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Creolised Science
This rich, deeply researched study offers the first comprehensive exploration of cross-cultural plant knowledge in eighteenth-century Mauritius. Using the concept of creolisation – the process by which elements of different cultures are brought together to create entangled and evolving new entities – Brixius examines the production of knowledge on an island without long-established traditions of botany as understood by Europeans. Once foreign plants and knowledge arrived in Mauritius, they were adapted to new environmental circumstances and a new socio-cultural space. Brixius explores how French colonists, settlers, mediators, labourers and enslaved people experienced and shaped the island's botanical past, centring the contributions of subaltern actors. By foregrounding neglected non-European actors from both Africa and Asia, within a melting pot of cultivation traditions from around the world, she presents a truly global history of botanical knowledge.
Creolised Science
Truly global study of creolised plant knowledge in eighteenth-century Mauritius, exploring how people came together to create new practices.
Heirs of Flesh and Paper
"Heirs of Flesh and Paper" tells the story of early modern dynastic politics through subjects’ practical responses to royal illness, failing princely reproduction, and heirs’ premature deaths. It treats connected dynastic crises between 1699 and 1716 as illustrative for early modern European political regimes in which the rulers’ corporeality defined politics. This political order grappled with the endemic uncertainties induced by dynastic bodies. By following the day-to-day practices of knowledge making in response to the unpredictability of royal health, the book shows how the ruling family’s mortal coils regularly threatened to destabilize the institutionalized legal fiction of kingship. Dynastic politics was not only as a transitory stage of state formation, part of elite cooperation, or a cultural construct. It needs to be approached through everyday practices that put ailing dynastic bodies front and center. In a period of intensifying political planning, it constituted one of the most important sites for changing the political itself.
Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa
Kananoja demonstrates how medical interaction in early modern Atlantic Africa was characterised by continuous knowledge exchange between Africans and Europeans.
Islands and the British Empire in the Age of Sail
This volume examines the various ways in which islands (and groups of islands) contributed to the establishment, extension, and maintenance of the British Empire in the age of sail.
The Nutmeg's Curse
In this ambitious successor to The Great Derangement, acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism’s violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment. A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh’s new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg’s Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conq...
Healers and Empires in Global History
This book explores cross-cultural medical encounters involving non-Western healers in a variety of imperial contexts from the Arctic, Asia, Africa, Americas and the Caribbean. It highlights contests over healing, knowledge and medicines through the frameworks of hybridisation and pluralism. The intertwined histories of medicine, empire and early globalisation influenced the ways in which millions of people encountered and experienced suffering, healing and death. In an increasingly global search for therapeutics and localised definition of acceptable healing, networks and mobilities played key roles. Healers’ engagements with politics, law and religion underline the close connections between healing, power and authority. They also reveal the agency of healers, sufferers and local societies, in encounters with modernising imperial states, medical science and commercialisation. The book questions and complements the traditional narratives of triumphant biomedicine, reminding readers that ‘traditional’ medical cultures and practitioners did not often disappear, but rather underwent major changes in the increasingly interconnected world.
The Routledge Handbook of Science and Empire
The focus of this volume is the history of imperial science between 1600 and 1960, although some essays reach back prior to 1600 and the section about decolonization includes post-1960 material. Each contributed chapter, written by an expert in the field, provides an analytical review essay of the field, while also providing an overview of the topic. There is now a rich literature developed by historians of science as well as scholars of empire demonstrating the numerous ways science and empire grew together, especially between 1600 and 1960.
Linnaeus, Natural History and the Circulation of Knowledge
The name of Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) is inscribed in almost every flora and fauna published from the mid-eighteenth century onwards; in this respect he is virtually immortal. In this book a group of specialists argue for the need to re-centre Linnaean science and de-centre Linnaeus the man by exploring the ideas, practices and people connected to his taxonomic innovations. Contributors examine the various techniques, materials and methods that originated within the 'Linnaean workshop': paper technologies, publication strategies, and markets for specimens. Fresh analyses of the reception of Linnaeus's work in Paris, K nigsberg, Edinburgh and beyond offer a window on the local contexts of kno...
Johann Reinhold Forster and the Making of Natural History on Cook's Second Voyage, 1772–1775
James Cook’s voyages of exploration are a turning point not only in the history of the British Empire, but also in the history of science and exploration of the Pacific. The last decades have seen a wide-ranging scholarly interest in Cook’s voyages, focusing on their impact on European and Polynesian societies, their scientific results, and their protagonists, such as Cook himself or the nobleman Joseph Banks who took part in Cook’s first voyage of exploration. This book examines the hitherto underestimated role of the German scholar Johann Reinhold Forster who, together with his son Georg Forster, accompanied Cook on his second voyage of exploration (1772–1775) as a principal natura...
