made to look obvious far
beyond the ground where it originated.57 Chakrabartys method, of course, is
case-based. It is one that requires the particularities of so-called minority
histories to be not only not dismissed as deviations from a European
standard, but to trouble the foundations and the particularities of that
standard. European universalism, in other words, must be recovered as a case.
For this to happen fully, it may well be that we need to historicise not only the
notions and methods of the universal, but those of the particular as well.
Acknowledgements
It is a pleasure to thank the contributors to this volume for their enthusiasm, insight, and
patience during its assembly. Aminda Smiths editorial and intellectual support has been
invaluable. For their comments on drafts of this introduction, I am indebted to Warwick
Anderson, Sandra Harding, Richard Rottenburg, Sanjay Seth, and Vanita Seth. In dealing
with an issue that did not always run to schedule, David Martin and Catherine Raw have been
models of equanimity and grace. Preliminary research for this essay was conducted at the
Cornell Society for the Humanities.

Notes
1

Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western
Dominance, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002, pp 6879.
Frantz Fanon, Medicine and Colonialism, in A Dying Colonialism, New York: Grove Press, 2002,
pp 121145.

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4

10

11

12

13

Phillip Curtin, The White Mans Grave: Image and Reality, 17801850, Journal of British Studies, 1,
1961, pp 94110; Phillip Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Actions, 17801850, Madison,
WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964. More recently, see Phillip Curtin, Disease and Empire: The
Health of European Troops in the Conquest of Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Daniel R Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Colonialism in the Nineteenth
Century, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men, pp 199210. For another account of the sciences and the
civilising mission, see Lewis Pyenson, Civilizing Mission: Exact Sciences and French Overseas Expansion,
18301940, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993; Lewis Pyenson, Cultural Imperialism and
Exact Sciences: German Expansion Overseas, 19001930, New York: P Lang, 1985; Lewis Pyenson,
Empire of Reason: Exact Sciences in Indonesia, 18401940, Leiden: Brill, 1989. Pyensons work, it should
be noted, has been criticised for its insistence that the only role the exact sciences played in colonialism
was as part of the mission to civilise. See Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys, Science and
Imperialism, Isis, 84, 1993, pp 91102. Lewis Pyenson, Cultural Imperialism and the Exact Sciences
Revisited, Isis, 84, 1993, pp 103108.
I have not attempted a detailed historiography of science and colonialism here, preferring instead to
bring attention to themes of particular interest for readers of Postcolonial Studies. For more systematic
introductions, see Roy Macleod, Introduction, in Roy Macleod (ed), Nature and Empire: Science and
the Colonial Enterprise (Osiris, Vol. 15), Chicago, 2000, pp 113; Dhruv Raina, From West to NonWest? Basallas Three-Stage Model Revisited, Science as Culture 8, 1999, pp 497516; and the four
essays collected as part of a special Focus section of Isis, vol. 96, in 2005. Particularly astute on
historiographical issues is Mark Harrison, Science and the British Empire, Isis, 96, 2005, pp 5663. An
excellent critical introduction may be found in Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation
and the Construction of Scientific Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006,
pp 126. On postcolonial science, see Itty Abraham, The Contradictory Spaces of Postcolonial
Technoscience, The Economic and Political Weekly, 41, 2006, pp 210217; Warwick Anderson,
Postcolonial Technoscience, Social Studies of Science, 32, 2002, 643658; Maureen McNeil,
Introduction: Postcolonial Technoscience, Science as Culture, 14(2), 2005, pp105112; and Warwick
Anderson and Vincanne Adams, Pramoedyas Chickens: Postcolonial Studies of Technoscience, in
Edward J Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch and Judy Wajcman (eds), The Handbook of
Science and Technology Studies, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007, pp 181203.
Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (eds), Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the
Early Modern World, Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2005, p 2. For further work on
natural history and imperialism, see Richard Drayton, Natures Government: Science, Imperial Britain,
and the Improvement of the World, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000; Fa-Ti Fan, British
Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004; John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British
State, and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998;
Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999; David
Phillip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill (eds), Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of
Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; and Emma Spary, Utopias Garden: French
Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2004.
Harold J Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions, Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2002. The astronomical determination of geographical positions, Matthew
Edney has noted, was a fundamental aspect of the East India Companys territorial expansion in India.
Matthew H Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 17651843,
Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997, p 86.
David Arnold (ed), Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500
1900, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996; Michael Worboys, The Emergence of Tropical Medicine: A Study in
the Establishment of a Scientific Specialty, in Gerard Lemaine, Roy Macleod, Michael Mulkay and
Peter Weingart (eds), Perspectives on the Emergence of Scientific Disciplines, The Hague: Mouton, 1976;
Nancy Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 18951945, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2001, p 237. Cf. Michael A Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of
French Colonialism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994. The history of forestry has also

