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- Since its birth around the same time as Europeans began conquering other parts of the world, modern Western science was inextricably entangled with colonialism, especially British imperialism. And the legacy of that colonialism still pervades science today.
www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/science-bears-fingerprints-colonialism-180968709/
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The link between science and colonialism. Throughout the colonial period, science was strongly linked to the expansion of European empires. From the very beginning of this period, when European explorers were rst venturing into the wider world, science was present in the elds of navigation, astronomy, and in the development of new instruments.
The linkages between science and colonization in nonsettler areas of Africa, Asia, and Oceania, where small numbers of Europeans dominated large and diverse colonized populations, were markedly different than in Australia or the United States.
- Michael Adas
- The Gracious Gift of Science
- Imperial Collections
- Modern Colonial Science
- Mistrust and Resistance
- Science Must Fall?
- The Path to Decolonization
When an enslaved laborer in an early 18th-century Jamaican plantation was found with a supposedly poisonous plant, his European overlords showed him no mercy. Suspected of conspiring to cause disorder on the plantation, he was treated with typical harshness and hanged to death. The historical records don’t even mention his name. His execution might...
Leading public scientific institutions in imperial Britain, such as the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the British Museum, as well as ethnographic displays of “exotic” humans, relied on a global network of colonial collectors and go-betweens. By 1857, the East India Company’s London zoological museum boasted insect specimens from across the colon...
Since the formal end of colonialism, we have become better at recognizing how scientific expertise has come from many different countriesand ethnicities. Yet former imperial nations still appear almost self-evidently superior to most of the once-colonized countries when it comes to scientific study. The empires may have virtually disappeared, but t...
International health charities, which are dominated by Western countries, have faced similar issues. After the formal end of colonial rule, global health workers long appeared to represent a superior scientific culture in an alien environment. Unsurprisingly, interactions between these skilled and dedicated foreign personnel and the local populatio...
In October 2016, a YouTube video of students discussing the decolonisation of science went surprisingly viral. The clip, which has been watched more than 1 million times, shows a student from the University of Cape Town arguing that science as a whole should be scrapped and started again in a way that accommodates non-Western perspectives and exper...
Attempts to decolonize science need to contest jingoistic claims of cultural superiority, whether they come from European imperial ideologues or the current representatives of post-colonial governments. This is where new trends in the history of science can be helpful. For example, instead of the parochial understanding of science as the work of lo...
- 4 min
- Rohan Deb Roy,The Conversation
Sep 16, 2011 · In a book of considerable nuance and sophistication, she provides a simple but convincing answer to the question of whether there was such a thing as “colonial science”: “no.” Science developed in a world divided unequally but not into separate compartments, and science could be a tool to tear down the premises of colonial rule as well ...
- Frederick Cooper
- 2011
science was important for the history of colonization and decolonization in Africa. Because European expeditions to Africa expanded the range of human societies that were knowable, the continent’s contribu-tions were irreplaceable—to tropical medi-cine, biology, and ecology as well as to such social science fi elds as geography
- 9/12/2011 4:13:07 PM
- Science Magazine
- Science Magazine Article
Mar 4, 2016 · The article re-considers mainstream accounts of what is science, and how this standard account of science seems to represent a colonized (i.e., globalized) conception of science that is Western, modern, and secular.
Aug 9, 2024 · Colonization was an active force for 500 years, and shifting the axis of scientific influence won’t happen overnight. It will require scientists in the Global North to commit to decolonizing their work and for those in the Global South to claim their rightful places in research.
