raj, kapil. beyond - postcolonialismand postpositivism - circulation and the global history of...

Beyond Postcolonialism …and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of ScienceAuthor(s): Kapil RajSource: Isis, Vol. 104, No. 2 (June 2013), pp. 337-347Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670951 .

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Beyond Postcolonialism . . . andPostpositivism

Circulation and the Global History of Science

By Kapil Raj*

ABSTRACT

This essay traces the parallel, but unrelated, evolution of two sets of reactions to traditionalidealist history of science in a world-historical context. While the scholars who fosteredthe postcolonial approach, in dealing with modern science in the non-West, espoused anidealist vision, they nevertheless stressed its political and ideological underpinnings andengaged with the question of its putative Western roots. The postidealist history of sciencedeveloped its own vision with respect to the question of the global spread of modernscience, paying little heed to postcolonial debates. It then proposes a historiographicalapproach developed in large part by historians of South Asian politics, economics, andscience that, without compromising the preoccupations of each of the two groups, couldhelp construct a mutually comprehensible and connected framework for the understandingof the global workings of the sciences.

I N A WELL-KNOWN ESSAY published in this journal some years ago, James Secordrightly observes that historians of science of whatever school are unanimous about the

circulatory property of knowledge.1 However, the analytic significance of the concomitantsituatedness and movement of science, in particular on a global scale, has until quiterecently received little scholarly attention. Indeed, the history of science in its classicpositivist-idealist mode hardly ever asked the “Where?” question of the practice ofscience. Science was universal knowledge, ideally founded on mathematical formalizationand experimental verification. Its spread was not considered to be worthy of scrutiny,taken care of by the simple fact that rational beings universally accept what is true; anyresistance to its dissemination was a result of false beliefs or irrationality on the part of thehost community.

There were, however, some nuanced exceptions in the universalist perspective oftraditional history of science. Two are particularly noteworthy for the nature of their

* Centre Alexandre Koyre, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 105, Boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, France.1 James A. Secord, “Knowledge in Transit,” Isis, 2004, 95:654–672, esp. p. 655.

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particular interest in the global context of scientific practice: Joseph Needham and GeorgeBasalla. Since the approaches they set out have determined thinking among sociologistsas well as both post-colonial and postcolonial historians working on non-Western science,I shall briefly rehearse their arguments.2 I shall then go on to show how postidealist historyof science developed its own vision with respect to the question of the global spread ofmodern science, paying little heed to these debates, before proposing a historiographicalapproach that, without compromising the preoccupations of each group, might helpconstruct a mutually comprehensible and connected framework for the understanding ofthe global workings of the sciences. I shall argue that this scholarship engaged almostexclusively with the global implications of classical history of science, remaining almosttotally oblivious of recent developments in the domain. As is all too well known, thesedevelopments have been a reaction to the view from nowhere on which the classical visionis based, and local specificity, or the context of scientific practice, has been one of themain focal points of research in the past decades.3

Let us then turn first to Joseph Needham (1900–1995). Convinced of the universalityof science as a human enterprise, an expression of an innate curiosity fundamental tohuman nature, and intrigued by the momentous scientific and technological achievementsof China up to the fifteenth century, Needham asked why modern science did not arisethere but originated only in Europe.4 The answer, he claimed, lay in the resilience ofChina’s agrarian bureaucratic culture, which hindered the emergence of mercantile andindustrial capitalism, a sine qua non in his view for the emergence of mathematicalrationality, the bedrock of modern science. Although technical innovations from China (orIndia and the Arab world) spread widely, their underlying theoretical systems could notspread, being built on local, “ethnic-bound,” categories. Conversely, because it is foundedon mathematical reasoning, modern science can be completely appropriated by all humansand is thus “ecumenical.” Yet, despite its uniqueness, modern science was not created exnihilo. Rather, it subsumed the medieval learning of both West and East, “like riversflowing into the ocean of modern science.”5 For Needham, then, while modern science isuniquely Western in origin, it is culturally universal.

