 |
Not all international
collaborations are equal. US Army Africa/Flickr, CC BY
|
Sir Ronald Ross had just returned from an
expedition to Sierra Leone. The British doctor had been leading efforts to
tackle the malaria that so often killed English colonists in the country, and
in December 1899 he gave a lecture to the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce about
his experience. In the words of a contemporary report,
he argued that “in the coming century, the success of imperialism will depend
largely upon success with the microscope”.
Ross, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for
his malaria research, would later deny he was talking specifically about his own work. But his
point neatly summarized how the efforts of British scientists were intertwined
with their country’s attempt to conquer a quarter of the world.
Ross was very much a child of empire, born in
India and later working there as a surgeon in the imperial army. So when he
used a microscope to identify how
a dreaded tropical disease was transmitted, he would have realized that his
discovery promised to safeguard the health of British troops and officials in
the tropics. In turn, this would enable Britain to expand and consolidate its
colonial rule.
Ross’s words also suggest how science was used to
argue imperialism was morally justified because it reflected British goodwill
towards colonized people. It implied that scientific insights could be
redeployed to promote superior health, hygiene and sanitation among colonial
subjects. Empire was seen as a benevolent, selfless project. As Ross’s fellow
Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling described it, it was the “white man’s burden” to introduce
modernity and civilized governance in the colonies.
But science at this time was more than just a
practical or ideological tool when it came to empire. 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.
As a result, recent years have seen an increasing
number of calls to “decolonize science”, even going so far as to advocate scrapping the practice and
findings of modern science altogether. Tackling the lingering influence of
colonialism in science is much needed. But there are also dangers that the more
extreme attempts to do so could play into the hands of religious
fundamentalists and ultra-nationalists. We must find a way to remove the
inequalities promoted by modern science while making sure its huge potential
benefits work for everyone, instead of letting it become a tool for oppression.
The gracious gift of science
When a slave 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 also have
been forgotten forever if it weren’t for the scientific enquiry that followed.
Europeans on the plantation became curious about the plant and, building on the
slave’s “accidental finding”, they eventually concluded it wasn’t poisonous at
all.
Instead it became known as a cure for worms,
warts, ringworm, freckles and cold swellings, with the name Apocynum
erectum. As the historian Pratik Chakrabarti argues in a recent book,
this incident serves as a neat example of how, under European political and
commercial domination, gathering knowledge about nature could take place
simultaneously with exploitation.
For imperialists and
their modern apologists, science
and medicine were among the gracious gifts from the European empires
to the colonial world. What’s more, the 19th-century imperial ideologues saw
the scientific successes of the West as a way to allege that non-Europeans were
intellectually inferior and so deserved and needed to be colonized.
In the incredibly influential 1835 memo “Minute on Indian Education”, British politician Thomas Macaulay denounced Indian
languages partially because they lacked scientific words. He suggested that
languages such as Sanskrit and Arabic were “barren of useful knowledge”,
“fruitful of monstrous superstitions” and contained “false history, false
astronomy, false medicine”.
Such opinions weren’t confined to colonial
officials and imperial ideologues and were often shared by various
representatives of the scientific profession. The prominent Victorian scientist
Sir Francis Galton argued that the “the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some
two grades below our own (the Anglo Saxon)”. Even Charles Darwin implied that “savage
races” such as “the negro or the Australian” were closer to gorillas than were
white Caucasians.
Yet 19th-century British science was itself built
upon a global repertoire of wisdom, information, and living and material
specimens collected from various corners of the colonial world. Extracting raw
materials from colonial mines and plantations went hand in hand with extracting
scientific information and specimens from colonized people.
Imperial collections
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 colonial world,
including from Ceylon,India, Java and Nepal.
The British and Natural History museums were
founded using the personal collection of doctor and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane.
To gather these thousands of specimens, Sloane had worked intimately with the
East India, South Sea and Royal African companies, which did a great deal to
help establish the British Empire.
The scientists who used this evidence were rarely
sedentary geniuses working in laboratories insulated from imperial politics and
economics. The likes of Charles Darwin on the Beagle and botanist Sir Joseph Banks on the Endeavour literally rode on the voyages of British
exploration and conquest that enabled imperialism.
Other scientific careers were directly driven by
imperial achievements and needs. Early anthropological work in British India,
such as Sir Herbert Hope Risley’s Tribes and Castes of Bengal, published in 1891, drew upon massive administrative
classifications of the colonised population.
Map-making operations including the work of
the Great Trigonometrical Survey in South Asia came from the need to cross
colonial landscapes for trade and military campaigns. The geological surveys
commissioned around the world by Sir Roderick Murchison were linked with intelligence gathering on minerals
and local politics.
