In Our Time - Imperial Science

Episode Date: February 1, 2001

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what drove the British Empire, especially in Victoria’s century. Was it science, more specifically, the science of plants, of agriculture, a scientific notion of nature and the improvement of nature? Was this seemingly rather adjacent notion - that the source of Empire can be found in Kew Gardens, Royal, Botanical, rather than in the muzzle of a gun or in the purse of a plunderer or in the consciousness of a conqueror - was science “the force that was with us?” Francis Bacon said of the Irish in 1603, “We shall reclaim them from their barbarous manners…populate plant and make civil all the provinces of that kingdom ..as we are persuaded that it is one of the chief causes for which God hath brought us to the Imperial Crown of these Kingdoms”. Centuries later, at the height of the Empire, John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty: “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement”. But - despotism aside - was this notion of ‘improvement’ really the driving force behind the Empire? And did the British Empire have any firm basis in believing that the ‘light of pure reason’ that it brought to its colonies was any brighter than the knowledge that existed before they came? With Richard Drayton, Professor of History at the University of Virginia and author of Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World; Maria Misra, Lecturer in Modern History and fellow of Keble College Oxford; Ziauddin Sardar, Professor of Science and Technology Policy, Middlesex University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, Francis Bacon said of the Irish in 1603, we shall reclaim them from their barbarous manners, populate, plant and make civil all the provinces of that kingdom,

as we are persuaded that it's one of the chief causes for which, God has brought us the imperial crown of these kingdoms. Centuries later at the height of the empire, John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty, quote, "'Despotism is a legitimate mode of government "'in dealing with barbarians, "'provided the end be their improvement. "'But despotism aside, if that's possible,

"'was the notion of improvement, really the driving force "'behind the empire, and did the British Empire "'have any firm basis in believing that the light of pure reason "'that it brought to its colonies was any brighter than the knowledge that existed before it came, so and conquered. With me to discuss the relationship between science, technology and imperialism, is Richard Drayton, Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and the author of Nature's Government, Science, Imperial Britain, and the Improvement of the World.

Also with us is Hermaria Misra, a lecturer in modern history, a fellow of Kebel College, Oxford, and Zia Sadaar, Professor of Science and Technology Policy at Middlesex University. Richard Drayton, you make the claim in your book that the nature of government, you're right, the nature of government, both at home and in the colonies, was shaped by assumptions about how nature might be governed. Would you unravel that for us? Well, I'd hesitate to suggest that this doctrine of improvement

is the sole central strand at the centre of imperial expansion. What I am attempting to explore in the book, the connections between the notion that some kind of precise and complete knowledge of nature might in fact equip government to serve the purposes, not just of minorities, but in fact, perhaps, of all of humanity. What I'm suggesting in the book is that we can see this idea, which has its roots perhaps in Christian notions

of man's place in nature, being at the center of several episodes in the experience of European imperialism from the early-bottom period to arguably the 20th century. We can see this particular set of assumptions linking the knowledge of nature and a theory of the prerogatives of government, the competences of government. When you referred to the Christian origins, you were talking about the Garden of Eden, I presume, the idea at the beginning that man found himself in the garden, which he then conquered us, were understood,

had to understand, and by understanding conquered and moved on from there. Well, apart from the fact that he conquered the garden, in the sense he was given the garden, and it's after he gets kicked out of the garden. He and Eve, of course, he must remember, that even Adamar charged with the responsibility of reclaiming the garden, of reclaiming the wilderness. And this assumption that man both has some kind of prerogatives, set of prerogatives in nature, at the same time a set of responsibilities,

it's in the space between the responsibilities and the prerogatives that we see emerging this ideology, which having to do with the benevolent command of resources. Maria Misard, you agree with Richard Wrighton that agriculture and this attitude towards nature was a powerful impulse driving imperial expansion? I don't really know. I thought that his book was intriguing

and I thought insofar as it was attempting to place ideas of science into the context of empire. It was very, very well done. But I think we need to divide two issues here. One is the expansionism of empire, why our empire's created. and I really don't think, and I'm sure that Richard doesn't either, that botanists are responsible for the creation of empires.

I think that the creation of empires is much more to do with economic issues, with trade and with international rivalries and international politics. I think when we move on to questions of how empire should be governed or how empire should be justified, then I think certainly the role of science and possibly even ideas about nature will become, important at certain times, yes. I think how we were...

