Environment and Logistics in the Creation of Knowledge in British Colonies from 1750 to 1950

27th-28th February 2020, University of Manchester

artsmethods@manchester

Supported by the Royal Historical Society and artsmethods@manchester

Programme Overview

Day 1, Thursday 27th

08:30 - 09:00 Registration Ellen Wilkinson Building Reception

09:00 - 09:15 Welcome Ellen Wilkinson A2.6

09:15 - 10:30 Keynote – Prof. Javed Majeed Ellen Wilkinson A2.6

10:30 - 11:00 Break Ellen Wilkinson Building Reception

Panel 1: Tools and Instruments 11:00 - 12:30 Ellen Wilkinson A2.6 of Knowledge Panel 2: The Impact of the Humanities Bridgeford Street, Cordingly Theatre Individual Panel 3: Navigating Colonial Kilburn Building, Theatre 1.3 Space

12:30 - 13:30 Lunch Ellen Wilkinson Building Reception

Panel 4: The Physical 13:30 - 15:00 Ellen Wilkson A2.6 Environment Panel 5: Education and Humanities Bridgeford Street, Cordingly Theatre Pedagogy Panel 6: Knowledge Creation in Kilburn Building, Theatre 1.3 Writing

15:00 - 15:30 Break Ellen Wilkinson Building Reception

Panel 7: Indigenous Skill and 15:30 - 17:00 Humanities Bridgeford Street, Cordingly Theatre Knowledge Panel 8: Foundations in the Kilburn Building, Theatre 1.3 Metropole

Day 2, Friday 28th

08:30 - 09:00 Registration Ellen Wilkinson Building Reception

Panel 9: Collaboration and 09:00 - 10:30 Ellen Wilkinson Conference Room Cooperation Panel 10: The Flow of Mansfield Cooper, G.19 Communications

Panel 11: Exporting Knowledge Humanities Bridgeford Street, G33

10:30 - 11:00 Break Ellen Wilkinson Building Reception

Panel 12: Commercial 11:00 - 12:30 Ellen Wilkinson Conference Room Knowledge Panel 13: Hierarchies and Mansfield Cooper, G.19 Scholarship

12:30 - 13:30 Lunch Ellen Wilkinson Building Reception

13:30 - 15:00 Panel 14: Decolonisation Ellen Wilkinson Conference Room

Panel 15: Knowledge Mansfield Cooper, G.19 Communities

15:00 - 15:30 Break Ellen Wilkinson Building Reception

15:30 - 16:30 Roundtable Ellen Wilkinson Conference Room

Panel Details Day 1, Thursday 27th

11:00 – 12:30

Panel 1: Tools and Instruments of Knowledge

• Floris Solleveld (KU Leuven), Administrators as ‘human instruments’ • Jane Wess, Physical and Social Challenges for Western Knowledge Creation: The Roles of Instruments at the Periphery • Steven J Burke (Sheffield Hallam U.), Colonial Fantasies of Martial Races and Untamed Places: British travel accounts from post-Napoleonic Atlantic peripheries

Panel 2: The Impact of the Individual

• Tom Menger (U. of Cologne), Knowledge Production and Transfer on the Violence of Colonial Warfare in the British Empire, c. 1890-1910 • Porscha Fermanis (U. College Dublin), ‘No Literature worthy of the name’: Ethnographic Knowledge Formation and Literary Appreciation in Nineteenth-Century Singapore • Martin Mahony (U. of East Anglia), Imperial Weather: Meteorology and British Colonialism in the Long Nineteenth Century

Panel 3: Navigating Colonial Space

• Philip Jagessar (U. of Nottingham), Circulation, Correspondence and Cartographic Networks: The Linguistic Survey’s Mapping of Languages in Late Colonial India 1896 – 1928 • Alison Bennett (Paul Mellon Centre), Colonial Knowledge Production and its Challenges in Twentieth-Century East Africa: Case Studies on The East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society and Uganda Museum • Ivan Marowa (Independent), The African ‘black-watcher’ and the African ‘carrier’: Bridging the Challenges of Travel and Communication in North-Western Colonial Zimbabwe, 1895-1950

13:30 – 15:00

Panel 4: The Physical Environment

• Joseph Hardwick (Northumbria U.), The Protestant Clergy, the ‘Environmental Sermon’, and Attributing Blame for Drought in Nineteenth-Century Australia and South Africa • Yadhav Deerpaul (National Research U. Higher School of Economics), Debating the Challenges of Constructing Railways in British Mauritius at the Institute of Civil Engineers during the 1860s • Netta Cohen (U. of Oxford), Knowing Climate: Zionist Climate Science in Mandate Palestine (1920-1948) Panel 5: Education and Pedagogy

• Sylvia Vatuk (U. of Illinois at Chicago), Edward Balfour, Colonial Knowledge, and the Muslims of Mid-Nineteenth Century Madras Presidency • Theodore Delwiche (U. of Groningen), Masters of the Manuscript, Makers of Knowledge: Student Societies in Colonial New England • Edward Y. F. Tan (Ministry of Education, Singapore), A Tale of Two Colonies: Hyper- colonial space of the Straits Settlements and its Influence on the Development of Pedagogical Knowledge, 1867 to 1899

Panel 6: Knowledge Creation in Writing

• Jonathan Westaway (U. of Central Lancashire), Theatres of Silence: Censorship, Central Asian travel narratives and the Imperial Security State in British India, c.1900- 1947 • Jan Seifert (Himalaya Archive Vienna), Touring and Gathering – Diaries as a Source of North-East India‘s Colonial History • Fariha Shaikh (U. of Birmingham), Opium and the Periodical Press: Sites of Knowledge Formation?

15:30 – 17:00

Panel 7: Indigenous Skill and Knowledge

• Tamara Fernando (U. of Cambridge), Cultivating the Seafloor: Colonial and Indigenous Knowledge-Making in the Pearl Fisheries of Ceylon 1880-1925 • Meira Gold (U. of Cambridge), Fertiliser, preservation, and the popularisation of late- Victorian Egyptology • Jules Skotnes-Brown (U. of Cambridge), Subterranean Swarms: multispecies colonisation and the ‘veld plague’ epidemic in South Africa, c. 1920s-30s

Panel 8: Foundations in the Metropole

• Susan Newell (U. of Leeds and Oxford U. Museum of Natural History), Building a Teaching Collection for Oxford: William Buckland’s Sourcing of Geological Specimens via Colonial Networks, c. 1819-45 • Alexandra Eveleigh; Adrian Plau (Wellcome Collection), Colonial Complicity or Conflicted Identity? Paira Mall and the Wellcome Collection • Stuart Mathieson (Queen’s U. Belfast), The Victoria Institute as a Forum for Colonial Knowledge Day 2, Friday 28th

09:00 – 10:30

Panel 9: Collaboration and Cooperation • Zak Leonard (U. of Chicago), Reformist Collaboration and the Formation of Imperial Civil Society • Harald Gropp (Heidelberg U.), Pacific maps and statistical designs --- from Tupaia (1769) to Bose (1936) • Michael Rayner (U. of Sussex), Gates and Darlington: The Battle for Indian Genetics

Panel 10: The Flow of Communications

• Devyani Gupta (U. of Leeds), The Postal Prism: Knowledge Practices and Information Networks in Colonial India • Helena Yoo Roth (Graduate Center of the City U. of New York), Colonial Relativity: Transatlantic Communications, the Multiplicity of Time, and the Coming of the American Revolution • David Schorr (Tel Aviv U.), The Society of Comparative Legislation and the Mechanics of Imperial Law Reform

Panel 11: Exporting Knowledge

• Heeral Chhabra (U. of Delhi), Exploring ‘Animal-Connects’ of the Empire: Creating Knowledge about Animals and their ‘Welfare’ through SPCAs of Colonial India • Priya Naik (Zakir Husain Delhi College), The Patent Truth: Explorations in the Circulation of the Patent Act, Science and Modernity in Colonial South Asia (1859- 1950) • Tarquin Holmes (London School of Economics), Rabies, Rabbits and Robben Island: Alexander Edington and the Problematic Logistics of Pasteurising Cape Colony

11:00 – 12:30

Panel 12: Commercial knowledge

• Chelsea Davis (The George Washington U.), Cultivating Networks of Knowledge: Improving Britain’s Colonial Wine Industry at the Cape of Good Hope • Sarah Pickman (Yale U.), ‘Extreme Portability’: Circulating Medical Knowledge to and from Britain with Burroughs-Wellcome, 1890-1940 • Gita Bania (U. of Hyderabad), Colonial Bioprospection of Cannabis in Indian North- Eastern Frontier (1826-1925)

