ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Scientific Travel in Colonial Contexts: Logistics, Politics and Practices

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

From the eighteenth century to the present, travel has been instrumental to the production and circulation of knowledge in the natural sciences. The development of disciplines from geology to zoology both coincided with and shaped the expansion of European empires, which provided naturalists with numerous opportunities to study the flora, fauna, strata, and peoples of the world, as well as governments with new technologies of conquest, classification, and rule. Travel enabled the exchange of knowledge between Indigenous experts and scientists, albeit under highly unequal and often violent power relations. Simultaneously, scientific travel was a tool of diplomacy, economy, and advocacy, one which sought to build closer ties between disparate regions and people, and even to challenge the oppression of marginalised groups.

This panel session addresses the multifarious relationships between natural science and travel from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Spanning the 1740s through 1930s, and geographically covering Southern Africa, North America, England, and French Guiana, our papers explore how travel modulated the production and exchange of natural knowledge in tense political situations. In particular, we examine the relationships among the logistics and practice of travel and collecting; classification; medical surveying; colonial prospecting; agricultural development; lecture touring; and diplomacy.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Janet Browne, Harvard

Individual Presentations

• Pehr Kalm’s Linnaean Ethnography - Jordan Thomas Mursinna, University of California, Berkeley

• Scientific Exploration Against Slavery? Catineau Laroche’s Expedition and the “White Colonization” Project in Mana (French Guiana, 1820s) - Salomé Ketabi, EHESS, Mondes Américains (Paris)

• Lecturing from the Cape to Cairo: George Darwin and the Dissemination of Knowledge During the BAAS Expedition to Africa in 1905 - Edwin Rose, University of Leeds

• Conservation, Contagion, and Collecting: Guy Shortridge and Nicholas Arends’s Scientific Expeditions to Namibia, 1920s - Jules Skotnes-Brown, University of Liverpool

Session Organizer

• Edwin Rose, University of Leeds