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14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

received recent study as part of the history of colonial science. See Kavita Philip, Civilizing Natures:
Race, Resources, and Modernity in Colonial South India, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2004, pp 5479; S Ravi Rajan, Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Eco-Development, 18001950,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Tilley writes: . . . historical actors attempts to get full, precise, and accurate facts often undermined
and transformed many of the assumptions that brought them to the continent in the first place. Experts
emphasis on accuracy, in other words, called into question at significant junctures the limits not only of
the ways they pursued knowledge, but also the very content of that knowledge. Helen Tilley,
Ambiguities of Racial Science in Colonial Africa: The African Research Survey and the Fields of
Eugenics, Social Anthropology, and Biomedicine, 19201940, in Benedikt Stuchtey (ed), Science Across
the European Empires, 18001950, German Historical Institute, London: Oxford University Press, 2005,
pp 245288, p 247.
Bruce J Hunt, Michael Faraday, Cable Telegraphy, and the Rise of Field Theory, History of Technology,
13, 1991, pp 119.
Bruce J Hunt, Doing Science in a Global Empire: Cable Telegraphy and Electrical Physics in Victorian
Britain, in Bernard Lightman (ed), Victorian Science in Context, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1997, pp 312333; Crosbie Smith and M Norton Wise, Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord
Kelvin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Janet Browne, Biogeography and Empire, in N Jardine, J A Secord and E C Spary (eds), Cultures of
Natural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp 305321.
Cf. Londa Schiebinger, who defines colonial science as: any science done during the colonial era that
involved Europeans working in a colonial context. This includes science done in Europe that drew on
colonial resources in addition to science done in areas that were part of Europes trading or territorial
empires. Londa Schiebinger, Forum Introduction: The European Colonial Science Complex, Isis, 96,
2005, pp 5255, p 52.
Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 18001960, Hamden, CT: Archon Books,
1982, p xvi. Stepans book drew on George Stockings pioneering work on the history of anthropological
understandings of race. George W Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of
Anthropology, New York: Free Press, 1968. See also Seymour Drescher, The Ending of the Slave Trade
and the Evolution of European Scientific Racism, Social Science History, 14, 1990, pp 415450; and
Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
For studies of race, colonialism, and criminality/criminology, see Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the
Raj: How Fingerprinting was Born in Colonial India, London: Pan Books, 2003.
George W Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, New York: Free Press, 1987; Thomas R Trautmann,
Aryans and British India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. For a transnational account of
the ongoing utility of the Aryan hypothesis within the British Empire, see Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism
and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. For changes in
British attitudes towards race in the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion, see Heather Streets, Martial
Races: The Military, Race, and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 18571914, Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2005.
Roy Macleod and Milton Lewis (eds), Disease, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine
and the Experience of European Expansion, London: Routledge, 1988; Waltraud Ernst and Bernard
Harris (eds), Race, Science, and Medicine, 17001960, London: Routledge, 1999; Mark Harrison, The
Tender Frame of Man: Disease, Climate, and Racial Difference in India and the West Indies, 1760
1860, The Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 70(1), 1996, pp 6893. Warwick Anderson, Immunities of
Empire: Race, Disease, and the New Tropical Medicine, 19001920, Bulletin of the History of Medicine,
70(1) 1996, pp 94118; Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment, and
British Imperialism in India, 16001850, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999;. Tilley, Ambiguities
of Racial Science in Colonial Africa.
Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006, p 3.
This is not to suggest, however, that race disappeared from the sciences after World War II*as some
have claimed*and is currently returning. On this point, and for an excellent analysis of the Human
Genome Diversity Project, see Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of
Genomics, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, pp 1744. For a helpful introduction to many of
the issues involved in contemporary discussions of science, medicine, and race, see the web forum
convened to discuss an editorial published in the New York Times in 2005 by Armand Marie Leroi, an
evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College London. Armand Marie Leroi, A Family Tree
in Every Gene, New York Times, 14 March 2005, A. 23. (http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/). For a very