Panel 13: Hierarchies and Scholarship

• Sarah Qidwai (U. of Toronto), The Munsif in Delhi: Intellectual Communities and Vernacular Translations in 19th India • Sarah Irving (Edge Hill U.), Scholarly hierarchies in a colonial setting: the case of the Palestine Oriental Society • Robert Frost (U. of Nottingham), Employer or employee? The Negotiated Nature of Gardner Wilkinson’s Egyptological work 13:30 – 15:00

Panel 14: Decolonisation

• Swathi Gorle (Rutgers, State U. of New Jersey), Andhra After Amarāvathī: Colonial Influence on Archaeology in India • Campbell Price (Manchester Museum), Knowing Egypt. Petrie, Haworth and the Victorian Desire for Ancient Egypt • Megan Kuster (U. College Dublin), ‘Language adheres to the soil’: Natural History Knowledge Formation in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand

Panel 15: Knowledge Communities

• Sarah Comyn (U. College Dublin), Mechanics’ Institutes and Colonial Knowledge on the Goldfields of Victoria • Nicholas Green (U. of Bristol), Community and Colonial Knowledge at the Edge of Empire • Hannah Kelly (U. of Liverpool), William Robertson’s ‘Historical Disquisition on India’, and Knowledge Creation within the Family and Beyond

15:30 – 16:30

Roundtable

Abstracts

Panel 1: Tools and Instruments of Knowledge

Floris Solleveld, Administrators as ‘Human Instruments’ Kapil Raj (Relocating Modern Science, 2007) recounts how the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India recruited and trained local assistants to function as ‘intelligent instruments of measure’. In my presentation, I will discuss to what extent this notion of ‘human instruments’ can also be applied to polymath administrators at a higher level in the hierarchy of knowledge production. What I mean by this is that British colonial administrators were trained and selected according to criteria that predisposed them to gather information and produce knowledge even if this was not part of their official tasks. They were required to draw maps and keep accounts; learning native languages was useful; and writing chorographies and/or building up collections not only brought prestige but also could further their career. Effectively, they were selected and expected to do more interesting things than they were required to do.

The main examples that I will discuss are three authors of ‘Histories’ of Sumatra (William Marsden, 1783), Java (Stamford Raffles, 1817) and the Indonesian archipelago (John Crawfurd, 1820), as well as George Grey, governor of New Zealand and South Africa in the mid-19th century. Marsden, Raffles, and Crawfurd represent three different research agendas with corresponding scholarly personae: the sedentary antiquarian, the highly efficient data collector, and the philosophical historian. Grey, who built one of the world’s largest collections of language material, was something of a caricature of the ideal colonial administrator, seeking to understand Maori culture so as to better civilize it away. Jane Wess, Physical and Social Challenges for Western Knowledge Creation: The Roles of Instruments at the Periphery The Royal Geographical Society was founded in 1830 with a remit to collect, register, digest, and disseminate interesting and useful geographical facts and discoveries. It described itself as a ‘department of science’, giving rise to an imperative to collect numerical data, which necessitated mathematical instruments. The RGS operated in a manner closely resembling the Actor Network Theory model. ‘Immutable mobiles’ circulated repeatedly in order to build up knowledge. At the ‘centre of calculation’, the Map Room in London, the resulting inscriptions from the immutable mobiles were analysed, and disseminated.

However, in practice human actants met constant resistance to immutability and mobility, and struggled to maintain each characteristic. The instruments had agency in several ways: they dictated how things should be done, required resource in their care and use, and required calibration and repair. The paper will argue, using three case studies, that the instruments created particular challenges and imposed constraints.

The three case studies will be that of William Ainsworth to Kurdistan in 1838, that of William Watts to Iceland in 1876, and that of Halford Mackinder to Mount Kenya in 1899. These studies illuminate the way in which instruments in unfamiliar locations, both physically and socially, shaped the process of knowledge creation and the content of knowledge. Steven J Burke, Colonial Fantasies of Martial Races and Untamed Places: British travel accounts from post-Napoleonic Atlantic peripheries Travel writing became a key medium for the development of colonial knowledge acquisition and consumption in Britain in the early the nineteenth century. Utilised as a tool by aspiring traveller-authors for contributing to public discourses on Other places and people, it also came to serve an expected stage in careers between metropole and stretching imperial peripheries. Travel writers in the Atlantic World after 1815 might have been writing from positions of authority as representatives of the British state, or from without that aegis but with the more performative authority of British national-imperial identities and worldviews. Both positions drew on a set of developing cultural assumptions and expectations around the characters of people, landscapes and environments that were applied as paradigms for assessing the subjects of their encounters.

This paper will discuss travel writings by British agents in West Africa’s Gold Coast region, and British mercenaries in Venezuela fighting Imperial Spain. I will examine their ideas about the colonial potential of population groups as military allies or enemies – prototypes of ideas of Martial Races developed through the colonial gaze later in the century. I will also consider characterisations of landscape and environment as blank spaces for colonial civilising processes, or sites of underdevelopment that call for a British colonial model of improvement. These ideas are also considered to belong primarily to the era of Victorian Imperialism between 1850 and 1900. In my paper I will argue that these strands of British Imperial intellectual culture exist in this earlier period.

Panel 2: The Impact of the Individual

Tom Menger, Knowledge Production and Transfer on the Violence of Colonial Warfare in the British Empire, c. 1890-1910 How did the agents of empire produce knowledge on colonial warfare, and its extreme violence in particular? This is a question that is still rarely posed in the research on colonial knowledge production. Furthermore, the special character of the topic means the ways of knowledge production are bound to differ considerably from those in other colonial knowledge fields. Nevertheless, there was knowledge production on colonial warfare and its transgressive violence, as this conference paper will demonstrate. It looks at the British Empire in the specific period of 1890-1910, and takes the 1896-1897 Ndebele-Shona Rising in Rhodesia (current-day Zimbabwe) and the 1898 ‘Hut Tax War’ in Sierra Leone as case studies. While there was little sustained production and diffusion of knowledge on the topic till the 1880s, the acceleration and increase of wars of imperial conquest and post-conquest so-called ‘pacification’ gave a boost to this knowledge field. One can find an indication of this when one looks at the publication of manuals on colonial warfare, which only started to appear in greater numbers in the 1890s. All of them were written by colonial officers with a host of individual experience of colonial warfare ‘on the ground’. One main question of the paper will be how these men processed these personal experiences ‘on the ground’ in the colony into the medium of a manual.

A second question, however, will concern these individuals themselves. As will be shown, most of the knowledge creation and subsequent circulation remained bound to persons (in contrast to written publications) and took place on the ground in the colonies themselves. This did not mean that knowledge was created at many different parts of the empire in isolation; rather, many of the actors of colonial warfare proved surprisingly mobile, crossing colonial and even imperial boundaries and taking their knowledge with them. The wheel did not need to be reinvented every time; knowledge on colonial violence moved in tandem with a relatively small, but generally highly mobile group of actors. Porscha Fermanis, ‘No Literature Worthy of the Name’: Ethnographic Knowledge Formation and Literary Appreciation in Nineteenth-Century Singapore

This paper considers ethnographic knowledge formation in nineteenth-century Singapore, looking in particular at the relationship between metropolitan discourses and regional praxis. It focuses on the interconnections between James Richardson Logan’s Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia (JIA) (1847-55; 1856- 63), the book holdings of the Raffles Library and Museum (est. 1874), and the formation of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (est. 1877) and its journal, The Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JSBRAS) (1879-1922). The first part of the paper argues that these Singapore-based societies, institutions, and publications were part of a concerted effort to create a transregional network of ethnographic and philological researchers who would systematically collect, record, and disseminate ethnological, historical, and economic ‘data’ about East Asia and the Malay Peninsula, thereby attempting to establish Singapore as a ‘centre of calculation’ for the Southeast Asian region that would be taken seriously in the metropole. It considers both the role of amateur ethnographers and Logan’s attempt to systemize local field work by developing ethnological questionnaires and schemes of ‘desiderata’. The second part of the paper looks at translations, literary histories, and ‘appreciations’ of Malay literature by Logan and other British writers in the JIA and the JSBRAS, arguing for the correlation between ethnographic knowledge formation and assessments of Malay literary culture, which relied heavily on philological accounts linking language and race. Martin Mahony, Imperial Weather: Meteorology and British Colonialism in the Long Nineteenth Century European empires were never solely about the horizontal projection of power across geopolitical space. They also had a distinctive verticality – a deep-rooted interest in the skies above – articulated through a concern for the effects of tropical climates on human health, of climatic extremes on colonial political economy, or through an engagement with the atmosphere as a space of imperial connectivity and military power. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these concerns were refracted through the practice of scientific meteorology and climatology. Taking the British Empire as an example, this paper surveys how atmospheric knowledge was pursued, standardized, circulated and put to work in colonial settings as the science of meteorology underwent a transition from the ad hoc compilation of ‘amateur’ observations to an institutionalized and professionalized science of colonial government. The paper contends that the sciences of the atmosphere offer a new opportunity to examine the relations between science and colonialism, having so far been overlooked in studies of institutionalisation and standardisation, the materialities of colonial knowledge-making, the scientific activities of colonial administrators, and inter-imperial interactions.