As opposed to this irenic vision of the world and of the history of science, GeorgeBasalla takes for granted the ex nihilo Western origins of modern science and is insteadconcerned with the modalities of its spread from Western Europe to the rest of the world.In an epoch-making paper that appeared forty-six years ago, he proposed a three-stagemodel of evolutionary progress for the globalization of what he simply called “WesternScience.” A preliminary period of scientific exploration, where non-European (that is tosay, “non-Scientific”) societies serve as passive reservoirs of data, leads to a second one

2 I use the term “post-colonial” in a purely chronological sense, in order to designate the period following thecollapse of West European colonial empires after World War II; this is in contrast to the use of “postcolonial,”mainly by literary critics, to refer to the various cultural effects of colonization.

3 The bibliography is too large to be cited here with justice. See, however, Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin, “ThePlace of Knowledge: A Methodological Survey,” Science in Context, 1991, 4:3–21; and David N. Livingstone,Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2004).

4 For the Zeitgeist of Needham’s generation see Gary Werskey, The Visible College: A Collective Biographyof British Scientists and Socialists in the 1930s (London: Free Association, 1988).

5 Joseph Needham, “The Roles of Europe and China in the Evolution of Oecumenical Science,” in Clerks andCraftsmen in China and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 396–418, on p. 397. See alsoNeedham, Science and Civilisation in China, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1954–2005), esp. Vol.7; and Needham, The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969).For a critique of Needham’s theses see Nathan Sivin, Science in Ancient China: Researches and Reflections(Aldershot: Ashgate, 1995).

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of colonial dependency in which European scientific institutions encourage Westernscientific activity outside of Europe by European colonists or settlers or else by accultur-ated indigenes. Eventually, colonized societies gain maturity, a phase characterized by astruggle to establish independent national scientific traditions based nonetheless on West-ern professional standards.

Historical studies of science outside the West have thus mainly focused on bringing tolight the contributions of non-Western cultures to the “ocean of modern science,” on theone hand, and on the diffusion and response to modern science, on the other. Indeed, eversince he formulated it almost half a century ago, Needham’s “Grand Question” hasconstituted one of the major determinants in shaping globally contextualized explanationsfor the rise of modern science—and modernity—in the West. Along with its Weberiancounterpart (“Why did industrial capitalism not emerge in China?”), this question is at thecore of the “divergence” approaches to world history of a number of prominent economichistorians, notably those of the so-called California School.6 Besides, Needham himselfhad tremendous influence in giving a material form to his vision through his position asthe first head of the natural sciences section of UNESCO, thereby shaping the scientificand technological policies of the post-colonial world. Basalla’s model, for its part, is atypical product of the Cold War era; it echoes Walt Whitman Rostow’s anti-Communistfive-stage model for economic development based on the American ideal and has thus, notsurprisingly, attracted much favor but undoubtedly more critical response.7 Its publicationin Science assured the article a wide readership among the American political elite, andit crucially contributed to shaping U.S. foreign policy in science during the Cold Waryears. It is thus not surprising that the overwhelming majority of studies engendered byboth Needham and Basalla contain a very strong political, and moral, dimension.

In the South Asian context, a number of general surveys of the history of science andtechnology have been written in the past decades, all striving to complement Needham’smagnum opus without, however, even remotely approaching its quality or range.8 Thisensemble appears to plead for the peaceful coexistence of different cultures and theirforms of knowledge. Basalla’s thesis, on the other hand, has been more critically engagedwith on three major themes: the non-West as a scientific tabula rasa, diffusionism, and

6 Among the best known of these works are R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and theLimits of European Experience (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1997); and Kenneth Pomeranz, The GreatDivergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press,2000). See also Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of EconomicChange in China and Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2011); and Prasannan Parthasarathy,Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniv. Press, 2011). Cf., however, David Washbrook, “From Comparative Sociology to Global History: Britainand India in the Prehistory of Modernity,” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, 1997,40:410–443.

7 See George Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science,” Science, 5 May 1967, 156:611–622; Basalla, “TheSpread of Western Science Revisited,” in Mundializacion de la ciencia y cultura nacional, ed. Antonio Lafuente,Alberto Elena, and Marıa Luisa Ortega (Aranjuez: Doce Calles, 1993), pp. 599–603; and Walt WhitmanRostow, Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1960).

