ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

China Observed: Science and the British Encounter with China in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel examines the diverse ways in which British actors engaged with, represented, and reconfigured “China” through scientific, educational, and intellectual practices from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Bringing together studies of a colonial institution, a missionary-translator, a hunter-naturalist, and two visionary-thinkers, the panel highlights how different episodes of the British encounter with China mediated knowledge making and circulation.

The four papers illuminate different positions and perspectives of British actors. The first paper revisits the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (1847-1859), which exemplified the efforts to understand China from the vantage point of a colonial empire, treating it as a frontier of “otherness.” This often overlooked colonial institution stood at the intersection of science, sinology, and imperial governance. In comparison with the initiative by a colonial institution, the activities of John Fryer (1839-1928) were deeply engaged within Chinese government and school. Fryer’s efforts in scientific translation and education in Chinese institutions positioned him as a crucial intermediary in the reform movements of the late Qing government. The third paper examines the career of Arthur de Carle Sowerby (1885-1954), a China-born British hunter-naturalist active in early twentieth-century China. Through his journalism and museum curatorship, Sowerby reinvented natural history in ways that linked British zoological work to Chinese discourses on evolution and scientific nationalism. Finally, the paper on the wartime correspondence between Joseph Needham (1900-1995) and H. G. Wells (1866-1946) reveals how their beliefs about biological and social evolution forged the vision of a new world order. China, as an ancient civilization with the potential for revitalizing, was an indispensable component of both Needham’s and Wells’s utopian frameworks.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Bernard Lightman, York University

Individual Presentations

• Science and Sinology at the Colonial Frontier: The Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1847-1859 - Bernard Lightman, York University

• Translating Power: John Fryer and the Making of Scientific Authority in the Self-Strengthening Era - Su Huai, York Univeristy

• Translating Natural History: Arthur de Carle Sowerby and the Sinicization of British Zoology in Republican China - Christine Yi Lai Luk, Tsinghua University

• Evolution and Utopia: Joseph Needham and H. G. Wells on the New World Order, 1940-1942 - Hsiang-Fu Huang, Nankai University

Session Organizer

• Hsiang-Fu Huang, Nankai University