2008 Workshop: Empires and Science

INTRODUCTION

In a society increasingly dependent on science and technology, the cultural relevance of historical inquiry is sometimes called into question. Although historians of science have always recognized that the practice of science is historically determined, this fundamental insight does not receive the attention it deserves in American science education.

1. Announcement
2. Introduction
3. Workshop Program
4. List of Speakers and Topics
5. Preliminary Readings
6. Credits
7. Questions
8. Suggestions for Projects
9. Biographical Sketches

This workshop examines how an exciting new field in historical studies – the cross-cultural study of empire – can shed new light on the cultural bonds that tie the sciences and the humanities together. By bringing together a diverse body of scholars from different regions across the globe, it will show how the history of science is not purely the province of western Europeanists. No one disputes the importance of science and science education in planning for the future; this workshop examines one way in which science and science education can also be enriched by the study of the past.

In the last two and a half decades there have been tremendous changes in ways scholars in the humanities view the history of science. Once a separate discipline, and the narrative of great discoveries and heroic European discoverers, the history of science now encompasses a global range and a vast time frame that stretches back into the ancient past and culminates in the present. The borders between history of science and history and other humanities and social science disciplines have been replaced by the general engagement of specialists in a vast array of subjects and questions involving scientific inquiry. These scholars, working with global consciousness, now regularly ask questions about how knowledge of the natural world has been gathered and organized, by whom, and for what purpose; how that knowledge, once formulated, circulates, and by and for whom; how such knowledge gains authority; and how knowledge systems from one part of the world differ from similar knowledge systems from other parts. Scholars are asking about the role that governments play in connection with scientific knowledge, about the role that power and the exercise of power have played when two knowledge systems are competing, and about why some knowledge systems seem to have disappeared only to reappear again in different historical circumstances. Where, in the past, the natural world itself was once the sole subject of study, many interdisciplinary scholars from history, anthropology, art history and literary study as well as historians of science now look at science as a social construction, intimately related to time, place and persons involved. The results of these interdisciplinary endeavors are manifested in two new fields of inquiry: colonial science and cultural studies. When these fields are linked to the history of science it becomes possible to see relationships between scientific practice and the many and complex facets of societies where it is carried out.

While there tends to be agreement among historians of science today that all societies have had some form of systematic inquiry into the natural world and that such inquiries are carried out by specialists, imperial formations have played a major part in facilitating scientific work. Not only do empires often link systematic inquiry into the natural world to aims of the state (as in imperial China), but also empires facilitate travel and the formation of geographically broad networks (as in the Roman and Islamic empires). Some familiarity with knowledge circulation and transfer in the pre-modern period helps in grasping the complexities and achievements of the American and Western European empires from 1500 to the present. The workshop will focus primarily on the post 1500 period but will give some attention to the pre-modern period.

The workshop will be organized around a micro-history and case studies approach that emphasizes themes rather than linear progression.