8 See, e.g., Devendra Mohan Bose, Samarenda Nath Sen, and B. V. Subbarayappa, eds., A Concise History ofScience in India (New Delhi: Indian National Science Academy, 1971); Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, History ofScience and Technology in Ancient India, 3 vols. (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1986–1996); Om Prakash Jaggi,History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in India, 15 vols. (Delhi: Atma Ram, 1969–1984); and G.Kuppuram and K. Kumudamani, eds., History of Science and Technology in India, 12 vols. (Delhi: SundeepPrakashan, 1990). For an overview of the influence of Needham on the historiography of science in the SouthAsian context see S. Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina, eds., Situating the History of Science: Dialogues with JosephNeedham (New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999); and, more generally, Roger Hart, “Beyond Science andCivilization: A Post-Needham Critique,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine, 1999, 16:88–114.

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colonial scientific policy. These critiques have brought to the fore the racial and economicdiscriminations involved in the workings of science in the colonial context and have,above all, convincingly shown that “diffusion” occludes the active processes of receptionand appropriation on the part of receiving groups in scientific and technological transfers.9

Indeed, their greatest success perhaps resides in banishing diffusion from the repertoire ofpolitical correctness.

Nevertheless, these studies and critiques share with Needham and Basalla the belief thatscience is the embodiment of the basic values of truth and rationality, the motor of moral,social, and material progress, the marker of civilization itself. It is not surprising, then, thatthe history of science has become a site of controversy in the post-colonial world, withnationalist historians pressing the claim of scientificity for their indigenous knowledgesand ways of knowing. In the hands of religious and political extremists, this has led to alot of chauvinistic gerrymandering, if not pure historical falsification.10 We are thenpresented with the following dilemma. Are we to understand modern science as a pureemanation of Western Europe, constituting the Great Divide between the West and theRest and reaching non-European peoples only as they come into contact with Euro-peans— or capitalism? Or are we to think solely in terms of competing nationalist, orcivilizationist, narratives claiming precedence in scientific reasoning for their respec-tive societies?

One way out of this predicament has been to question the moral and political values ofmodern science. Indeed, many postcolonial scholars have espoused this line of argumentin recent years, seeking to denounce science—and all other institutions of modernity—asalienating and dehumanizing and, in certain cases, to open up alternative visions of whatscience might be. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s and Edward Said’s writings, and some-times by those of Daniel Headrick, these scholars see modern science as a hegemonic“master narrative” of Western power, a discursive formation through which the rest of theworld was simultaneously subjugated and relegated to the role of Europe’s binarilyopposed Other.11 The spread of Western science is, in this view, achieved by means of an

9 The first theme largely overlaps Needham-inspired historiography. For a historical critique of pure diffu-sionism see Ahsan Jan Qaisar, The Indian Response to European Technology and Culture, AD 1498–1707(1982; New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999). For a history of colonial science policy see Deepak Kumar,Science and the Raj, 1857–1905 (New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995); and John Lourdusamy, Science andNational Consciousness in Bengal, 1870–1930 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004). For an engagement withBasalla’s general perspective see Deepak Kumar, Science and Empire: Essays in Indian Context, 1700–1947(Delhi: Anamika Prakashan, 1991). More generally, see Roy MacLeod, “On Visiting the ‘Moving Metropolis’:Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science,” Historical Records of Australian Science, 1982, 5(3):1–16;Ian Inkster, “Scientific Enterprise and the Colonial ‘Model’: Observations on Australian Experience in HistoricalContext,” Social Studies of Science, 1985, 15:677–704; Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg, eds., ScientificColonialism: A Cross-Cultural Comparison (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987); and PaoloPalladino and Michael Worboys, “Science and Imperialism,” Isis, 1993, 84:91–102.