Honing in on the colonial career of Albert Walter – meteorologist, statistician and administrator in Mauritius and British East Africa – the paper shows how meteorology rose to prominence as a trans- local imperial science in the first half of the twentieth century, leaving residues that shape the post- colonial production of atmospheric knowledges to this day.

Panel 3: Navigating Colonial Space

Philip Jagessar, Circulation, Correspondence and Cartographic Networks: The Linguistic Survey’s Mapping of Languages in Late Colonial India 1896 – 1928 The Linguistic Survey commenced in 1898 with the aim of comprehensively surveying, classifying and mapping the numerous languages and dialects of India. Supervised by the Anglo-Irish civil servant and linguist, George Grierson, the Survey took five years to complete and by the time the final volume was published in 1928 over 700 languages and dialects had been classified and 45 maps produced.

This paper will examine the practicalities and complexities of locating, defining and fixing the geographies of languages in colonial India. Conventional surveying, such as those undertaken by the Survey of India, relied on field expeditions, technicians and instruments to create or improve maps. The Linguistic Survey’s mapping on the other hand, relied on the circulation of maps through correspondence to identify, locate and fix the geography of languages and dialects. These cartographic networks were built upon the on-the-ground knowledge of local informants, political agents, missionaries and so forth, some of whom went to great lengths in the remotest parts of India to identify the geographical extent of languages.

In examining and highlighting the practical issues and difficulties in mapping languages this paper will argue that the ‘language map’ should not only be understood as the visible, published map but that these cartographic networks function as the invisible, unpublished ‘language map’. Alison Bennett, Colonial Knowledge Production and its Challenges in Twentieth-Century East Africa: Case Studies on The East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society and Uganda Museum This paper will examine some of the complex logistics surrounding natural history knowledge production in colonial East Africa during the early twentieth century.

Using the archives of the East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society (UEANHS) and the Uganda Museum (UM) as its focus, the paper will illuminate a number of logistical challenges faced by these institutions in the course of their construction and development. These issues largely revolved around: colonial governmental funding (or lack thereof) for learned societies in the region; housing such organizations and storing and administering their collections; and maintaining communication among members of this scholarly network in the face of vast geographical distances (both within eastern Africa and with the metropole). In probing these issues, this paper will demonstrate the vital role of the UEANHS and UM in the colonial knowledge project. At the same time, it will expose a number of significant logistical tensions within the colonial community and state, and also highlight the critical roles of specific individuals in challenging the overwhelmingly elite, white, male colonial power structures underpinning these institutions of knowledge. Ivan Marowa, The African ‘Black-Watcher’ and the African ‘Carrier’: Bridging the Challenges of Travel and Communication in North-Western Colonial Zimbabwe, 1895-1950 Real colonisation started upon arrival in the colonies and not with signing of treaties. It involved putting into place requisite administrative structures, knowing and building a relationship with the people and taming the environment. For this to be achieved there was need to traverse long distances of broken landscapes, valleys and escarpments. Communication networks were non-existent, but in those circumstances of absence, colonisation was made to happen and reach peripheral areas that were hundreds of kilometres away from the political centre. This paper intends to argue that the horse, campus, the diary and the African himself became integral to logistics of travel and communication in the absence of telephones, trains and vehicles in that age within the colony. The paper will put much emphasis on the African because he became the backbone of the colonial structure in connecting the metropole and the periphery and in making sure that the Native administrative office communicated with and travelled to the peripheral areas. African men became the Native Commissioner’s (NC) policemen, postmen and those in villages acted as the ‘horses’ in carrying the NC during his visits. Yet, their duties have not been recognised in most researches on the colonial history of British Africa. This paper will use data gathered between 2011 and 2018 from north-western Zimbabwe, which is the case study, to build its argument.

Panel 4: The Physical Environment

Joseph Hardwick, The Protestant Clergy, the ‘Environmental Sermon’, and Attributing Blame for Drought in Nineteenth-Century Australia and South Africa Drought was an acute threat to the nineteenth-century empire of British settlement. Colonists who moved into the semi-arid regions of southern Africa and Australia in prosperous years looked on helplessly as rainclouds disappeared, water courses dried up, crops shrivelled, and animals died of thirst and starvation in colossal numbers. Droughts bred fear, despair and uncertainty – politicians, pastoralists, farmers, meteorologists and astronomers all offered theories on the causes, periodicity and length of drought, but no colonist could explain why rainfall was so variable and why some dry periods lasted longer than others. This paper examines another group who spoke publicly on the drought phenomena in southern Africa and the Australian colonies – the clergy of the Protestant churches.

Thanks to the work of Richard Grove, Georgina Endfield, James Beattie and others, much is known about how Christian missionaries helped develop a conservationist conscience in British colonies. Yet there is more to say about the role Protestant clergy played in shaping settler understandings of drought. Clergymen initiated drought relief funds, summoned colonists to collective acts of fasting and prayer, and communicated advice to agriculturists on appropriate farming techniques. Importantly, clergy introduced the idea that someone – some moral agent – was to blame for drought. Through a comparison of the delivery and reception of an archive of Australian and South African drought-related ‘environmental sermons’, this paper broadens our understanding of when and how settlers talked about and reflected on drought. It also shows how religious understandings of dangerous and extreme weather interacted with, but remained distinct from, naturalistic and scientific forms of explanation. Yadhav Deerpaul, Debating the Challenges of Constructing Railways in British Mauritius at the Institute of Civil Engineers during the 1860s Railways have been constructed in many British colonies but their construction in Mauritius, an Indian Ocean island of volcanic origin, brought to the forefront novel engineering difficulties. The papers and discussions of engineers at the Institution of Civil Engineers have never been analyzed historically but they provide an insight on how geological constraints in Mauritius could have had influenced the construction of railways around the globe. The views of the main engineers involved - John Hawkshaw and James Longridge - often collided with those who were not necessarily familiar with the island but who had experience or knowledge of railways in places such as Mont Cenis or Madras. The first engineering challenge involved the steep gradient which was unavoidable due the relief of the island. Other engineers, contradicting Longridge, believed that it should have had been less steep or the focus should have been on locomotives and carriages rather. The second issue concerned the Grand River Viaduct where the usage of girders and piers diverted from the original plan. Skids were also preferred over rollers as there were only small foundries. In both cases, John Hawkshaw - who was also one of the most prominent railway engineers of the period - advocated that there should be no rigid rules regarding the engineering choices but improvisation should be privileged due to the unique circumstances of each location. Netta Cohen, Knowing Climate: Zionist Climate Science in Mandate Palestine (1920-1948)

This paper focuses on the evolution of Zionist climate research in Palestine during the British Mandate. In the late nineteenth century, British astronomer George Airy opined that ‘the observing is out of all proportion to the thinking in meteorology’. Indeed, until World War I experts who collected climatic data were usually short of systematic methods to assist them in utilising this data for practical needs. The conduct of modern warfare and especially the effect of weather on airplanes during the war, boosted the study of meteorology to a new level.

Meteorological developments in Palestine were mainly a product of British military strategies in this land. During its early days the meteorological service consisted mainly of British colonial officers, but it did not take long until this service began cooperating with local Jewish experts and institutions. Nevertheless, the growing interest in climate sciences within the Jewish community in Palestine was not only a direct result of British influences. It also reflected Zionists’ own colonial interests in the natural conditions of the country and their fear of the potential ramification of local climate on the success of the Zionist project. The aim of this paper is to present the political, social and cultural ideas and conventions which constructed and guided the work of practitioners within climate research in Palestine while simultaneously examining the ways in which Jewish experts absorbed scientific knowledge in Europe and its colonies.

Panel 5: Education and Pedagogy

Sylvia Vatuk, Edward Balfour, Colonial Knowledge, and the Muslims of Mid-Nineteenth Century Madras Presidency

This paper addresses efforts by Dr. Edward Green Balfour (1813-1889) to persuade the elite Muslims of the Madras Presidency to begin learning English and replace their traditional Islamic forms of learning with the “superior” knowledge brought to them by the British. Born and educated in Edinburgh, Balfour joined the Madras Army medical service in 1834. During his forty-five-year career in India he wrote voluminously on myriad aspects of its culture, public health, and environment and established India’s first zoo and government museums in Madras and Mysore.

