Relocating Modern Science: Circulation And The Construction Of Scientific Knowledge In South Asia And Europe: Seventeenth To Nineteenth Centuries

Modern science is widely considered a purely West European creation. Academic accounts of its relationship to other societies and cultures have thus centred either on highlighting the epistemological, sociological, and economic uniqueness of the West, or else on focusing on the mechanisms of its worldwide spread. 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 diffused, or imposed, elsewhere. Through six chronologically ordered 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 much recent 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. Finally, 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. In addition to engaging with questions central to imperial, colonial, and South Asian history, Relocating Modern Science presents a heuristic model for specialists of other contact zones, periods, and fields of knowledge, as also for the fast growing fields of transnational and global studies.