10 For a sample of such work in the Indian context see K. Ramasubramanian, M. D. Srinivas, and M. S. Sriram,“Modification of the Earlier Indian Planetary Theory by the Kerala Astronomers (c. 1500 AD) and the ImpliedHeliocentric Picture of Planetary Motion,” Current Science, 1994, 66:784–790; Saroja Bhate and Subhash Kak,“Panini’s Grammar and Computer Science,” Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1993,72:79–94; Kak, “Computational Aspects of the Aryabhata Algorithm,” Indian Journal of History of Science,1986, 21:62–71; Kak, “The Astronomy of the Vedic Altars and the Rgveda,” Mankind Quarterly, 1992,33:43–55; Kak, “Early Theories on the Distance to the Sun,” Indian J. Hist. Sci., 1998, 33:93–100; Kak, TheAstronomical Code of the Rig Veda (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2000); and B. N. Narahari Achar, “On theAstronomical Basis of the Date of Satapatha Brahmana: A Re-Examination of Dikshit’s Theory,” Indian J. Hist.Sci., 2000, 35:1–19.

11 Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981).

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often violent imposition of “rationality” on cultures originally endowed with “anotherreason.” Thus, far from replicating those in Europe, the resulting practices in the non-Western colonial world are a mere travesty of Western metropolitan science, a hybrid orpale copy valid only locally, in contrast to the universality of the European original.12

Their political appeal notwithstanding, these critiques tell us nothing about the natureof putative non-Western “reason(s)” that, if only through the Manichean thrust of theirargument, are assumed to have preserved a pristine innocence through the millenniapreceding contact with Europeans. More important, they share with the more optimisticearlier positions the widely accepted idea that there is something essential and unifiedcalled modern science that, like modernity itself, originated in Western Europe andsubsequently spread to the rest of the world. In short, they have shied from engaging withpostpositivist scholarship in science studies and the Gestalt switch in the image of sciencethat emerges through this work, to which we shall now turn.

In a parallel and largely unrelated development, historians, sociologists, and philoso-phers of science have radically undermined this traditional, essentialist understanding ofmodern science. Moving away from a conception of science as a system of formalpropositions or discoveries, these recent studies understand it as the construction, main-tenance, extension, and reconfiguration of knowledge, focusing equally on its material,instrumental, corporeal, practical, social, political, and cognitive aspects. Systematicallyopting for detailed case studies of the processes through which knowledge and associatedskills, practices, procedures, methods, and instruments are created in preference to “bigpicture” accounts, they have investigated the negotiated, contingent, and situated nature ofthe sciences. This new scholarship has convincingly shown that scientific research is notbased on logical step-by-step reasoning but on pragmatic judgment, much like thatinvolved in practical crafts, and is thus historically and geographically situated. In concertwith, and indeed in significant measure inspired by, ethnomethodology and microhistori-cal approaches, on the one hand, and anthropological insights into the ever-local nature ofknowledge across cultural divides, on the other, contingencies of place have thus come toacquire key importance in recent sociological and historical studies of science.13

Accounting for the mobility and spread of the sciences beyond their site of origin hasaccordingly become another major concern for recent science studies. It has been con-vincingly shown that scientific propositions, artifacts, and practices are neither innatelyuniversal nor forcibly imposed on others. Rather, they disseminate only through complexprocesses of accommodation and negotiation, as contingent as those involved in theirproduction. Some scholars have identified these processes in the standardization ofmethods and measurement, others in the rendering of new knowledge immutable or in themultiplication of identical contexts, while for yet others negotiability or open-endednessis the inherent property of the knowledge, practice, or device that seeks to impose itself

12 Typical examples are Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999); and Pratik Chakrabarti, Western Science in Modern India:Metropolitan Methods, Colonial Practices (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004).

13 For the sources of inspiration of this recent approach see Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967); Edoardo Grendi, “Microanalisi e storia sociale,” Quaderni Storici,1972, 7:506–520; Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller(1976; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981); and Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays inInterpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic, 1983).