Appointed Government Agent to the Nawab of the Carnatic in 1851, he focused for several years on the “reform,” “uplift,” and “moral regeneration” of the “Mahomedan race”. Concerned that Muslims were “falling behind” Hindus in acquiring “modern,” knowledge, he secured funding for a Muslim public library and tried— unsuccessfully—to convince the Muslim intelligentsia to form a “Society for Arts and Sciences” in which to exchange ideas on subjects of shared interest. He then persuaded the Nawab to host a school for Muslim boys in his palace but resigned from its managing board when its religious members refused to include English or any “Western” subjects in its curriculum.

Opposing cultural values led Muslims associated with the Nawabi to resist Balfour’s efforts to impose “useful knowledge” over “learning for the glory of God”, a contest that, ultimately, their descendants were to lose. Theodore Delwiche, Masters of the Manuscript, Makers of Knowledge: Student Societies in Colonial New England

Intellectual histories, and even histories of education all too often focus their attention on the pedagogue over the pupil. Narratives of colonial curricula present education as rote drudgery, with students the passive – and unwitting – recipients of esoterica. Assignments entailed needless notetaking and repetition of worn, dated information. Like the famed case of the disillusioned Edward Gibbon, it is only after the student survives his school days that he can begin the real work of the mind. Making use of overlooked student manuscripts and notebooks at 18th century American colleges, this paper will reject this premise and instead argue that students were active creators of knowledge in the colonial context who not only followed prescribed curricula, but forged robust networks of learning outside the classroom. Many of the earliest student clubs and debate societies in the British American colonies were formed by students themselves as a means of supplementing – and even maybe supplanting – official curricula. By examining all but neglected student manuscripts in English, Latin, and Greek, we are able at once to both understand and appreciate the colonial college as a place of experimentation and knowledge creation, where the Res Public Litterarum extended beyond just Europe and into the new world and the British North American colonies.

Edward Y. F. Tan, A Tale of Two Colonies: Hyper-Colonial Space of the Straits Settlements and its Influence on the Development of Pedagogical Knowledge, 1867 to 1899

The development of pedagogical knowledge in the British Empire during the latter half of the 19th century presents an opportunity to study the extent and limits of British knowledge and power. Pedagogical knowledge — an understanding of who, what, and how to teach — was neither developed in the metropole or the colonies. The British officials of the Straits Settlements, while desiring to ‘civilise’, made no pretensions about the poor state of education in the Settlements and Britain. These deficiencies were exposed by a self- confident Chinese settler colony in the same colonial space. Mirroring the British narrative of civilisation, Chinese newspapers framed Chinese education as a need to “prevent our children from degenerating into barbarians”. One would mistake the copybooks of Mancunian schools in the Fitch Report (1870) and the text recitations in Chinese schools to have came from the same pedagogical cosmology. In this hyper-colony, the realities on the ground meant the developed pedagogical knowledge came to represent a liminal space between the British and Chinese colonial projects. Both colonies had to recognise the limits of their power while attempting to socialise the youth of society in their own image. The late-19th century marked the beginnings of British attempts to codify this field of knowledge, starting with the founding of Education Departments across the empire to fact-find develop and understanding pedagogical knowledge; and the hyper-colonial nature of the Straits Settlements allows a rare insight into British weaknesses and fears as this field of knowledge was developed.

Panel 6: Knowledge Creation in Writing

Jonathan Westaway, Theatres of Silence: Censorship, Central Asian Travel Narratives and the Imperial Security State in British India, c.1900-1947

The establishment of the British Consulate General in Kashgar, Xinjiang, in 1890 extended British political influence and intelligence-gathering capabilities deep into Central Asia. Adjacent to the borders of three empires, Kashgar became the main source of information filtering back to British India about Central Asia. The romance of Central Asia ensured that Kashgar became a prime posting for ambitious political officers in the Government of India. British border cadres in Kashgar wrote about their time in Xinjiang in a series of travel books that have shaped British attitudes to Chinese Central Asia. Conforming to the conventions of travel writing, they are rich in chorographic, geographical and ethnographic detail but to varying degrees they avoid politics. Prior to publication, these Central-Asian travel narratives were all submitted to political censors in the Foreign and Political Department of the Government of India and the India Office in London. Authors self- censored, promising to avoid military and pollical subjects and subjects with which the governments of Russia and Afghanistan could take exception. This paper problematizes these texts. They require both reading ‘against the grain’ and cross referencing with the India Office archives. They invite a new historicism that raises wider issues about travel narratives authored by colonial officials as historical sources. Travel writing as a federated genre has always been adept at narrative sleight-of-hand, the travel book itself a form of legitimation, a cover story. These texts are aporetic and governed by silence, part of the repertoire of steganographic techniques employed by the imperial security state. Jan Seifert, Touring and Gathering – Diaries as a Source of North-East India’s Colonial History

North-East India’s history has been studied from various viewpoints, using the vast body of governmental sources in archives in India and abroad. Administration policies of the East India Company and later the British India Government, implemented in various and often contradictory ways, have been at the centre of many works. Less importance has been given to the ways information on the people was gathered, the base of all administration efforts. In many areas, especially tribal territories, administration took place in a peculiar way – through touring. Administrators would travel the administered and controlled areas, while collecting taxes, dealing with legal cases, assessing and counting villages and also gather a plethora of other information – official and personal in character. This information would be written down in tour diaries, later used to provide detail and context on various levels of administration. They also describe personal experiences, ideas, plans, local incidents and more – traceable over long time periods – and became a source for ethnographic monographs and area histories written by these administrators and others. I will give examples of the materials gathered and found in diaries of J.H. Hutton, administrator in the Naga Hills in the first half of the 20th century, and trace the various themes found therein, complementing them with excerpts from non-official diaries, like Henry Balfour’s, of the same period and area. Fariha Shaikh, Opium and the Periodical Press: Sites of Knowledge Formation?

The two Opium Wars of the nineteenth century have traditionally been seen as one of pivotal moments in which China was ‘opened up’ to colonial powers. During this time, as debate over the ethical and moral implications of the opium trade and Wars came to dominate the pages of the periodical press, so too did popular interest in the opium factory as a specific site of commodity production. At the same time, news coverage of both the Opium Wars bled into a broader concomitant fascination with Chinese customs, culture and society. Reading across a broad range of periodicals, such as the Illustrated London News, the Graphic, Household Words, Blackwood’s Magazine, Fraser’s Magazine, and the Examiner, this paper will demonstrate how the British periodical press played a pivotal part in the formation of colonial knowledge of not only China, but also of a wider interconnected colonial world, as British opium was grown in India, and then smuggled into China. This paper seeks to examine the ways in which the periodical press played an important part in not only keeping a British audience up to date with the progress of the war, but was also vital in producing colonial knowledge of a culture and society that had hitherto seemed opaque, foreign and unfamiliar. As it will demonstrate, however, this knowledge was only ever partial and provisional.

Panel 7: Indigenous Skill and Knowledge

Tamara Fernando, Cultivating the Seafloor: Colonial and Indigenous Knowledge-Making in the Pearl Fisheries of Ceylon 1880-1925

In addition to commodities such as cotton, tea or opium, the late nineteenth-century British Empire also oversaw several sites in the Indian Ocean responsible for the production of a luxury maritime product—pearls. Running bountiful fisheries necessitated a knowledge of the life cycle, breeding patterns and pearl-formation operations of the mollusc Margaritifera from whom pearls were extracted. Colonial knowledge about the pearl oyster circulated ‘horizontally’ through sites of empire: the five-volume series on the Ceylon Pearl Oyster produced by William Herdmann in Ceylon, for example, circulated in London and in the fisheries of the Persian Gulf and to Lower Burma. But the transfer and diffusion of knowledge also took place ‘vertically’, from the seafloor to the deck of a ship and onwards to a laboratory—the passage underwater, importantly, was only undertaken by ‘native’ divers, not by European scientists. Using sources from the Ceylon pearl fishery, this paper thus investigates ways of knowledge-making which were dependent on an underwater aquatic realm. Was this a space removed from the archive and the official gaze and how is it reconstructed via surveys, divers’ reports and seabed hauls? How did native skill and expertise about the seafloor then interact with colonial overseers and scientists in the transfer into printed ‘science’? Meira Gold, Fertiliser, Preservation, and the Popularisation of Late-Victorian Egyptology

Following the British occupation of Ottoman-Egypt in 1882, Victorian Egyptologists fashioned their discipline into a colonial field science. Disciplinary developments owed as much to new Anglo-Egyptian relations abroad as they did to increasing specialisation, professionalisation, and popularisation at home. The mid-nineteenth century ‘communications revolution’ created a mass British readership, and for the first time, writers published cheaply on ancient Egypt for non-specialist audiences. David Gange has shown that British popularisers such as Amelia Edwards and Flinders Petrie promoted urgent ‘preservation’ of antiquity to fund- raise for further archaeological work in Egypt; however ulterior motives actually resulted in the wide-scale destruction of Egyptian material heritage (Gange 2015). Building on this research, my paper will focus on the communication of excavations at Tell el-Yahudiyeh, in 1887 by the Egypt Exploration Fund and in 1905 by the British School of Archaeology in Egypt. Archaeologists relied on local labour and knowledge, but just as quickly condemned Egyptian motives. This tension played out in the condemnation of sebakh (fertiliser). Nineteenth- century Egypt underwent massive agricultural reforms to increase the country’s cotton exportation to the European—especially British—textile industry. Egyptian fellahin (peasants) responded by digging up fertilizer from nearby tells (abandoned mounds built up over time from human occupation) where the soil was known to be particularly rich in nitrates from decomposed ancient mudbrick. My paper will explore how British Egyptologists seeking disciplinary legitimisation both benefited from and criticised sebakhin in order to promote archaeology to the public and prove their utility to the Foreign Office.