Efforts to curb epidemic diseases such as plague,
smallpox and cholera led to attempts to discipline the routines, diets and
movements of colonial subjects. This opened up a political process that the
historian David Arnold has termed the “colonization of the body”. By controlling people as well as countries, the authorities
turned medicine into a weapon with which to secure imperial rule.
New technologies were also put to use expanding
and consolidating the empire. Photographs were
used for creating physical and racial stereotypes of different groups of colonized people. Steamboats were
crucial in the colonial exploration of Africa in the mid-19th century. Aircraft enabled
the British to surveil and then bomb rebellions in 20th-century Iraq. The
innovation of wireless radio in
the 1890s was shaped by Britain’s need for discreet, long-distance
communication during the South African war.
In these ways and more, Europe’s leaps in science
and technology during this period both drove and were driven by its political
and economic domination of the rest of the world. Modern science was
effectively built on a system that exploited millions of people. At the same
time it helped justify and sustain that exploitation, in ways that hugely
influenced how Europeans saw other races and countries. What’s more, colonial
legacies continue to shape trends in science today.
 |
Sir Hans Sloane’s
imperial collection started the British Museum. Paul
Hudson/Wikipedia, CC
BY
|
Modern colonial science
Since the formal end of colonialism, we have
become better at recognizing how scientific expertise has come from many different countries and 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 the cultural biases and disadvantages they
imposed have not.
You just have to look at the statistics on the
way research is carried out globally to see how the scientific hierarchy
created by colonialism continues. The annual rankings of universities are published mostly by the Western world and
tend to favour its own institutions. Academic journals across the different
branches of science are mostly dominated by
the US and western Europe.
It is unlikely that anyone who wishes to be taken
seriously today would explain this data in terms of innate intellectual
superiority determined by race. The blatant scientific racism of the 19th
century has now given way to the notion that excellence in science and
technology are a euphemism for significant funding, infrastructure and economic
development.
Because of this, most of Asia, Africa and the
Caribbean is seen either as playing catch-up with the developed world or as
dependent on its scientific expertise and financial aid. Some academics have
identified these trends as evidence of the persisting “intellectual domination
of the West” and labelled them a form of “neo-colonialism”.
Various well-meaning efforts to bridge this gap
have struggled to go beyond the legacies of colonialism. For example,
scientific collaboration between countries can be a fruitful way of sharing
skills and knowledge, and learning from the intellectual insights of one
another. But when an economically weaker part of the world collaborates almost
exclusively with very strong scientific partners, it can take the form of
dependence, if not subordination.
A 2009 study showed
that about 80% of Central Africa’s research papers were produced with
collaborators based outside the region. With the exception of Rwanda, each of
the African countries principally collaborated with its former colonizer. As a
result, these dominant collaborators shaped scientific work in the region. They prioritized research on immediate local health-related issues, particularly
infectious and tropical diseases, rather than encouraging local scientists to
also pursue the fuller range of topics pursued in the West.
In the case of Cameroon, local scientists’ most
common role was in collecting data and fieldwork while foreign collaborators
shouldered a significant amount of the analytical science. This echoed a 2003 study of
international collaborations in at least 48 developing countries that suggested
local scientists too often carried out “fieldwork in their own country for the
foreign researchers”.
In the same study, 60% to 70% of the scientists
based in developed countries did not acknowledge their collaborators in poorer
countries as co-authors in their papers. This is despite the fact they later
claimed in the survey that the papers were the result of close collaborations.
Mistrust and resistance
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 population
have often been characterized by mistrust.
For example, during the smallpox eradication
campaigns of the 1970s and the polio campaign of past two decades, the World
Health Organization’s representatives found it quite challenging to mobilize willing
participants and volunteers in the interiors of South Asia. On occasions they
even saw resistance on religious grounds from local people. But their stringent
responses, which included the close surveillance of villages, cash incentives
for identifying concealed cases and house-to-house searches, added to this
climate of mutual suspicion. These experiences of mistrust are reminiscent of those created by strict colonial
policies of plague control.
Western pharmaceutical firms also play a role by
carrying out questionable clinical trials in the developing world where, as
journalist Sonia Shah puts it, “ethical oversight is minimal and desperate patients abound”. This raises moral questions about whether
multinational corporations misuse the economic weaknesses of once-colonized countries in the interests of scientific and medical research.
The colonial image of science as a domain of the
white man even continues to shape contemporary scientific practice in developed
countries. People from ethnic minorities are underrepresented in science and engineering jobs and more likely to
face discrimination and other barriers
to career progress.