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in the outside world.14 As one scholar has aptly put it, there is no “algorithmic recipe” forsuccessful replication.15

The revolutionary nature of these recent accounts notwithstanding, however, they stillshare with earlier traditions and with postcolonial critiques of modern science the dogmaof its Western origins, a significant pointer being the absence of case studies fromanywhere but Europe and America, knowledge production in non-European spaces ofmodernity being left largely to anthropologists and area studies specialists. They alsoimplicitly share with them a belief in the “center/periphery” model for the spread of thesciences as well as in the use of the dichotomous vocabulary of “metropolitan” versus“colonial” science, although they do endeavor to bring to light the mechanisms that makediffusion possible instead of simply taking the phenomenon for granted. It is thus worthremarking that while the domain has evolved orthogonally to the earlier positivism andfundamentally reconfigured approaches to questions of knowledge, postpositivist histori-ans have acquiesced willy-nilly to the obdurate Eurocentric postulate that modern scienceis “distinctly Western in its inception—although no longer in its pursuit or execution.”16

In what remains of this essay, I shall suggest a way of opening a conversation betweenthese two trends, inspired by recent approaches successfully advocated by historians ofsociety, culture, and science who focus on South Asia in a global context, approaches thatcould be relevant in other world-historical contexts.17 I propose to do so by taking onboard the recent critical reconception of science. However, instead of attending exclu-sively to its making in confined spaces, such as laboratories, cabinets of curiosity,libraries, and the like, I shall focus on the (long- or short-range) movement of scientificskills, practices, material, and ideas and their encounter with the skills, practices, material,and ideas of other specialized communities in natural history, medicine, cartography,linguistics, ethnology, and so forth—fields that actually counted as mainstream science

14 See, e.g., Harry M. Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (London:Sage, 1985); Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Engineers through Society (Milton Keynes: OpenUniv. Press, 1987), Ch. 6: “Centres of Calculation,” pp. 215–257; Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer,“Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations,’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Mu-seum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39,” Soc. Stud. Sci., 1989, 19:387–420; Simon Schaffer, “Late VictorianMetrology and Its Instrumentation: A Manufactory of Ohms,” in Invisible Connections: Instruments, Institutions,and Science, ed. Robert Bud and Susan E. Cozzens (Bellingham, Wash.: SPIE Optical Engineering Press, 1992),pp. 23–56 (Contrast however with Schaffer, “Exact Sciences and Colonialism: Southern India in 1900,” inScience as Cultural Practice, Volume 1: Cultures and Politics of Research from the Early Modern Period to theAge of Extremes, ed. Moritz Epple and Claus Zittel (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010), pp. 121–139); and PeterL. Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1997), pp.803–844.

15 Collins, Changing Order, p. 143. The founding works for spatially contextualizing scientific practice areSteven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985); and Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledge: The ScienceQuestion in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, 1988,14:575–599. See also Latour, Science in Action (cit. n. 14). An excellent introduction to these new approachesin the history, philosophy, and sociology of science, along with a substantial bibliography, is to be found in JanGolinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Construction and the History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.Press, 1998). On problems of replication see Harry M. Collins, Gravity’s Shadow: The Search for GravitationalWaves (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2004).

16 Margaret C. Jacob, “Science Studies after Social Construction: The Turn toward the Comparative andGlobal,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, ed. Victoria E.Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1999), pp. 95–120, on p. 95.

17 See esp. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected History, 2 vols. (New Delhi: Oxford Univ.Press, 2005); C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons(London: Wiley, 2003); and Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction ofKnowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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until well into the nineteenth century.18 I shall argue that the resulting interactions arethemselves a locus of knowledge construction and reconfiguration. In other words, I shallfocus on the unanimously acknowledged centrality of circulation to analyze its conse-quences for the sciences and their history on a global scale. It will be seen that many ofthe shortcomings of postpositivism and postcolonialism pointed out above can thus beaddressed—on condition that both sides pay a price: that by science we understand notfree-floating ideas, but the production of knowledge, practices, instruments, techniques,and services; and by circulation we understand not the “dissemination,” “transmission,” or“communication” of ideas, but the processes of encounter, power and resistance, negoti-ation, and reconfiguration that occur in cross-cultural interaction.19 It is precisely thistransformative conception of circulation that I want to develop, articulate, and theorizehere. As the editors of a recent book on circulation and society stress in their introduction:“Circulation is different from simple mobility, inasmuch as it implies a double movementof going forth and coming back, which can be repeated indefinitely. In circulating, things,men and notions often transform themselves. Circulation . . . therefore . . . implies anincremental aspect and not the simple reproduction across space of already formedstructures and notions.”20