Jules Skotnes-Brown, Subterranean Swarms: Multispecies Colonisation and the ‘Veld Plague’ Epidemic in South Africa, c. 1920s-30s

The ‘veld plague’ epidemic which swept across rural South Africa in the 1920s-30s, posed a near- insurmountable challenge to the new Department of Public Health. Since 1894, bubonic plague had ravaged port cities across the globe, and scientists developed numerous technologies for ‘destroying’ brown and black rats. Such technologies were effective in South African cities, and by 1905, plague was presumed to have been eradicated. Yet in 1920, Secretary of Public Health, James Mitchell, discovered that infection had spread amongst veld (uncultivated land) rodents. Unlike urban-rats, these burrowing rodents were challenging to locate, let alone kill. Rodent-extermination, as was policy in plague-infected cities across the British empire, was declared impossible.

This paper investigates the logistical challenge of combatting this disease in an environment where pre- existing anti-plague strategies were useless – subterranean rural southern Africa. The appearance of a medieval disease in a rapidly-modernising agricultural milieu, I argue, provoked a disturbing realisation, which exposed the limits of colonial environmental power. As settler farmers colonised the highveld, cleared bush, and exterminated wildlife, they upset the ‘balance of nature.’ This facilitated a form of animal colonisation absent in African land reservations: infected ‘veld rodents’ were ‘colonising’ new areas. Mitchell’s response relied upon the knowledge of indigenous Africans, settler farmers, zoologists, and even wildlife. Ultimately, the concept of ‘veld plague’ and methods for preventing it blurred the boundaries between humans and animals. Farmers were transformed into gas-wielding rat ‘destroyers’ who assumed the role of the rodent-predators they had exterminated, while numerous wild animals were reconceived as agents of public health.

Panel 8: Foundations in the Metropole.

Susan Newell, Building a Teaching Collection for Oxford: William Buckland’s Sourcing of Geological Specimens via Colonial Networks, c. 1819-45

William Buckland, first joint Reader in Geology and Mineralogy at Oxford University developed an extensive body of materials and specimens for his combined activities of teaching and research during his tenure. His work as a geological theorist has received much attention, this paper however, will focus on the part played by the network of naval officers, naturalists and former students that supplied Buckland with international specimens for his collection.

Buckland received rocks, minerals and fossils officially and unofficially throughout his career from throughout the globe. Jurassic specimens were presented by Captain Gerard who explored remote valleys in Himachal Pradesh, northern India c. 1820, while Captain Beechey sent Pleistocene mammal bones and a bowl of mammoth ivory bought from the Innuit following his voyage to the Arctic voyage of 1825-28. Further items arrived from Woodbine Parish in Argentina, Thomas Hobbes Scott and Allan Cunningham in Australia and New Zealand, as well as William Fox-Strangways in Russia. Buckland’s personal involvement with these exploratory enterprises is not generally recognised, nor is their role in cementing Buckland’s position at the hub of an international geological network. The related collections that survive in Oxford today will be investigated in this paper, as well as what can be gleaned of their place in Buckland’s work. Alexandra Eveleigh; Adrian Plau, Colonial Complicity or Conflicted Identity? Paira Mall and the Wellcome Collection

The Wellcome Collection holds one of the world’s largest collections of South Asian manuscripts outside of South Asia. A majority of these were collected between 1911 and 1921 by Dr Paira Mall, a Doctor of Medicine from the University of Munich, a polyglot of South Asian and Middle Eastern languages, and from 1910 an agent of the Wellcome. Throughout his travels, Dr Mall was in continuous correspondence with the Wellcome in London, describing his activities and potential purchases. This archive, available online at wellcomecollection.org, provides a unique and granular account of the practicalities of negotiating colonial knowledge to the metropolis; tasked with acquiring materials relating to health and medicine, Dr Mall assumed the role of interpreter of traditional systems of knowledge, literature and circulation. In this talk, we will use Dr Mall’s archive as a site to explore wider questions of representation, complicity, and identity in the gathering and establishment of colonial archives and knowledge systems, as well as exploring traces of the metropolis in the manuscript materials Dr Mall gathered.

Stuart Mathieson, The Victoria Institute as a Forum for Colonial Knowledge

The Victoria Institute was a society established in London in 1865 to defend scripture from ‘science, falsely so called’. Drawn from middle class evangelical and philanthropic circles, it began as a largely metropolitan venture, concerned with the relationship between science and religion. However, it quickly expanded, and, by the 1880s, boasted more than 1,500 members spread across the globe. Many of these members were missionaries working in Britain’s disparate dominions and colonies, who participated in processes of knowledge creation and exchange. Observations on indigenous cultures, comparative religion, and palaeontology were presented at the Victoria Institute’s meetings, hoping to shed scientific light on religious questions. After the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, this process intensified, with proceedings at the Victoria Institute dominated by biblical archaeology and scriptural geography. These were attempts to prove the historical reliability of the Bible through detailed study of the landscape and monuments of Egypt, including efforts to explain how the Red Sea had been parted, and retracing the route of the Exodus through the Sinai desert. This paper examines the Victoria Institute as an interdisciplinary space in which knowledge, especially as it pertained to Christianity, was exchanged between colony and metropole. In particular, it demonstrates how the dominant epistemology at the Victoria privileged physical presence in the spaces portrayed, of having personally witnessed what was being described. Those who had obtained their knowledge through direct experience and presence in the colonial field were therefore held to have a particular authority.

Panel 9: Collaboration and Cooperation

Zak Leonard, Reformist Collaboration and the Formation of Imperial Civil Society

In the early-Victorian period, agitators affiliated with the British India Society and later the India Reform Society regularly complained about the dearth of accurate information on Indian affairs available in the metropole. The East India Company, in their view, was unwilling to publicize its nefarious deeds; its agents also remained aloof from the native populace and dismissed Indian public opinion as solely representative of special-interest groups. Focusing on this lack of mutual comprehension, this paper will argue that reformers in both Britain and India were attempting to construct a new, visionary social formation: an imperial civil society composed of modular associations working in tandem to counter a despotic state. These webs of contact also formed on an individual level, as veteran British reformers advised members of the new native political associations on constitutionalist techniques. The lengthy exchange between former railway promoter John Chapman and Jagannath Sunkersett, a leading merchant and founder of the Bombay Association, provides key insight into this transfer of knowledge and its attendant frustrations. Confronted with official stonewalling during the Company’s charter renewal debate in 1853, the Association consulted Chapman on petitioning tactics, private lobbying, and public information campaigns that could demonstrate the authenticity of its claims and grievances. Not all members of the native intelligentsia, however, believed that the upstart Bombay Association was adequately equipped to carry out such an audacious project. These tensions lie at the heart of this paper, which approaches the reformers’ conceptualization of civil society as a foundational element of an envisioned liberal imperial union. Harald Gropp, Pacific Maps and Statistical Designs --- from Tupaia (1769) to Bose (1936)

In this talk two very different cases of cooperation of „colonial“scholars with British (and German) scholars will be discussed, one from the first quarter of the „very long 19th century“ (1750-1950) and one from its last quarter. The first example produces a map which remains quite unknown till today without big impact. The second example is a long-term cooperation in the 1930s which „gives birth“ to a new mathematical theory (or even two theories) and has had an ever growing scientific impact in the last 90 years both in theoretical mathematics as well in applications in agriculture, biology, medicine, and in other disciplines. The voyages of James Cook explored the seas in precolonial times. For the second voyage he invited father and son Forster as scientific experts. Together with the Tahitian Tupaia who was on board the British ship for several months on the way to New Zealand a map was produced who in an interesting cooperation combined Pacific and European tradition and knowledge in geography and cartography. In the 1930s a mathematical theory was born in British India in order to build up an Indian statistics of its own. This development supported the way to Indian independence and was a cooperation of the British statistician R.A. Fisher. The German F.W. Levi who had emigrated from Nazi Germany, and among other Indians the young R.C. Bose.

