AFRICA AS A LIVING LABORATORY: Science, Nature and Imperial Development in the Tropics 1860-1960

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

This project seeks to explore three related questions. First how did the "Scramble for Africa" in the latter half of the nineteenth century affect European scientific communities and disciplines? Second, what were scientists' roles during the period of imperial rule in tropical Africa and what kinds of studies did they produce? Finally, how did scientific knowledge impinge upon and influence colonial practices and plans for economic development? The project will concentrate most fully on the British Empire and its dependent African territories - particularly present-day Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Gambia - but it will also draw upon literature relating to German, French, Belgian, Portuguese, American, and South African activities in order to situate the arguments in a transnational and inter-imperial context. A primary aim of the project is to produce a monograph that offers a detailed historical account of the ways in which science, empire, and development intersected in Africa in the century between its conquest and its decolonization. Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonization, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of scientific disciplines as well as technologies and research methodologies. Historical actors, in fact, referred to the continent as a "living laboratory" in which imperial powers ought to embark upon scientific study and experimentation. The research for this project will explore three loosely overlapping historical periods: 1860 to 1914, which corresponds to the period of European exploration, partition, and conquest; 1900 to 1940, covering the establishment of colonial states, their attendant technical services, and a range of scientific expeditions sent out to survey the continent; and 1940 to 1960, including the effects of the Second World War and the tension between economic models developed in the inter-war and post-war periods. Within this framework, close attention will be paid to four arenas of scientific research: environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological. This cross-section should reveal the multifaceted and often unpredictable effects colonization had on scientific epistemologies and, in turn, that science had on colonialism. It should also highlight the centrality of field sciences not only to African imperial processes, but also to the gradual codification of "ethnosciences" as a legitimate realm for European inquiry. The resulting monograph will place tropical Africa in the foreground rectifying its hitherto neglected position in studies of science and empire.