Let us then look very briefly at an example from early modern botany. Makinginventories of local flora was crucial to European nations engaged in ever-increasing tradenetworks across the globe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A knowledgeof plants and their uses was important not only for introducing new commodities on theEuropean markets but also for maintaining the health of the thousands of sailors andtraders who found themselves in the hostile climes of the tropics. The Portuguese, theDutch, the English, and the French prepared voluminous herbals of Asian plants. Ofcourse, the stories told so far about the making of this knowledge invariably involveindigenous people who are described as “informants,” responding to questions determinedby European investigators designated as “collectors” or “travelers.” This information istransformed into certified knowledge in the metropole and can then be disseminated urbiet orbi.21

Looking at this history through the prism of the circulation of a fourteen-volume herbalcontaining more than 720 Indian plants painted by Indian artists, commissioned by aFrench surgeon in Orissa at the end of the seventeenth century, along with associatedcorrespondence, helps us to understand the character of the early Indo-European economicand social networks that made such works possible. Focusing on the interaction betweenmultiple circulations and on the long- and short-range networks and heterogeneouspractices at play in the construction of the manuscript, the complex processes of inter-cultural negotiation, power play, and collaboration involved in the making and legitimi-

18 Josef W. Konvitz, Cartography in France, 1600–1848: Science, Engineering, and Statecraft (Chicago:Univ. Chicago Press, 1987).

19 In effect, even in his otherwise highly instructive piece Jim Secord stresses circulation as communicationmost of all; see Secord, “Knowledge in Transit” (cit. n. 1).

20 Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Introduction: Circulation andSociety under Colonial Rule,” in Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia,1750–1950, ed. Markovits, Pouchepadass, and Subrahmanyam (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 1–22, on pp.2–3. A similar vision is expressed by the editor and various authors in Michel Cotte, ed., Circulationstechniques: En amont de l’innovation: Hommes, objects et idees en movement (Besancon: Presses Univ.France–Comte; Belfort: Univ. Technique de Belfort–Montbeliard, 2004).

21 For a schematic representation of the received notion of the information–knowledge relationship see H. V.Wyatt, “When Does Information Become Knowledge?” Nature, 1972, 235:86–89.

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zation of this botanical and medical knowledge are clearly brought to the fore, turning thestandard agonistic topos of East/West encounter on its head. In effect, a closer look showsthat, far from being mere passive informants, the indigenes have varied roles, from fakirsas depositories of herbal and medicinal knowledge to male and female collectors, illus-trators, translators, bookbinders, and mediators. As a matter of fact, the French surgeondesignates himself a mere translator of the text from Hindustani to French (although thatdoes not do justice to his true role). The template for the structure of the work is a Dutchcompilation made in southwestern India. Its fate upon its arrival in France, where it isdeliberately ignored in a controversy over what counted as knowledge for early eighteenth-century France, is another aspect of the story that emerges only when the question ofcirculation is asked.22 It is only by seeking the different movements involved that certain newevidence comes to light and new ways of questioning the historical material can behoned.23

More important, however, the term “circulation” serves as a strong counterpoint to theunidirectionality of “diffusion” or even of “dissemination” or “transmission,” of binariessuch as metropolitan science/colonial science or center/periphery, which all imply aproducer and an end user. “Circulation” suggests a more open flow—and especially thepossibility of the mutations and reconfigurations coming back to the point of origin.Moreover, the circulatory perspective confers agency on all involved in the interactiveprocesses of knowledge construction. This does not imply, as some Indologists havecontended, that South Asians played a determinant role in the dialogical process throughwhich knowledge emerged and even “exercised greater dominance than did the British”in this process.24 Nor does it give credence to the opponents of this position, who arguethat indigenes were deprived of all agency in knowledge production, at best playing therole of passive informants providing raw information to intellectually active Europeanswho then organized it into knowledge according to Western modes of knowing.25 Rather,it shows that being colonized and having agency are not antithetical. It is in the asymmetryin negotiation processes that the power relationship resides, and it can be brought to lightin its specificity only through a rigorous analysis of these processes, instead of beingraised to the status of an explanatory category.