Michael Rayner, Gates and Darlington: The Battle for Indian Genetics

This paper explores the interactions of two prominent British geneticists, Cyril Darlington and Reginald Ruggles Gates, with Indian scientists and institutions. Both held positions of powers in academic institutions and were influential to the development of the field of genetics. More importantly, they had long-standing relations with several important Indian geneticists and participated actively in scientific conferences and debates.

By his own calculation, Gates, Professor at King’s College, had the largest number of Indian students of any British laboratory at the time. He used his influence to establish them in prominent positions in important research centres in India, including the Haffkine Institute, the University of Calcutta and Bose Institute. Darlington, Director of the John Innes Horticultural Society, had significantly fewer contacts in India, but those he did have included Janaki Ammal, a highly regarded cytologist, and Birbal Sahni, renowned palaeobotanist and president of the Indian Botanical Congress.

Their influence on Indian genetics is examined with particular reference to their debate in the late 1930s on the structure of the chromosome. India became the platform for this debate, largely unvoiced in Great Britain, as Darlington and Gates polarised their networks against one another. Beginning with the publication of an article by one of Gates’s students, this paper shows how various platforms were used by both scientists to propagate their theories, including education bodies, conferences, individual scientific friendships and publication bias.

Panel 10: The Flow of Communications

Devyani Gupta, The Postal Prism: Knowledge Practices and Information Networks in Colonial India

This paper focusses on the creation of a knowledge society vis-à-vis the standardisation of the postal system in nineteenth century India, while highlighting colonial mechanisms of control which facilitated and systematised the circulation of information. Networks of postal communication served as a medium of colonial conquest, consolidation and control, providing an over-arching imperialist infrastructure as well as regimes of administration and governance over India and its colonial outposts.

The colonial post office single-handedly facilitated the structuration of knowledge about, and control over, both the physical and sociopolitical terrain of the Indian subcontinent, which in turn ensured military and commercial advantages for the colonial state. This paper will underline the significance behind the pattern of laying postal lines, which, I argue, throws light on the spatial character and ethnographic encounters of colonial rule in India. The expansion of the physical frontiers of the colonial empire was accompanied by the deepening of imperialist intervention in the everyday social life of India. Considerations of temporality and spatiality were central to this discourse and attest to the importance of scientific and knowledge practices in achieving colonial domination. This was manifested, among other things, in colonial preoccupation with the establishment of a fool-proof and efficient communication network.

The drive towards standardisation resulted in the attempted subordination and control over all effective means of information exchange and communication, as well as in the piecemeal establishment of institutional structures of knowledge formation and colonial governance. This paper will demonstrate how the organisation of colonial postal administration in India turned out to be, among other things, a scientific experiment, a cartographical exercise and a sociological undertaking. Helena Yoo Roth, Colonial Relativity: Transatlantic Communications, the Multiplicity of Time, and the Coming of the American Revolution From the edges of empire, colonists developed dual senses of time. Day to day, they lived within a steady provincial time with each sunrise and sunset. However, these colonists also lived in the herky-jerky instability of imperial time with the arrival of each mail packet ship. Letters, newspapers, and magazines allowed provincial Americans to binge-read imperial news (and binge-live imperial lives) from the periphery. After weeks and months of silence and isolation, these colonists would lurch into a version of the imperial present. But the irony was that their imperial present was actually the imperial past; the news would be already outdated by weeks if not months by the time it arrived in the North American colonies. Colonists understood, in a way and to a degree that those at the imperial center could not, the fundamental fact that news could only travel as fast as a ship could sail or a horse could run.

The development and popularization of serial print in the form of newspapers and magazines across the British Atlantic world allowed colonial readers to develop new understandings of time. Living both provincial and imperial times, American colonists wrestled with the ideas of relativity and subjectivity. As transatlantic communication networks improved during and after the Seven Years War with the development of regular mail packet ships, heightened expectations that letters and printed materials could knit the rapidly expanding empire together crashed into the realities of eighteenth-century communications. I argue that this colonial relativity is central to understanding the seemingly paranoid and conspiratorial thinking of American colonists in the decades leading up to the American Revolution. David Schorr, The Society of Comparative Legislation and the Mechanics of Imperial Law Reform

The Society for Comparative Legislation, based in London but with members, correspondents, and supporters all around the British Empire, was active from 1895 until the 1950s. Its reformist goal was to collect information on legislation from around the empire and make it available to legislators, officials, and scholars; it did so through its eponymous journal, which included an annual survey of legislation from around the empire and beyond. The journal was the first English-language comparative law journal; the only one in the world until the 1950s.

The commonwealth of legal letters was made possible and facilitated by a specific set of technological, political, administrative, and social circumstances and structures. The Society was founded just as fast steamships and empire-wide penny post made the dispatch of manuscript articles from around the world to London and journal copies back out again fast and cheap enough to make an Empire-wide journal possible. Though a private organization, the Society's leaders made frequent use of contacts in the Colonial and India Offices to encourage colonial officials and governments, as well as governmental bodies in the UK, to contribute both written material and financial support. The imperial concerns reflected in the content of this groundbreaking organ of legal scholarship were thus echoed in the imperial channels that encouraged the flow of information, funds, and bound journals along the routes opened by British shipping and official despatches between Whitehall and the colonies.

Panel 11: Exporting Knowledge

Heeral Chhabra, Exploring ‘Animal-Connects’ of the Empire: Creating Knowledge about Animals and their ‘Welfare’ through SPCAs of Colonial India

This paper seeks to explore the ‘animal’ connect between Britain and colonial India in the first half of 20th century with specific reference to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCAs). Gaining its inspiration from Britain based RSPCA (Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), the many SPCAs of colonial India, and later the AISPCA (All India SPCA), modelled themselves in spirit and action on the former. What came along with the formation of these societies were not just the organisational methods and activities, but a certain understanding of cruelty; cruelty ‘prevention’; ‘humane’ action and attitude; and infrastructural creations – all geared towards animal ‘welfare’. These animal-centric concepts and aspects followed ‘colonial-global’ trajectories with active borrowing and reflections across metropoles and colonies. Eventually these ideas became inherent in formulating legal measures for animals, making them politically and legally relevant ‘colonial subjects’. Based on the analysis of centenary report of RSPCA and many annual reports of various SPCAs of colonial India, this paper will attempt to unravel ways through which many of these apparently animal centric concepts, logics and attitudes were used extensively to create popular vocabulary (which still has much currency) to justify legal formulations and related measures ‘for’ animals, but in effect served human-centric ends. The larger aim through this research is to provide entry points to investigate animal-centric gateways in exploring colonial- global connects facilitating imperial legitimation, knowledge creation and exchange not only between the metropole and their respective colony/ies but across the metroples and the colonies. Priya Naik, The Patent Truth: Explorations in the Circulation of the Patent Act, Science and Modernity in Colonial South Asia (1859-1950)

The Patent Act extended to British India in 1859, introduced the distinctly modern idea of the sovereign state recognizing a claim to an invention in the form of a patent. The article examines the receptivity to the idea in British India, by looking at patent applications filed by both natives and Europeans. By the turn of the century, the princely states of Mysore, Travancore, Hyderabad, Jodhpur and Kashmir in an imitation of the imperial British government, extended it to their own states. The creation and percolation of a ‘patent culture’ with the Patent Office in Calcutta as a site of this activity is an intrinsic part of colonial histories of science and technology. Patent records reveal that natives were indeed inventing by tapping into indigenous and modern pools of knowledge and subjecting them to the new modern parameters of the patent: utility and novelty. The latitudinal history of the Patent Office as a colonial institution is representative of the percolation and as well as the limitation of modernity. The article compares the nature of inventive activity between Europe and South Asia. It meditates on the role of language in shaping patentee activity. It concludes by arguing that the skewed proportions of Western and native patents point at invisible and structural ruptures such as the replacement of English with Persian in 1835, and uneducated and illiterate workers in workshops. Tarquin Holmes, Rabies, Rabbits and Robben Island: Alexander Edington and the Problematic Logistics of Pasteurising Cape Colony

In 1891, Cape Colony established the Colonial Bacteriological Institute at Grahamstown (now Makhanda), the first major life science laboratory in what would become South Africa. The colonial government hired Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Edington to head the establishment. An ambitious if middling scientist, Edington saw the post as an opportunity to pioneer Pasteurian veterinary medicine in the region and further hoped to establish the CBI as a major preventative medicine institute. Edington’s ambitions would ultimately be frustrated, with the CBI closing in 1905. Whereas previous literature has largely focused on Edington’s character flaws and difficult relationship with Cape authorities, I will in this paper look at the logistical problems Edington encountered in trying to transplant techniques and technologies developed in Europe to a South African context. My case-study will concentrate on Edington’s difficulties sourcing rabbits for Pasteur’s antirabic vaccine, which he was called upon to produce locally after the 1893 Port Elizabeth rabies outbreak. Despite prior efforts by colonists, European rabbits were not established on the South African mainland, and their importation had moreover been prohibited in 1890 following Australia’s ‘rabbit plague’. Edington was ultimately able to secure feral rabbits from Robben Island, a prison and leper colony, on condition that they be destroyed as part of vaccine production. This case-study highlights not only the logistical difficulties of doing bacteriology in a frontier colony but also the dependence on imperial ecologies of European colonial medicine and laboratory knowledge (re)production.

