ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Colonial Administrator-Intellectuals across the British Empire: Appropriating Knowledge and Extracting Labour in the Late Nineteenth-Century.

• In Event: Making and Unmaking Colonial Science

English Abstract

Recent scholarship has looked to indigenous and native histories of science to situate contested knowledge forms into processes of scientific developments across the British empire. Taking this decolonial imperative further, this paper interrogates histories of natural science that have long centred the colonial ‘man of science’ to reassess their scientific activities. The two men of science, whom I call ‘administrator-intellectuals’, are botanist William Henry Harvey (1811-1866) and geologist Valentine Ball (1843-1895). The former acted as colonial administrator in the Cape Colony and later travelled and ‘collected’ extensively across the Australian colonies. The latter was a geologist on the Geological Survey of India and made numerous trips to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. This paper takes two thematic modes of analysis, ‘picking as plundering’ and ‘assessing and appropriating’, to interrogate how Harvey and Ball used their colonial mobility to amass extensive natural history collections and in the service of commodity accumulation. It reassesses the materiality of the methods involved in Harvey’s and Ball’s botanical and geological work to recover archival silences of knowledge production. These silences, and those who were silenced, include the coercion of colonial labour and the appropriation of indigenous epistemologies from marginalised individuals like the guide, the ‘gold-washer’, and the ‘plant boy’. These modes of analysis, this paper argues, advance our understanding of colonial circuits of knowledge-production and the intricate processes involved in the making of scientific collections.

Author

• Mobeen Hussain, University of York