To finally leave behind the baggage of
colonialism, scientific collaborations need to become more symmetrical and
founded on greater degrees of mutual respect. We need to decolonize science by recognizing the true achievements and potential of scientists from outside the
Western world. Yet while this structural change is necessary, the path to decolonization has dangers of its own.
 |
A March for Science protester
in Melbourne. www.wikimedia.com, CC BY-SA
|
Science must fall?
In October 2016, a YouTube video of students
discussing the decolonization of science went surprisingly viral. The clip,
which has been watched more than 1m 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 experiences. The
student’s point that science cannot explain so-called black magic earned the
argument much derision and mockery. But you only have to look at the racist and ignorant comments left
beneath the video to see why the topic is so in need of discussion.
Inspired by the recent “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign against the university legacy of the imperialist Cecil
Rhodes, the Cape Town students became associated with the phrase “science
must fall”. While it may be interestingly provocative, this slogan isn’t
helpful at a time when government policies in a range of countries including
the US,UK and India are
already threatening to impose major limits on science research funding.
More alarmingly, the phrase also runs the risk of
being used by religious fundamentalists and cynical politicians in their
arguments against established scientific theories such as climate change. This
is a time when the integrity of experts is under fire and science is the target of political manouevring. So polemically rejecting the subject altogether
only plays into the hands of those who have no interest in decolonization.
Alongside its imperial history, science has also
inspired many people in the former colonial world to demonstrate remarkable
courage, critical thinking and dissent in the face of established beliefs and
conservative traditions. These include the iconic Indian anti-caste activist Rohith Vemula and the murdered atheist authors Narendra Dabholkar and Avijit Roy. Demanding
that “science must fall” fails to do justice to this legacy.
The call to decolonize science, as in the case
of other disciplines such as literature, can encourage us to rethink the
dominant image that scientific knowledge is the work of white men. But this
much-needed critique of the scientific canon carries the other danger of
inspiring alternative national narratives in post-colonial countries.
For example, some Indian nationalists, including
the country’s current prime minister, Narendra Modi, have emphasized the scientific glories of an ancient Hindu civilization.
They argue that plastic surgery, genetic science, aeroplanes and stem cell
technology were in vogue in India thousands of years ago. These claims are not
just a problem because they are factually inaccurate. Misusing science to stoke
a sense of nationalist pride can easily feed into jingoism.
Meanwhile, various forms of modern science and
their potential benefits have been rejected as unpatriotic. In 2016, a senior
Indian government official even went so far as to claim that “doctors prescribing non-Ayurvedic medicines are
anti-national”.
The path to decolonization
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 lone geniuses, we could insist on
a more cosmopolitan model. This would recognize how different networks of
people have often worked together in scientific projects and the cultural exchanges that helped
them – even if those exchanges were unequal and exploitative.
But if scientists and historians are serious
about “decolonizing science” in this way, they need to do much more to present
the culturally diverse and global origins of science to a wider, non-specialist
audience. For example, we need to make sure this decolonized story of the
development of science makes its way into schools.
Students should also be taught how empires
affected the development of science and how scientific knowledge was reinforced,used and sometimes resisted by
colonized people. We should encourage budding scientists to question whether
science has done enough to dispel modern prejudices based on concepts of race,
gender, class and nationality.
 |
Ronald Ross at his lab in
Calcutta, 1898. Wellcome Collection, CC BY
|
Decolonizing science will also involve
encouraging Western institutions that hold imperial scientific collections to
reflect more on the violent political contexts of war and colonization in which
these items were acquired. An obvious step forward would be to discuss
repatriating scientific specimens to former colonies, as botanists working on
plants originally from Angola but held primarily in Europe have done.
If repatriation isn’t possible, then co-ownership or priority access for
academics from post-colonial countries should at least be considered.
This is also an opportunity for the broader
scientific community to critically reflect on its own profession. Doing so will
inspire scientists to think more about the political contexts that have kept
their work going and about how changing them could benefit the scientific
profession around the world. It should spark conversations between the sciences
and other disciplines about their shared colonial past and how to address the
issues it creates.
Unravelling the legacies of colonial science will take time. But the field needs strengthening at a time when some of the most influential countries in the world have adopted a lukewarm attitude towards scientific values and findings. Decolonization promises to make science more appealing by integrating its findings more firmly with questions of justice, ethics and democracy. Perhaps, in the coming century, success with the microscope will depend on success in tackling the lingering effects of imperialism.
.jpg){kind=link}