Panel 12: Commercial Knowledge

Chelsea Davis, Cultivating Networks of Knowledge: Improving Britain’s Colonial Wine Industry at the Cape of Good Hope

When the British Empire took control of the Cape of Good Hope at the beginning of the 19th century, they inherited a nearly 150-year-old wine industry—one that would require serious investment in viticultural knowledge. Low demand for Cape wine in the metropole, its global reputation as a sub-par product, and eventually, the spread of oïdium and the vine disease phylloxera to the Cape would eventually initiate more direct colonial intervention in the scientific improvement of winegrowing. Admittedly not a wine-producing state at home, the British Empire created colonial departments, like the Cape Department of Agriculture, and respective positions like Colonial Viticulturist or Botanist, to diffuse new scientific, viticultural methods to local wine farmers. Through government-sponsored publications, the establishment of agricultural colleges and experimental wine farms, and travel to and correspondence with the old wine worlds, these ‘viticultural intermediaries’ sought to improve the growth, production, and circulation of the commodity, demonstrating a vested interest in preserving the colonial industry. Moreover, wine’s reification as a ‘civilizing’ drink for ‘savage’ colonies meant that improvement of the product would equally elevate the ‘nature’ of the local population. This paper seeks to demonstrate that colonial knowledge was not necessarily a function solely between metropole and periphery, as viticultural knowledge was often exchanged within and outside the empire. I will also elucidate the negotiation—and at times, rejection—of knowledge at the local level, with Boer winegrowers combatively resisting imperial methods, and even questioning the verity of colonial knowledge. Sarah Pickman, “Extreme Portability”: Circulating Medical Knowledge to and from Britain with Burroughs-Wellcome, 1890-1940

In recent decades, historians have added to our understanding of how both medicine and commodity culture supported British colonialism in the long nineteenth century. Arguably, no company best combined these two phenomena than Burroughs Wellcome & Co. From roughly 1890 until 1940, this British pharmaceutical manufacturer promoted its products as modern marvels, with Western medicine providing universally applicable solutions to human ailments. However, analysis of Burroughs Wellcome’s marketing materials and archives reveals keen attention to local contingencies in British colonies and newly independent Commonwealth nations. Not only did the company tailor its advertisements and products to specific geographic markets – often explicitly appealing to purchasers’ support of British exploration and colonization – but the company actively collected anecdotes about novel or improvised uses of its products “in the field.” Such anecdotes were in turn used in the instruction of its sales staff.

In this paper, I will use Burroughs Wellcome to investigate how local contingencies and logistics underpinned the emerging arena of global medicine around the turn of the twentieth century. Particularly, I will analyze promotional medical reference guides that the company distributed, as well its employee newsletter, which featured testimonials from colonial and Commonwealth doctors, pharmacists, administrators, and explorers. Burroughs Wellcome reveals how the rhetoric of colonial conquest sat alongside anxieties about the shortcomings of Western medicine and bureaucracy in the field. I argue that this case study has implications for understanding medicine and material culture in colonial histories, but also contemporary conversations about the universalizing impulses of global health initiatives. Gita Bania, Colonial Bioprospection of Cannabis in Indian North-Eastern Frontier (1826-1925)

In Asia, during the pre-colonial era, cannabis was extensively used as a medicinal and recreational drug having immense socio-cultural and religious significance. However, in the West, hemp (male derivative of cannabis) was used as a fiber crop for producing various industrial commodities. The Russian hemp blockade against Britain in 1807 marked the onset of Britain’s search for an alternative source of hemp supply in its colonies including India. Moreover, during the 17th century, there was also the colonial search of valuable tropical plants -the process being termed as ‘colonial bioprospection’. This mainly aimed to grow these plants on a large scale for greater commercial profits. This also served towards the colonial hunt for tropical medicines, which involved the collection, study, and classification of exotic medicinal plants. In India, the explorations of various scientists and botanists revealed the Indian cannabis as the fiber producing European hemp. The three categories of researches conducted on cannabis were viz. cannabis fiber production, medicinal cannabis and the preservation and elevation of cannabis intoxicants. This paper will thereby focus on a lesser known history of the colonial policies of amassed knowledge on the various derivatives of cannabis which led to the ‘pre- colonial’ and ‘colonial’ shifts in the perceptions of production process from medicinal cannabis to that of an industrial and commercial commodity in colonial North-Eastern Frontier 1826-1925. Strategic shifts which led to the governmentalization of cannabis, providing a fatal blow to its indigenous usages, compelling native’s reliance on the Raj.

Panel 13: Hierarchies and Scholarship

Sarah Qidwai, The Munsif in Delhi: Intellectual Communities and Vernacular Translations in 19th India

In 1847, Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898), founder of Aligarh Muslim University in India, published an archeological study of Delhi titled Asar-ul-Sanadid (The Remnant Signs of Ancient Heroes). In 1854 he published a significantly different version under the same name. While the first version was written in a highly Persianized form of Urdu, the second version was written in a more accessible vernacular form of the language. Using the period between the two versions of Asar (1847-1854) as a starting point, this paper examines Sayyid Ahmad’s time in Delhi and his reasons behind publishing two drastically different texts under the same title. I argue that his second publication was shaped by intellectual communities in Delhi, formed by locals such as Sayyid Ahmad and Europeans. However, Asar-ul-Sanadid was also part of larger conversations related to translations of English texts to vernacular languages in India. The sites for these discussions included the Delhi Archeological Society (est.1847), Delhi College (est. 1828) and its Vernacular Translation Society. Following the rebellions of 1857, many of these intellectual communities disbanded. Sayyid Ahmad, a Munsif (subordinate judge) working for the East India Company (EIC) at the time, was able to re-establish scholarly networks of Delhi through his Scientific Society (est. 1864) in Ghazipur. It was the time between the publications of Asar that these networks were constructed. This paper this asserts the importance of situating a local figure within the broader context of knowledge production within the British Empire. Sarah Irving, Scholarly Hierarchies in a Colonial Setting: the Case of the Palestine Oriental Society

The Palestine Oriental Society (1920-48) is often referred to in scholarly literature as an anomaly of British Mandate rule in Palestine. Where most social, educational and cultural bodies were strictly segregated between Palestinian Arab, Jewish or foreign imperial groups, the POS is seen as an environment in which scholars met on roughly equal terms. Palestinian Arabs, often marginalised in Mandate society, presented historical, ethnographic and linguistic papers alongside counterparts from numerous other backgrounds, published articles in the Society’s journal, sat on its board, and held officer and editorial roles.

I argue, however, that scrutinising the actual operations of the POS, rather than its public discourses, presents a different picture, and also have methodological implications. The Society’s public face disguises an ethnic hierarchy in which Palestinian Christian Arabs carried out much of the routine labour, and were viewed by other, often more established, scholars as junior members. Internal correspondence from the society shows that in decision-making, internal discourses, and command and allocation of mundane tasks, local Arab participants such as Tawfiq Canaan and Stephan Hanna Stephan – who perhaps had more to lose than international scholars in terms of intellectual interchange and publication opportunities – were far from equal. Despite its outwardly equitable nature, the POS was, in fact, profoundly characterised by colonial assumptions and power relations in its daily operations, highlighting the impact that archives have on how we understand institutional hierarchies, and the extent to which the loss of colonial archives may colour our interpretations of history. Robert Frost, Employer or employee? The Negotiated Nature of Gardner Wilkinson’s Egyptological Work

The history of Egyptology has traditionally been narrated as a record of the heroic achievements of a small number of Orientalist-like European archaeologists. More recently, this positive image has been challenged so that western scholars are now regarded as treasure-hunters interested only in artefacts to fill museums, an interpretation regarded as heavily revisionist just twelve years ago (Hooke, 2007).

