Search results
A study of the evolution of colonial science is perhaps as relevant and instructive as the study of colonialism itself. Colonisation primarily meant exploration and exploitation. Natural resources were the star attraction and this brought the practitioners of natural history into the limelight. Lord Wellesley recorded the illustration and improvement of Natural History of India which embraces an object so extensive as the description of the principal part of the Animal Kingdom is worthy of the munificence and liberality of the English East India Company. The economic value of the geological investigations proved of immediate concern to the Company, with the coalfields of India looming large. Pre-British India had nothing like a scientific society, not to say a journal, which could provide some sort of a platform for scientific workers.
traders and the like. MacKenzie followed up his study of hunting and empire with an edited volume, Imperialism and the Natural World (1990), which highlighted research by Richard Grove, Deepak Kumar and others on the relationship between empire and the environment. 7 Most of the volume’s essays examine the role of science and learned institutions in the imperial engagement
imperialism and the natural world, in which he argues that the scientific organisation of knowledge was ‘crucial to the pursuit of power’. 98 His 1988 The Empire of Nature is impressive in its range, from a deep chronology of European and African hunting to imperial hunting and conservation in India as well as Africa. It was welcomed by an Africanist reviewer for examining both African and European hunters
opinion’, p. 137. 6 E. Said, Culture and Imperialism, (1993; London, Vintage, 1994 edition), pp. 101, 104. 7 J. M. MacKenzie (ed.), ‘Introduction’, Imperialism and the Natural World, (Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 9. 8 Said, Culture, p. 106. 9 Ibid., p. 114. 10 Gardener’s Magazine, 1 (1826) 1
), 345–63. 17 J. M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester, 1990), p. 2. 18 J. M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester, 1995), pp. xi-xiv. 19
: climatic anxieties in the colonial tropics’, in J. M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester University Press, 1990): 118–40. 6 D. Arnold (ed.), Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester University Press, 1988 ); R. MacLeod and M. Lewis (eds), Disease, Medicine and Empire (London
2005. Also MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester, 1990); Jeffrey Richards and MacKenzie, The Railway Station: A Social History (Oxford, 1986). I contributed all the non-European chapters to this book. MacKenzie, Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities (Manchester, 2009); MacKenzie, ‘Missionaries, Science and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Africa’ in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880–1914 (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, 2003), pp. 106–130; MacKenzie
. 8 Arnold, The New Cambridge History of India , pp. 20–31; Deepak Kumar, ‘The evolution of colonial science in India: natural history and the East India Company’ in John M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester, 1990 ), pp. 51
Century ’. In J.M. MacKenzie (ed.). Imperialism and the Natural World . Manchester : Manchester University Press . de Saussure , Horace-Bénédict . 1979 [ 1852 ]. Premières ascensions au Mont-Blanc 1774–1787 . Abridged edition, with introduction by R. Canac. Paris : F. Maspero . Secrétan , Charles . 1876
. 44 MNA, S1/425/23, 16, 21, Notes of Chief Secretary, 4 April and 12 April 1924. 45 On the Imperial Institute, see M. Worboys, ‘The Imperial Institute: the state and the development of the natural resources of the colonial empire, 1887–1923’, in J. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and the Natural World