Of course, not everything circulates, and the term could suggest a blindly optimisticvision of books, ideas, practices, people, and material flowing smoothly between differentcultures, communities, and geographical spaces.26 As the example of the herbal makes

22 For a detailed account of the history of this manuscript see Raj, Relocating Modern Science (cit. n. 17), Ch.1: “Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen: Making L’Empereur’s Jardin in Early Modern South Asia,” pp.27–59.

23 See Carlo Ginzburg, “Alien Voices: The Dialogic Element in Early Modern Jesuit Historiography,” inHistory, Rhetoric, and Proof (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis Univ. Press/Historical Society of Israel, 1999), pp.71–91.

24 See, e.g., Eugene Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South Asia, 1795–1895 (Berkeley: Univ.California Press, 1994), p. 9 (quotation); Thomas Trautmann, “Hullabaloo about Telugu,” South Asia Research,1999, 19:53–70; and Phillip B. Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge,”Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2003, 45:783–814.

25 See esp. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton Univ. Press, 1996); Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001); and Prakash, Another Reason (cit. n. 12). See, however, C. A.Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997); and Moritz Deutschmann, Edward Said and the Cultural Historyof British Colonialism in India (Munich: Grin, 2011).

26 This criticism has recently been made in Fa-ti Fan, “The Global Turn in the History of Science,” East AsianScience, Technology, and Society, 2012, 6:249–258.

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amply clear, certain conditions are required to be fulfilled for them to circulate.27 Theseconditions could depend on the exchange of favors, patronage, friendship, obligation, orjust economic exchange, to name but a few possibilities. Besides, not everyone wantseverything to circulate freely, as the historian of Indian merchant networks ClaudeMarkovits argues:

Most crucial [for the sustained existence of merchant networks] is probably the circulation ofinformation. . . . This means two things: first, that ‘leaks’ have to be avoided as much aspossible to the outside world, secondly, that information must circulate smoothly within thenetwork, both spatially and temporally, as it gets transmitted from one generation to another.Although academics are generally dismissive of the cognitive aspect of merchant activity, oftendeemed to consist of nothing more than the three Rs, in the long run the most successfulmerchant networks have been those most able to process information into a body of knowledgesusceptible of continuous refinement.28

As this passage suggests, circulation occurs within bounded spaces. The geography ofthese spaces of circulation changes historically, depending on the nature, morphology,geography, and relative power of the networks that interact in any given situation.Likewise, the morphology of spaces of circulation is seen to change over time: from oneclosely linked to trade and commercial networks in early modernity in the case of SouthAsia, it gradually becomes more intimately related to state-run institutions with the riseand development of colonial and imperial states.

The focus on circulation itself as a “site” of knowledge formation constitutes a majorchange in approach with respect to science studies orthodoxy. For, as outlined above,social studies of science have so far, albeit implicitly, separated three moments in themaking of knowledge: the collection of information or objects; their accumulation andprocessing within the local, segregated space of the laboratory; and, finally, the spread—and eventual universal acceptance—of the knowledge thus engendered.29 However, it isprecisely the mutable nature of the knowledge makers themselves, as much as of theknowledges and skills that they embodied, their transformations and reconfigurations inthe course of their geographical and social displacements, that the focus on circulationhelps bring to the fore.30

In conclusion, then, the circulatory perspective allows one to see science as beingco-produced through the encounter and interaction between heterogeneous specialistcommunities of diverse origins. (See Figure 1.) It allows one to tell a story that seeks not

27 Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005).28 Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.

Press, 2000), p. 25.29 See Latour, Science in Action (cit. n. 14). A recent book on the subject of intercultural scientific encounter

is based on a similar model: Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and CulturalEncounter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2004).