Can I just continue with Mary for a second, but where I take up Richard's point, when so much land was cultivated with sugar cane and cocoa and tea and coffee and palm oil and rubber and tobacco, a lot of other agricultural products which benefited the imperial power, in this case,

us, you could say that it was driven by agrarian concerns and that people were going out to these far-flung places to bring back plants, to sort of bring nature in. You could... There's a stronger argument. I think it's not dismissable in the way that you seem to survive. Well, I think people go out to bring back fortunes.

And I think that plantations and intervening in the agricultures of non-European countries is a means to that end. I don't personally believe that a great deal of interest was taken by imperial administrators and businessmen, who I think are the primary agents of imperialism, in issues of production, which I think is what Richard is concerned with. Zia, could I have your view on this? Yeah, well, I think that you don't just go out to make fortune.

You also go out with your own ideas. And one of the most profound thing that has happened at the early days, emergence of empire, was the transformation in how we saw nature. I mean, in medieval Europe, nature was enchanted, and suddenly we have a very disenchanted view of nature, where nature is out there. And Francis Bacon, as you quoted earlier, also said that nature is her secret under torture. So the idea of torturing and performing violence over nature becomes quite dominant.

And the second idea is that the empire is seen in terms of nature. Empire and nature go together. There is a hierarchy in nature. There's a hierarchy in empire. And the hierarchy in nature is seen in terms of the social organization of Victorian Britain. In fact, the royal authority, the royal absolutism that existed in Victorian Britain is now actually implanted on nature and therefore implanted on empire. So the people of empire, so the people of empire, for example, are seen in a very hierarchical way. So right at the top,

you have the white, enlightened scientists, if you like, the hierarchy of empire and hierarchy of nature and right at the bottom and you have this, you know, people going down to working class, European working class, then the colonized individuals and then you have animals, etc., etc. So there's a very linear hierarchy. This linear hierarchy then also reflects in the way we see history. The history then becomes a very linear history in which the function of history is actually to end up, you know, basically in a world that is dominated by white Europeans. Richard Drayne, you were trying to get in. Zia's comment began with the assertion that people, when they went to the periphery, they carried with them not just notions of profit and loss, but they carried with them also notions of where they fit it into the scheme of things. The scheme of things understood either in terms of religious or in scientific terms. We can go one step beyond that, that when businessmen or the governments, which at times served the interests of businessmen, faced tropical nature or colonial nature, they faced.

faced it not just simply looking at issues of profit and loss, but facing nature, looking at nature in terms as a theatre in which a certain programme, which we would call a program of development, needed to be instituted. And I do suggest the imperative that there is, within the Western tradition, this assumption that resources in nature should not lie idle, that they should be developed. And the development of these resources is something which,

no one should resist, that in various ways, land and labor had no right to be withheld. Maria. I don't see that in my own area of India until the 20th century, or very much the late 19th century. So I think this attempt to push back an interest in development, and particularly agricultural development, to the late 18th and early 19th century, is anachronistic. I think that the interests and the ideas that informed the British when they were in India in the late 18th century were not at all developmental. I mean, I think insofar as they attempted to generate ideas to justify what they were doing, they were ideas of traditionalisation.

I think that much of the time they depicted themselves as people who were returning India to the state in which the Mughal Empire had been before the collapse in the 18th century into what the British regarded as anarchy. So I think that if we're interested in how ideas are used to justify empire, I really don't agree that there's an agrarian developmentalism in 18th century India. Maria, I hope will forgive me saying that she is a 20th century historian of India so that the 18th century sources may not be quite so familiar to her. If one looks at Cornwallis correspondence or Wellesley correspondence or Banks' correspondence, in the late 18th century,

one gets a very different picture about the kinds of agendas at work. I'm not entirely ignorant of 18th century sources, Richard. I think that you're choosing selectively, and of course we can all do that. And I think that there certainly are periods, and I assume that's what you're arguing,

when science is put to the use of empire in a very foregrounded way. But I think if one looks at the period as a whole, and indeed if one looks at 18th century figures such as Hastings, and if one looks at early 19th century administrators like Metcalf and Monroe and Elphinstone, you don't see this interest really in the application of modern science to development. What you do see is a very strong interest in Eastern knowledge

and in the translation of the texts of Eastern knowledge so that India may be returned to its ideal state, which is to be the other, to be different from Europe, not to be developed like Europe. Can I stay in India with you, Maria? Well, an effect on Eastern knowledge. I'll come to your moments here. Mills' idea of improvement, or Francis Bacon's idea,

reclaiming from barbarous manners. Let's take that in relationship to India, in relationship to the science in India. Did India, a very ordinary question to start with, feel the benefit of Western Scientific Revolution over the Enlightenment? Did it feel the benefit of it? Was the improvement, from the point of view, of the British, working? Well, I think from the point of view of the British it was probably working.