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25

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27

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29

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31

32
33

34
35

36

37

38

39
40
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recent collection of essays, see Joan Fujimura and Troy Duster, Special Issue on Race, Genomics, and
Biomedicine, Social Studies of Science, 38(5), 2008, pp 643832.
Megan Vaughan, Health and Hegemony: Representation of Disease and the Creation of the Colonial
Subject in Nyasaland, in Dagmar Engels and Shula Marks (eds), Contesting Colonial Hegemony: State
and Society in Africa and India, London: I B Tauris, 1994, pp 173201.
David Arnold, Cholera and Colonialism in British India, Past and Present, 113, 1986, pp 118151;
David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993; Mark Harrison, A Question of Locality: The Identity of
Cholera in British India, 18601890, Clio Medica, 35, 1996, pp 133159.
Warwick Anderson, Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution, Critical
Inquiry, 21(3), 1995, pp 640669; Anderson, Immunities of Empire; Warwick Anderson, Where is the
Postcolonial History of Medicine? Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 79(3), 1998, pp 522530;
Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race and Hugiene in the
Philippines, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006; Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity:
Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
See note 7 for references. A superb early contribution to postcolonial science and technology studies*
one also critical of nave usages of the term*was Itty Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic
Bomb: Science, Secrecy, and the Postcolonial State, London: Zed Books, 1998.
David Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters, and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of
Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge, London: Taylor & Francis, 2000, p 1.
Helen Verran, A Postcolonial Moment in Science Studies: Alternative Firing Regimes of Environmental
Scientists and Aboriginal Landowners, Social Studies of Science, 32, 2002, pp 729762, p 730. See
also Helen Verran, Re-Imagining Land Ownership in Australia, Postcolonial Studies, 1(2), 1998,
pp 237254.
Homi Bhabha, Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse, in The Location of
Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, pp 8592; Homi Bhabha, Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of
Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817, in The Location of Culture,
London: Routledge, 1994, pp 102122.
Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999, p 48.
Gyan Prakash, Science Gone Native in Colonial India, Representations, 40, 1992, pp 153178, p 172.
Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India, Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1998, p 37.
Gupta, Postcolonial Developments, p 42.
Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995; Richard Rottenburg, Far-Fetched Facts: A Parable of Development
Aid, Allison Brown and Tom Lampert (trans), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. On the failure of the
projects of high modernism, see James C Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve
the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. For fundamental critiques
of the structure and logics of Western science that have emerged (at least in part) from critiques of
development, see, in particular, the essays by Nandy, Vandana Shiva, and Shiv Visvanathan in Ashis
Nandy (ed), Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity, Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1988, pp 123, pp 232256, pp 257286. See also Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and
Development, London: Zed Books, 1989.
Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Vincanne Adams and Stacy Leigh Pigg (eds), Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in
Global Perspective, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005, p 11.
Cori Hayden, When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003, p 6.
Raj, Relocating Modern Science, p 21.
Gupta, Postcolonial Developments, p 6.
Stacy Leigh Pigg, Found in Most Traditional Societies: Traditional Medical Practitioners between
Culture and Development, in Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (eds), International Development
and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997, pp 259290.
In his study of the shift, within Africa, from discourses and practices concerned with science for
development to those concerned with development as experimental science, Bonneuil points to the
crucial role played by settlement schemes. These sites were intended to function as hybrid locations,