30 A burgeoning interest in circulation as a site of knowledge making is attested to in at least two recentpublications by eminent historians of science, technology, and medicine. See Yves Cohen, “The Soviet Fordson:Between the Politics of Stalin and the Philosophy of Ford, 1924–1932,” in Ford, 1903–2003: The EuropeanHistory, 2 vols., ed. Hubert Bonin, Yannick Lung, and Steven Tolliday (Paris: PLAGE, 2003), Vol. 2, pp.531–558; and Maneesha Lal, “Purdah as Pathology: Gender and the Circulation of Medical Knowledge in LateColonial India,” in Reproductive Health in India: History, Politics, Controversies, ed. Sarah Hodges (New Delhi:Orient Longman, 2005), pp. 85–114. It is also significant to note that a recent quadrennial joint meeting of theBritish, Canadian, and American history of science societies, held in Halifax, Canada, in August 2004, had asits theme “Circulating Knowledge.” See also Mary Terrall and Kapil Raj, eds., Circulation and Locality in EarlyModern Science, British Journal for the History of Science, 2010, 43(4).

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to highlight the non-Western origins of modern science but to offer a grounded globalhistory that links the large-scale processes and the fine-grained observations of everydaylife, echoing the global ethnographic method proposed by Michael Burawoy.31 Detailed

31 Michael Burawoy et al., eds., Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a PostmodernWorld (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 2000).

Figure 1. “An European Gentleman with His Moonshee, or Native Professor of Languages.” FromCharles D’Oyly, The European in India, from a Collection of Drawings (London, 1813), Plate 1.

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and microhistorical in its narrative, it constantly changes scales, places, and territories,venturing out into spaces with uncertain or moving boundaries, creating or using net-works. Its actors are neither “local” nor “regional” nor “global.” They cross “classical”territorial disciplinary formations by juggling possibilities and constraints, constructspaces tailored to their own activity, cultivate solutions of continuity, and function throughnetworks.32

Appropriating this perspective offers rich theoretical alternatives to the center/peripherytrope, which ensnares world histories of science as it does “science and empire” studies.For, not only does it not efface the inherent asymmetries involved in the making andmovement of knowledge in its material and non-material dimensions, this perspective alsoallows us to reconfigure the moral and political dimensions of the sciences in telling thestory of a world far more complex end intertwined than that suggested by these simpledichotomies. It also opens prospects for fruitful collaboration between historians ofmodern and contemporary Indian science and those investigating encounter and interac-tion between heterogeneous specialist cultures within the “West” or in other regions of theworld.33 This will certainly help in the emergence of a meaningful methodologicalapproach for the transnational and global history of science, a sine qua non for the study,among other domains, of “big science,” the environment, and medicine.

32 This vision is based on Pierre-Yves Saunier’s depiction of mobile actors; see Saunier, “A l’assaut del’espace transnational de l’urbain, ou la piste des mobilites,” Geocarrefour, 2005, 80:249–253, esp. p. 251.

33 I have in mind the project “Practical Knowledge Traditions and Scientific Change, 1750–1870,” begun atthe Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, at the initiative of Otto Sibum in 2002 and continuedat the University of Uppsala since 2007. For examples of writings in this perspective see Otto Sibum, “Les gestesde la mesure: Joule, les pratique de la brasserie et la science,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 1998,53:745–774; and Sibum, “Exploring the Margins of Precision,” in Instruments, Travel, and Science: Itinerariesof Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Marie-Noelle Bourguet, Christian Licoppe, andSibum (London/New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 216–242. Another excellent example is Mary Terrall,Catching Nature in the Act: Reaumur and the Practice of Eighteenth-Century Natural History (Chicago: Univ.Chicago Press, forthcoming). See also David J. Hess, Science and Technology in a Multicultural World:The Cultural Politics of Facts and Artifacts (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1995); Amit Prasad, “ScientificCulture in the ‘Other’ Theater of ‘Modern Science’: An Analysis of the Culture of Magnetic Resonance Researchin India,” Soc. Stud. Sci., 2005, 35:463–489; Arun Bala, ed., Asia, Europe, and the Emergence of ModernScience: Knowledge Crossing Boundaries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and Prakash Kumar, IndigoPlantations and Science in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012).

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