I suppose the application of technology of railways and telegraphs, which is what people think of in a cliched way as being the product of British scientific improvement in India, were designed perhaps with assisting the Indian economy as a secondary notion and with the promotion of order by allowing the British to move their military resources, around India as a primary motive. I think that the paradigm you're establishing, which is that there's a straightforward transfer of enlightenment knowledge onto a tabularaza,

is not one that historians... I'm not establishing it, but I'm inquiring about it. Well, it's not one that I suppose historians now would accept. I suppose they would say, first, that India is not a tabularaza, and certainly that it's not a question of just a direct transfer or a direct transmission of Western knowledge that what tends to happen is that Western and Eastern knowledge become synthesized and affect one another in the context of the colonies.

I think we ought to make two things clear. One, the idea of improvement is basically virtual than real. It is an idea that exists in the mind of the colonizers. It is not an idea, it is not a practice that the colonized actually gained anything from. That's the first point. The second point is that when the British, for example, arrived in the United States. in India or when the French went into North Africa, they arrive in cultures which were pretty sophisticated

and cultures which were pretty advanced in science and technology, to some extent. And three things happened. One of the first things that the colonizers did was to declare the indigenous knowledge to be inferior and not worthy of attention. But this was done after it was totally and wholesale appropriated. For example, Western science did not come, you know,

emerge out of nothing. It was actually built on 7, 800 years of Islamic science, which was science in a real sense, as we understand it today. Objective, experimental, you know, verifiable, systematic, no matter how you define science. That all knowledge... To a certain extent on Islamic science, but it wasn't just built on Islamic science. I don't interrupt you, but it wasn't just.

No, I'm not saying that solely, but to a very large extent, because a lot of common ground between Western science and Islamic science. All that was appropriate. it, right? But at the same time, Islamic science and medicine were actually declared to be non-science, not worthy of attention. Not just that Islamic medicine was declared inferior and backward, but its very practice was actually banned. So, for example, in North Africa, the French made the practice of Islamic medicine illegal to the point of death. It was made illegal to such an extent.

And in India, the practice of Islamic medicine and Arabic medicine were actually outlawed. And research centers were closed down. I mean, the Mughal Empire was actually empire. It has something going for it. It wasn't totally kind of ramshackle in operation. So the research centers were closed. And the idea of improvement, I want to come back to the idea of improvement, not just that the indigenous knowledge was blocked and suppressed,

but also the subjects were not seen worthy of being. transmitted Western knowledge. So science was not thought in the colonies. The interesting question to ask is, at what point do Europeans begin to acquire the kind of attitude to indigenous knowledge which he is describing? And I think it actually happens quite late. It really is a kind of mid-19th century transition, arguably a post-industrial transition. Europeans really, until the 19th century, are essentially waterborne parasites. They're quick to command trade on the coasts at the rivers, but find it difficult to command the centers of continents. The realities of power were therefore connected to a kind of humility towards

indigenous peoples. And particularly in terms of medical practices, what you can see well into the 19th century, even in India, or particularly in India one could say, is a great deal of concern about what can be learned from these indigenous practices. And what we can see in a sense in medicine, as in all of the other sciences, is the emerging. of a kind of knowledge which is best thought of as a Creole form of knowledge. And it's the argument that Arab science is in some way appropriated by the West, but what we can say is that what we call Western science is, in fact, a world science and is the product of the kind of coming into communication

of a variety of knowledge traditions from different parts of the world. You wanted to come in on that. I wanted to agree with Richard in being quite careful, I think, about how we periodise this issue of Western. and denigration of Eastern knowledge. Because I think that certainly in the late 19th and early 20th century, I don't think it's quite as Zia suggests. I think there was quite a strong interest in the products of Eastern knowledge,

and they were accorded some respect. I think the processes of professionalisation and of the creation of social hierarchies, which may well have been exaggerated in empire, came into play here. and I think it became very important, probably in the period that Richard's talking about in the mid-19th century, to denigrate practitioners of Eastern science as part of a process of claiming professional status for Western experts and Western sciences. So I think that what's going on there is more of a sort of sociological...

