Spaces Of Knowledge

The ever increasing scientific community in Europe was excited about the opportunities that the vast landmass of India offered in natural history studies. On their part, the Christianity enthusiasts in Europe viewed European rule in India as a godsend for propagating the Gospel in the east. European interest in their field work brought them scientific recognition as well as the much needed cash. More significantly, they introduced the colonial administrators, especially the medical men, to systematic botany. The early success of its oceanic voyages brought contrary pulls to bear on Europe, with the practical needs of the hour standing in contradistinction to the age-old religious authority, sectarian antagonism and the recovered Greco-Roman intellectual tradition. How in course of time the former triumphed over the latter in the case of natural history is an interesting and instructive line of enquiry.

KAPIL RAJ teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris and is a member of the Centre Alexandre Koyré for the History of Science.
Astrological and astronomical techniques of observation proved critical to this endeavor.
The demands of the seaborne empires of early modern Europe for navigational precision gave rise to the authority and prestige of mixed mathematics, particularly in determining latitude and longitude across the Atlantic Ocean and the American continent.
The detailed studies of transport technologies provided by the contributions of this issue make a powerful argument for the significance of movement and displacement, and attendant issues of maintenance and repair, to current narratives of the history of science and technology.
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Knight includes not merely observation and experiment in natural philosophy but also the technical crafts and trades of brewers, silversmiths, and glassmakers. Those engaged in these labors sought “a programme and a method for acquiring and ordering natural knowledge so that it could be not only contemplated but also used for what was called the improvement of man’s estate” (p. 34). His book offers a useful, if somewhat limited, synthesis of the historiography of the Scientific Revolution—both as an event and an analytic category—that should encourage historians of science to reflect on its tenacious appeal and its increasingly questioned shortcomings. Publisher’s summary Drawing on recent scholarship in the history and sociology of science, as well as in imperial and colonial history, Relocating Modern Science challenges both the belief that modern science was created uniquely in the West and the assumption that it was subsequently https://peoplequotes.org/ diffused, or imposed, elsewhere. Through six chronologically ordered case studies of knowledge construction in botany, cartography, terrestrial surveying, linguistics, scientific education, and colonial administration at key moments in their history, this book demonstrates the crucial importance of intercultural encounter – here between South Asians and Europeans – for the emergence of these sciences. It also revisits questions at the heart of research in the social studies of science – interpersonal trust, replicability, calibration, translation, and the relationship between instruments and embodied skills – showing the complex nature of their resolution in multicultural, and colonial, contexts. By following practitioners, skills, instruments, and ideas as they moved between continents and communities, this book stresses the crucial role of circulation in the construction and reconfiguration of scientific notions and practices.

Relocating Modern Science: Circulation And The Construction Of Knowledge In South Asia And Europe, 1650

This strategic hypocrisy, while nurturing an ambiguity in Tibet’s status was linked closely to the imperialist interest of Britain.

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We suggest that the history of science and technology would benefit greatly from attention to the ways in which different modes of transportation require different types of maintenance. Perspectives from both transnational and spatial history have merged to provide a most impactful springboard for historians of science. After all, explorers, travellers, and scientists all travel, as do ideas, instruments, and texts – if not entire laboratories. A key analytical perspective borrowed from transnational history is the concept of ‘circulation’ as proposed by Pierre-Yves Saunier.191 Circulation invites the historian to track the translocation of people, ideas, and objects across space, place, and borders , and to analyse their meaning in the new host society. Moreover, it is a call to trace local interactions in the ‘field’ between different actors involved in the (co-)production of medical, botanical, or cartographic knowledge. Chapter 11 continues with the theme of science and empire by following the development of maritime navigation alongside “big science” projects, such as the measurement of Earth’s surface and the observations on the transit of Venus. These projects drew scientists closer to systematically understanding not only the planet—climate science observations were recorded throughout these expeditions—but also the diversity of the globe’s population.