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44
45

46
47

48

49

50

51

52
53

54

55

56

57

simultaneously village and agricultural station. This hybridity, Bonneuil argues, was essential. On the
one hand, the schemes were supposed to tell something about how new techniques would work in
indigenous farming conditions; on the other hand, they created state-space conditions in order to
operate under controlled conditions similar to that of the station. Christophe Bonneuil, Development
as Experiment: Science and State Building in Late Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, 19301970, in Roy
Macleod (ed), Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise (Osiris, Vol. 15), Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001, pp 258281, p 273. Such sites also produced hybrid individuals,
tamed as objects of intervention and experimentation, ideal as the subjects of surveys into the nature of
indigenous farming practices. Thus the promotion of indigenous farming knowledge in the 1970s and
1980s did not emerge simply from more open or more grass-roots-driven scholars. As paradoxical and
ironical as it may seem, decades of vertical and technocratic intervention and cognitive penetration of
agrarian societies through pre-packaged development schemes have certainly been preconditions for the
emergence of the present vast scholarship on indigenous knowledge and African farming systems.
Indigenous knowledge may therefore well have attained its recent intellectual significance from its
appropriation by the state and experts. Bonneuil, Development as Experiment, p 280.
For a similar move outside the field of postcolonial theory, see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been
Modern, Catherine Porter (trans), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Hull quoted in Hayden, When Nature Goes Public, p 31.
Timothy K Choy, Articulated Knowledges: Environmental Forms after Universalitys Demise,
American Anthropologist, 107, 2005, pp 518. For another account of the simultaneous presence of
local and global registers in environmental disputes, see Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An
Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Hayden, When Nature Goes Public, p 156.
Adriana Petryna, Andrew Lakoff and Arthur Kleinman (eds), Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets,
Practices, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
The re-construction of identities in call-centres has been a topic of some analysis. See, for example,
Divya C McMillin, Outsourcing Identities: Call Centres and Cultural Transformation in India,
Economic and Political Weekly, 21 January 2006, pp 235241. On the outsourcing of clinical trials, see
Adriana Petryna, When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
For critiques of the discourses and practices of global environmentalism, and in particular on
transnational governmental control of the environment as a new form of governmentality, see Gupta,
Postcolonial Developments, pp 291329; and Timothy Luke, On Environmentality: Geo-Power and
Eco-Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary Environmentalism, Cultural Critique, 31, 1995,
pp5781. On new attitudes towards global health and infectious disease, see Paul Farmer, Infections and
Inequalities: The Modern Plagues, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999; and Nicholas B King,
Security, Disease, Commerce: Ideologies of Postcolonial Global Health, Social Studies of Science, 32,
2002, pp 763789.
See also Jongyoung Kim, Alternative Medicines Encounter with Laboratory Science: The Scientific
Construction of Korean Medicine in a Global Age, Social Studies of Science, 37, 2007, pp 855880.
Sandra Harding, After Eurocentrism: Challenges for the Philosophy of Science, PSA: Proceedings of
the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, 1992, vol 2, 1993, pp 311319.
Harding, After Eurocentrism, p 311.
Sandra Harding (ed), The Racial Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future, Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1993.
Sandra Harding, Sciences from Below: Feminism, Postcolonialities, and Modernities, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2008, p 126.
Joseph Needham, The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West, London: Allen and
Unwin, 1969; Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 7 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1954. See also the many works by Nathan Sivin. An issue of the journal Osiris has
been dedicated to the history of East and South-East Asian science after Needham: Morris Low (ed.),
Beyond Joseph Needham: Science, Technology, and Medicine in East and South East Asia, Osiris, vol 13,
1998. A recent Focus section of Isis has been devoted to Science in Modern China: Vol. 98(3).
Benjamin Elman, On their Own Terms: Science in China, 15501900, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2005.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000, p 43.

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