This is when a sort of spurious race science came into the equation, wasn't it? Yes, I suppose... I mean, you point out in one of your... You point out that the racial hierarchy was not, wasn't heavily present in earlier centuries. Well, I suppose this is because in my rather crude way, tend to think that ideas are often put to the service of power and that I suppose that scientific racism, in my view, represents a change from the colour prejudice

and attitudes to colour hierarchy that undoubtedly existed before. And I think that this issue of scientific racism really is problematic for rich, and Zia's idea that there is a project of improvement going on in imperialism. This is not my idea. I made it very clear. The notion of improvement is virtual rather than really. It exists in the minds of the coloniser. But you see, I think that after the mid-19th century and the hardening of these ideas of race, an idea begins to emerge of unimproveability. And this notion that actually there are societies which simply cannot aspire to being Western and free

and liberal and individual begins to take a hold quite strong. strongly. But one can certainly feel that there would be limits to the improvement of indigenous peoples in various places and these attitudes were indeed common. But what goes along with that is the hypothesis that therefore these people have even less right to control their own resources. One ends up with the kind of late 19th century assumption that tropical peoples in the phrase of Benjamin Kidd simply have no right to oppose those who wish to use their lands or to claim their resources. But there's very little land expropriation in late 19th century India. In fact, I would say that the predominant worry of the British is to maintain order among the peasantry and so concerned are they to maintain order

that they actually turn their back on projects of modernisation in agriculture because they don't want to offend what they regard as backward peasant sensibilities. What's worth bearing in mind that the chronology of expansion in the 19th century distinguishes between a kind of Indian period of significant

expansion. And the process of land acquisition in the rest of the world. Things happen, if you like, a generation and a half earlier in India. So the processes we're talking about happen at different times and different places. But I'll pass on to Zia. I think Richard's ideas of what happened between indigenous knowledge and Western knowledge are a bit to romanticize. And in fact, that's part of my problem with this book. It's a very annually retentive book in the sense that it takes us so far.

but then it does not take the inductive leap, which is necessary to actually show that there were two systems of knowledge, but in the case of India, three systems of knowledge, but in Empire General there were number of systems of knowledge in conflict with the Western system of knowledge, which had the sanction of nature, which had the sanction of empire, and which had the sanction of the royal family. Let's be honest about it, because it was a very strong,

socially hierarchically notion of knowledge and nature. And what happened to indigenous knowledge was not kind of some romantic ideas of that this particular individual scientist showed respect to this particular individual scientist or that particular administrator wrote wonderful letters saying how wonderful we, in the Averedic system of medicine is, etc., etc. Overall, the indigenous systems of knowledge were suppressed and written out of history. Up to 1950s, up to 1950s, we did not know, for example, whether there was such a real thing as Chinese science, such a real thing as Indian science or Islamic science.

Aren't you leaving the Indians and the Chinese out of this? I mean, certainly in the late 19th and early 20th century, there was a tremendous revival in. in Indian science and in Iovadic medicine particularly. And rather paradoxically, it kind of piggybacked on the establishment of Indian scientists as stand-alone world-class research scientists. There was a recovery of confidence, I think. Well, there was always resistance. No, I agree with that.

There was always resistance. There was always an attempt to fight back. But I think, I think, one of the most interesting things that's been coming out of the history of 19th century science in India in the last couple of years is the work of people who have talked about the existence. in India of groups of people working within Indian traditions who were deliberately borrowing from Western traditions and if you like, creolizing Western traditions with Indian traditions,

preserving the autonomy, if you like, of their own centers of knowledge. At the same time, as you could argue, what you dismiss as romantic perhaps, I mean, there was certainly within the Western tradition itself an enormous amount of curiosity about indigenous systems of knowledge and a great deal was preserved as a real. The function of curious anthropologists was to find knowledge that they could use to control and manage the indigenous population. But one of the time. Just a second, one at a time, otherwise people get quite understanding of the exact.

