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7 Geological governance: surveying the North Sea in the Cold War Leucha Veneer This essay considers the notion of scientific governance in the context of the changes in the British geosciences in the 1960s. Various aspects of scientific governance are discussed in this volume, but the facet of scientific governance that especially concerns me here is the importance of particular scientific knowledge to administrators: how and when they come to realise what expertise they require; how crucial this expertise really is; how (and whether) this expertise can be
. Acknowledgement The research on which this paper is based was funded by the British Academy’s Cities & Infrastructure Programme. Notes 1 The recovery of housing after rapid-onset disasters as well as protracted conflict and displacement is referred to as ‘shelter’. The shelter sector is coordinated by the Global Shelter Cluster, jointly led by the IFRC and UNHCR. 2 The Promoting Safer Building team is a research collaboration with the Overseas Development Institute, CARE International UK, University College London, the British Geological Survey and
In 1872, a young archaeologist at the British Museum made a tremendous discovery. While he was working his way through a Mesopotamian ‘slush pile’, George Smith, a self-taught expert in ancient languages, happened upon a Babylonian version of Noah’s Flood. His research suggested this ‘Deluge Tablet’ pre-dated the writing of Genesis by a millennium or more. Smith went on to translate what later became The Epic of Gilgamesh, perhaps the oldest and most complete work of literature from any culture. Against the backdrop of innovative readings of a range of paintings, novels, histories and photographs (by figures like Dickens, Eliot, James, Dyce, Turner, Macaulay and Carlyle), this book demonstrates the Gordian complexity of the Victorians’ relationship with history, while also seeking to highlight the Epic’s role in influencing models of time in late-Victorian geology. Discovering Gilgamesh will be of interest to readers, students and researchers in literary studies, Victorian studies, history, intellectual history, art history and archaeology.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, museums in Europe and North America were at their largest and most powerful. New buildings were bigger; objects flooded into them, and more people visited them than ever before. The Manchester Museum is an ideal candidate for understanding cultures of display in twentieth-century Britain. It is a treasure trove of some four million priceless objects that are irreplaceable and unique. Like many large European collections, the origins of the Manchester Museum are to be found in a private cabinet: that of John Leigh Philips. This book traces the fate of his cabinet from his death in 1814. The establishment of the Manchester Natural History Society (MNHS) allowed naturalists to carve out a space in Manchester's cultural landscape. The Manchester Museum's development was profoundly affected by the history of the University in which it operated. In January 1868, the Natural History Society formally dissolved, and an interim commission took control of its collections; the Manchester Geological Society transferred its collections the following year. The new collection was to be purely scientific, comprising geology, zoology and botany, with no place for some of the more exotic specimens of the Society. The objects in the collection became part of Manchester's civic identity, bringing with them traces of science, empire and the exotic. Other museological changes were afoot in the 1990s. Natural history collections became key sites for public engagement with environmental issues and biodiversity and more recently as sites for exhibiting art.
judging, nor, as far as I am concerned, of preferring one to another’. 1 Jukes’s remark expresses not only the scope of the Royal Navy’s commitments in an era of commercial and imperial expansion, but the diversity of opportunities for publicly funded geological research being opened up by the growth of British overseas interests. The trajectory of Jukes’s own career exemplifies the
Imperial power, both formal and informal, and research in the natural sciences were closely dependent in the nineteenth century. This book examines a portion of the mass-produced juvenile literature, focusing on the cluster of ideas connected with Britain's role in the maintenance of order and the spread of civilization. It discusses the political economy of Western ecological systems, and the consequences of their extension to the colonial periphery, particularly in forms of forest conservation. Progress and consumerism were major constituents of the consensus that helped stabilise the late Victorian society, but consumerism only works if it can deliver the goods. From 1842 onwards, almost all major episodes of coordinated popular resistance to colonial rule in India were preceded by phases of vigorous resistance to colonial forest control. By the late 1840s, a limited number of professional positions were available for geologists in British imperial service, but imperial geology had a longer pedigree. Modern imperialism or 'municipal imperialism' offers a broader framework for understanding the origins, long duration and persistent support for overseas expansion which transcended the rise and fall of cabinets or international realignments in the 1800s. Although medical scientists began to discern and control the microbiological causes of tropical ills after the mid-nineteenth century, the claims for climatic causation did not undergo a corresponding decline. Arthur Pearson's Pearson's Magazine was patriotic, militaristic and devoted to royalty. The book explores how science emerged as an important feature of the development policies of the Colonial Office (CO) of the colonial empire.
3 ‘The scattered remnants of a diminished world’:1 William Richardson and geology M ephistopheles, in Goethe’s Faust, arriving on a jagged mountain top, recognises the place: ‘I know it well: this used to be the very floor of Hell, before God tumbled Satan from his throne, and turned all of Creation upside down’. The intellectually arrogant Faust denies he aims higher still, as ‘the earth still gives ample scope for what I have in mind’. But Mephistopheles asks, is this not just ‘a lust for glory?’, echoing the pronouncement of the seventeenth-century natural
The newly established Geological Society of London, formed in 1807, set out as a primary purpose its ambition to produce a geological map of Britain. The editors of the first issue of the Society’s journal, Transactions of the Geological Society ( 1811 ), stated their hope that its members will continue to donate mineral specimens that will lay the foundations of
The first two decades of the nineteenth century, when James Tod was in India, 1 was a period of great changes in the field of science in Britain, in particular with the institutionalisation of botany and geology in British universities, learned societies, botanical gardens and museums. 2 The British colonial authorities in India, who had been expanding their territorial domination through a
, fossils were becoming far more central to geological enterprises, but these did not entirely replace the interest in primitive rocks. The ‘President’s Address’, introducing Cornwall’s Transactions of 1846, shows that enthusiasm for fossils had reached the south-west, with its explanation that these rock forms were a new addition to the museum. Until recently, it continues, the existence of such fossils