To restore a sense of balance to this polarisation, this paper intends to interpret the Egyptological work of John Gardner Wilkinson (1797-1875) through the lens of Heringman’s (2013) concept of the ‘knowledge worker’. Heringman uses the term to describe a scholar or knowledgeable individual, outside the university setting, who offered his/ her services to a wealthier client, for remuneration. I propose to use Heringman’s concept, but allow for it to be two-way: a scholar could employ his/ her own ‘knowledge worker(s)’ in Egypt, but simultaneously fall into this category in Britain.

Applying this to Wilkinson, my presentation has three aims. First, in the absence of any concrete evidence, I intend to consider how Wilkinson may have been helped by indigenous Egyptian ‘knowledge workers’ and potential signifiers of this in the archive by reading ‘against the grain’. Second, I will consider collaborations in Britain: Wilkinson was helped by his publisher, John Murray, and by his wife, Caroline Lucas. Thirdly, since his expensive publications were bought by a wealthy clientele, I will consider the extent to which Wilkinson himself can be regarded as a ‘knowledge worker’.

Panel 14: Decolonisation

Swathi Gorle, Andhra After Amarāvathī: Colonial Influence on Archaeology in India The introduction of antiquarian studies in the nineteenth century marked the beginning of a deliberate, systemic and scholarly approach to cultural heritage in India. Promoted by British administrators, early antiquarian endeavors found their roots in the study of the region's religions, languages, architecture and traditions. Beginning in Bengal, the British investigated and produced a collection of customs and local histories through what they called enquiries. Complex forms of knowledge were then codified and circulated to other regions in India. The nations cultural heritage sites and structures were classified and hierarchized in the same fashion as its social sphere. After Colin Mackenzie's first visit to the great stūpa at Amarāvathī in the late eighteenth century, followed by Sir Walter Elliot's excavation and subsequent dispersal of Amarāvathī's sculptures in the mid-nineteenth century, Andhra Pradesh fell out of significance within the discipline of archaeology. Sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel writes that "acts of omission, after all, are much harder to notice than acts of commission." This paper sets out to challenge this claim by examining, explicating and attempting to reconcile with the implications colonialism has had on archaeology in India. Acts of omission are observable, but the normalization of colonial approaches and modes of thinking has clouded our ability to recognize cultural suppression. The omission of Andhra Pradesh from the archaeological narrative of India's history serves as an invaluable case study on the influences of colonial knowledge on archaeology both in theory and practice. Campbell Price, Knowing Egypt. Petrie, Haworth and the Victorian Desire for Ancient Egypt

The generous support of cotton magnate Jesse Haworth (1835-1920) to archaeologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942), and to the University of Manchester, is one of the central founding fables of Manchester Museum. Yet, close reading of archival correspondence between the key players reveals a more nuanced set of motivations. British Egyptology has tended to praise the contribution of industrial patrons to the development of the ‘science’ of Egyptology, and Haworth appears as a particularly benign and disinterested sponsor. As part of Manchester Museum’s wider promotion of honest discussion around decolonisation of our largely Victorian encyclopaedic collection, this paper re-examines the ‘hero sponsor/archaeologist’ narrative, the role of the cotton industry itself, and factors in the mechanics of the British imperial presence in Egypt that enabled Petrie’s excavations in the first place. Megan Kuster, ‘Language Adheres to the Soil’: Natural History Knowledge Formation in Nineteenth- Century New Zealand

This paper addresses the issue of indigenous participation in natural history knowledge formation in nineteenth-century New Zealand. It focuses on the interdependences between indigenous knowledge brokers, colonial polymath Reverend William Colenso, and Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 1865-1885). Drawing on Plant Determination Lists and specimen memoranda, the first part of the paper examines Kew’s response to Colenso’s interpretations of traditional ecological knowledge from indigenous knowledge brokers who accompanied him on over 18 collecting expeditions between the 1830s and 1880s. Analysing this material alongside two Maori-Latin indexes (both from 1866) included in two editions of Hooker’s Handbook of New Zealand Flora (1864-1867; 1867), the paper argues that the Victorian professionalization of science was dependent on indigenous knowledge brokers for the acquisition of specimens from environments unfamiliar to Europeans. The second part of the paper places Colenso’s ineffectual Maori Lexicon project, and his persistent championing of orthography, in the context of the history of Maori writing and the first Maori-owned printing press in 1857. In staying with the difficulty of nineteenth- century cross-cultural environmental knowledge exchange, this paper contributes to the decolonisation of the nineteenth-century colonial botanic garden.

Panel 15: Knowledge Communities

Sarah Comyn, Mechanics’ Institutes and Colonial Knowledge on the Goldfields of Victoria

On hearing the news in 1854 that a mechanics’ institute was to be established in the gold-rush town of Sandhurst in the Colony of Victoria, Australia, the Melbourne newspaper, The Argus, praised the idea, arguing that formation of the Institute was a ‘movement’ of ‘progress’ and would provide intellectual direction for the ‘discordant materials of our population’. Created as adult educational institutes committed to the intellectual and moral improvement of working men, the mechanics’ institutes emerged in Great Britain in 1821 before proliferating in British colonies throughout the world, including Australia, Canada and South Africa. Following the discovery of gold in 1851, mechanics’ institutes were established in the Colony of Victoria with unprecedented urgency. More mechanics’ institutes were created in Victoria relative to population size than in any other colony in the world. Among the first public institutions created on the goldfields, these institutes contained: a library that provided a reading room for its members, an assembly hall of various sizes depending on the wealth of the institution, and frequently a small museum. Committed to the ‘diffusion of useful knowledge’ the institutes frequently held lectures, soirées and conversaziones on various scientific, political and economic subjects including phrenology and acclimatisation, and the institutes held and participated in scientific and industrial colonial exhibitions. This paper will explore the goldfields mechanics’ institutes’ contribution to these different forms of colonial knowledge and their simultaneous promotion of a settler ideology. Nicholas Green, Community and Colonial Knowledge at the Edge of Empire

Founded in 1928 in Simla the Himalayan Club aspired to be many things to many different people: mountaineering society, learned society, social club, hunting lodge, the list could go on. The Club’s most pertinent forebear, however, and the one which served as a model for the Club’s constitution was the Alpine Club. Why, then, one might ask, did the Himalayan Club dedicate space in the pages of its literary organ The Himalayan Journal to topics like skiing, birdlife, archaeology, cartography, and military reminiscences? And why were members with little, or no mountaineering experience invited to become members? The answer can be found by examining the colonial context in which the Club was founded.

In deciding who would be asked to become a founding member of the Club Geoffrey Corbett, one-time deputy secretary to the Government of India for Commerce and Industry, and Kenneth Mason, from the Survey of India, sought to assemble ‘a solid core of men who have done things’ in the Himalaya. The emphasis on action, as opposed to knowledge or expertise, is important because it reveals that the Himalayan Club, despite its ostensible focus on mountaineering was equally concerned with matters of identity, and community. This paper will explore the ways in which conceptions of Britishness (usually centring on its perceived manliness, empiricism, or sportsmanship) intersected with the realities of a colonial occupation in the Himalaya to produce the Himalayan Club. Hannah Kelly, William Robertson’s Historical Disquisition on India, and Knowledge Creation within the Family and Beyond

While in India, Alexander Walker of Bowland produced a large number of memoranda on the subjects of the history of India, the then present social state of India, and on governing India, particularly during the years at the turn of the nineteenth century. His opinions throughout much of this material made heavy, sometimes contradictory, reference to William Robertson’s Historical Disquisition on India (1791).

Much later in England, in 1814, Walker’s wife, Barbara née Montgomery, would herself keep notes on Robertson’s text. Montgomery’s notes frequently echo the opinions of her husband. This is especially so with regards to Robertson’s ideas on the degenerative effects of the Indian climate on ancient and modern armies, which both Walker and Montgomery repudiate with contemporary military observations. The inference here is that Montgomery was set on the task of reading Robertson by way of Walker, and that she also read much of her husband’s own material on the same subject, or else accumulated many of his ideas through socialisation.

Contributing towards a wider PhD thesis focused on the relation of popular texts and recreational reading to colonial governmentalities, this paper explores the place of associational reading within the family in knowledge formation processes in the British colonies and metropole. In particular, it traces the spread of Walker’s ideas to his wife back to his movement between India and England, and in doing so hints at the importance of the cultural and intellectual capital invested in individuals in transit in the circulation of knowledge in the British Empire.