When white men wanted to control non-Western societies, he did anthropology. When he wanted to learn his own society, he did sociology. And the two disciplines had very different functions. The function of sociology was to understand our own society. The function of anthropology was to control and manage the indigenous people. Richard, do you like your point of them? Well, I think that when you have your anthropologist gentleman turning up in the tropics, he's not just simply going to be looking at himself and say,

I'm white, I'm an anthropologist, therefore I have a particular responsibility in an agenda. One of the curious things about human beings as historical actors is they work in ways which are sometimes paradoxical. This really is the problem which historians have with functionalist approaches to history where one says that a particular set of actors who happen to be European anthropologists must have acted in a particular way. This has always to be demonstrated by the historian. And they're always going to be a very complicated exceptions. I want to bring Maria in now.

She's been quiet for far too long. She began to make a point about Indian science in the 19th and 20th century. I'd like could you possibly develop that a bit first? Okay, well, I think that Zia has, I mean, oddly, I suppose, given his position, a rather Eurocentric approach to this encounter between Eastern and Western science. And he speaks as if the Chinese and the Asians are completely passive. Whereas I think what's quite interesting is the impact that Western science has on Indians themselves. And the different processes in which they go through in terms of assimilating,

completely accepting the superiority of Western science. And then the politicisation of science in the late 19th century where I think you find an interesting split in the scientific community between those who want to go for the straight, West is best, we're just going to show that we can do it as well as you can and we're going to win Nobel Prizes and so on and so forth. And those who attempt in a much more politically self-conscious way to construct a sort of synthetic East-West science, if you like,

And I think that that is part and parcel of this nationalist political reaction that you get in the late 19th century which culminates in Gandhi, which is the idea that India can do all these things itself, it doesn't have to borrow from the West, and that things like science, which come with a Western label, have to be indigenous in order to make them legitimate. Would you agree with that? Oh, yes. And I think that Zia's assumption that somehow there is this kind of all-conquering Western science, which sweeps all before it, which strangles to death all alternatives, seems to me both not to fit with the historical record

and also to significantly denigrate the capacities of non-European peoples to respond in active and deliberate and powerful ways to this encroaching tradition of the outsider. No, I mean, I'm not for a second suggesting that there was no resistance. On the country, I'm astonished to that you think I'm suggesting that that the non-West simply rolled over and played dead on the country. We fought and we fought tooth and nailed and we are still fighting to a very large extent. But that does not alter the fact that Western science in a very strong way try to dominate the scene

and present its notion of science as the only valid notion of science. Yeah. In fact, the very fact that you have said that this Western science is universal suggests that this is the only valid notion of science. Universal in the sense that the Indian discovery of zero in the sixth century, for instance, which is incredibly important for mathematics, was rediscovered, brought into, or whatever word you want to, you merged into, European mathematics later on. So in that sense, I can see that Richard Droughton's notion of universality

has some validity. What we have called Western science actually dependent to a great extent. As you pointed out there in this discussion, you said on the Islamic, but for the algebra, for the trigonometry and so, but also India to do with the mathematics.

So I think the claim to universalism was not a claim to imperial conquest. It was actually a descriptive word, which has certain validity. First of all, I don't think it's totally valid in the sense that the claim of Western science to be universal

also places other sciences in defensive terms. The idea of values is very central to Islamic science. And this so-called universal Western science does not allow values to enter equation at all. I think it might be useful here to make a distinction between things which are universal by necessity and things which are universal by historical event. Essentially what we have to acknowledge is that for historical reasons, the culture through which a kind of...

global science and was articulated, the medium through which a global universal and inverted commas science was articulated was European culture. And again, again, we have to face the problem that the European is by no means the universal through any fact of nature. However, through a fact of history. It's a defector rationalization of European superiority. No, no, no, only if you conflate universal one with universal two. I mean, I think that if we're moving simply to think about the ways in which the process of imperialism constructed sciences which represented themselves

putatively, I agree, as universal, we can go quite far by following that particular line of thought, always, of course, being aware of the point which you want to make, which is that these sciences were not in themselves universal or by necessity universal. Thank you all very much. Thank you, Richard Drayton, for talking about your book, Nature's Government, with Zia Sadaar and Maria

Ms Ryan, thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.ukh, forward slash radio 4.