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This collection, dealing with case studies drawn from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Mauritius, examines the relationship between scientific claims and practices, and the exercise of colonial power. It challenges conventional views that portray science as a detached mode of reasoning with the capacity to confer benefits in a more or less even-handed manner. That science has the potential to further the collective good is not fundamentally at issue, but science can also be seen as complicit in processes of colonial domination.
Not only did science assist in bolstering aspects of colonial power and exploitation, it also possessed a significant ideological component: it offered a means of legitimating colonial authority by counter-poising Western rationality to native superstition and it served to enhance the self-image of colonial or settler elites in important respects. This innovative volume ranges broadly through topics such as statistics, medicine, eugenics, agriculture, entomology and botany.
Saul Dubow, ‘Introduction’
Patrick Harries, ‘Field sciences in scientific fields: entomology, botany and the early ethnographic monograph in the work of H. A. Junod’
William K. Storey, ‘Making canes credible in colonial Mauritius’
Saul Dubow, ‘A commonwealth of science: the British Association in South Africa, 1905 and 1929’
Dawn Nell, ‘”For the public benefit”: livestock statistics and expertise in the late-nineteenth century Cape Colony’
Deborah Posel, ‘A mania for measurement: statistics and statecraft in the transition to apartheid’
Keith Shear, ‘Police dogs and state rationality in early twentieth-century South Africa’
Susanne Klausen, ‘The Race Welfare Society: eugenis and birth control in Johannesburg, 1930–1940’
Shula Marks, ‘Doctors and the state: George Gale and South Africa’s experiment in social medicine’
Jocelyn Alexander, ‘Technical development and the human factor: sciences of development in Rhodesia’s Native Affairs Department’