Thomas Simpson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3768934 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas Simpson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Simpson |
| SIGNATURE | SIMPSON T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9175-8874 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 27 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Efficiency of Moral Character: Modelling Principal–Agent Relations and Caring Agents Within the Fiduciary
This paper reconsiders how intrinsic motives that support trustworthiness should be modelled within economic theory, contributing to a methodologically pluralist business ethics. We re-examine the principal–agent problem, exposing a hidden assumption in the classic Jensen and Meckling (1976) solution. By introducing a lying cost—reflecting the agent’s concern for honesty—we reveal their model as a limiting case and distinguish between opportunist…
A call for transdisciplinary trust research in the artificial intelligence era
Trust is a cornerstone and enabler of human civilization, determining the very nature of how people interact with each other. The swift integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into daily life poses grand societal challenges and necessitates a reevaluation of trust. Our bibliometric literature review calls for scientists and stakeholders to cross traditional academic boundaries to address emerging and evolving societal challenges arising from …
Does enhanced expectancy mitigate the negative impact of gender stereotype threat on women’s motor learning, perceived competence and self-efficacy
A substantial body of literature has demonstrated that women may be negatively influenced by gender stereotypes, especially when induced in an evaluative situation, during a task where a negative stereotype toward women exists (e.g., soccer). Although numerous studies have been conducted with the aim of reducing these negative effects of stereotype threat, exploring newer methods such as using enhanced expectancy, achieved through the simplificat…
An Encroaching Sea: Nature, Sovereignty and Development at the Edge of British India 1860–1950. By Devika Shankar
Planetary pictures: Historicizing environmental and climate sciences in the Anthropocene
How should historians of environmental and climate sciences respond to the Earth's move from the blank canvas to a foreground feature of ‘big-picture’ scholarship? This article highlights three crucial themes for histories of science in the Anthropocene: categories of scale and methods of scaling, the relationship between history of science and the disciplines it historicizes, and the entanglement of environmental damage and environmental knowled…
Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya
Cartography and empire from early modernity to postmodernity
Cartography has both helped and hindered empires from earliest early modernity to postmodernity. Imperial formations developed in conjunction with particular mapping projects, which acted as instruments of violence, extraction, and dispossession, facilitating vast inequalities and iniquities. But maps have never been under the exclusive control of narrowly defined imperial elites; instead they have drawn on the knowledge and labour of subject peo…
The Frontier in British India: Space, Science, and Power in the Nineteenth Century
Thomas Simpson provides an innovative account of how distinctive forms of colonial power and knowledge developed at the territorial fringes of colonial India during the nineteenth century. Through critical interventions in a wide range of theoretical and historiographical fields, he speaks to historians of empire and science, anthropologists, and geographers alike. The Frontier in British India provides the first connected and comparative analysi…
Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future: Colin Mackenzie, the early colonial state and the comprehensive survey of India by Tobias Wolffhardt
Reviewed by: Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future: Colin Mackenzie, the early colonial state and the comprehensive survey of India by Tobias Wolffhardt Thomas Simpson Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future: Colin Mackenzie, the early colonial state and the comprehensive survey of India By Tobias Wolffhardt, trans. Jane Rafferty. New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2018. The expansive collections, writings, and images that Colin Mackenzie (1754—1821) …
Forgetting like a State in Colonial North-East India
What if governing and "seeing" like a state is actually about forgetting and misdirecting as much as it is about accumulating and communicating? In the colonial north-east during the early nineteenth century, governing and knowing peoples and spaces relied not on flows of knowledge, but on intermittent and selective adaptations of previously formulated information. This was not simply a product of unintended shortcomings, but resulted from delibe…
Science Without Frontiers: Cosmopolitanism and National Interests in the World of Learning, 1870–1940, by Robert Fox
The title of Robert Fox’s brief and deftly written book is not only a statement of its object of inquiry—scientific internationalism before and after the First World War—but also a declaration of the author’s optimistic adherence to ‘the goal of knowledge open to all’ (p. 111). The latter element is only explicit in the introduction and epilogue, but substantially informs the analysis in between: a tone of celebration pervades the first chapter’s…
Modern Mountains From the Enlightenment to the Anthropocene
Recent scholarship across a range of historical sub-disciplines shows that uplands are where many forms of modernity are both crafted and overwhelmed. Maintaining multiple tensions – between assimilation and distinction, between projections of power and material and human resistance, and between knowledge and elusiveness – is essential to the modernities crafted in mountain spaces. This review highlights a number of common threads running through…
The Philosophy of Trust
Trust is central to our social lives and trusting relations are themselves of great value. In trusting others, we realise distinctive forms of value. What are these forms of value, and how is trust central to our lives? These questions are explored and developed in this volume, which collects fifteen new essays on the philosophy of trust
Clean out of the map: Knowing and doubting space at India's high imperial frontiers
During the second half of the nineteenth century, land frontiers became areas of unique significance for surveyors in colonial India. These regions were understood to provide the most stringent tests for the men, instruments, and techniques that collectively constituted spatial data and representations. In many instances, however, the severity of the challenges that India's frontiers afforded stretched practices in the field and in the survey off…
Health activism against barriers to indigenous health in Aotearoa New Zealand
Racism and government policies of colonisation and assimilation contribute to the disproportionate burden of disease carried by indigenous people globally. In colonial contexts such as Aotearoa New Zealand, these inequities are routinely monitored but governments believe economic growth and better lifestyles will resolve the issues. Stop Institutional Racism (STIR), a group of health activists, is challenging this dominant discourse and building …
Realising the rhetoric: Refreshing public health providers’ efforts to honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi in New Zealand
Public health has an ethical commitment to reduce health disparities. Advancing Te Tiriti obligations in everyday practice has the potential to address inequalities
The Morality of Defensive War
I recall vividly a moment from pre-deployment training before a tour of Northern Ireland. A lawyer had been briefing us on the rules of engagement. We were going under Card A, which states that ‘You may only open fire against a person if he/she is committing or about to commit an act likely to endanger life and there is no other way to prevent the danger’. A corporal, already decorated with a Military Cross from an early tour of Afghanistan, said…
Bordering and Frontier-Making in Nineteenth-Century British India
From the 1820s to the 1850s, the British Indian state undertook its final major phase of expansion to assume the approximate geographical extent it retained until its demise in 1947. It confronted at its north-eastern and north-western outskirts seemingly intractable mountains, deserts, and jungles inhabited by apparently stateless ‘tribal’ peoples. In its various attempts to comprehend and deal with these human and material complexities, the col…
Réguler les robots-tueurs, plutôt que les interdire
Les futurs systèmes d'armes létales autonomes ( LAWS selon leur acronyme anglais), aussi appelés « robots tueurs », seront-ils une menace pour l'humanité ? Dans cet article de proposition prescriptive, nous soutenons qu'ils ne privent pas les humains de leurs responsabilités. Au contraire, ils augmentent notre capacité à leur faire rendre des comptes de leurs crimes de guerre, même si leur diffusion et leur utilisation doivent impérativement être…
Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coast of America: Effected by the Officers of the Hudson's Bay Company During the Years 1836-1839
Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coast of America: Effected by the Officers of the Hudson's Bay Company during the Years 1836–1839
In 1829, Thomas Simpson (1808–1840), born in Dingwall, Scotland, joined the fur-trading Hudson's Bay Company. Under its auspices, he was the junior officer of a successful survey expedition along the North-West Passage, beyond the limits of Franklin's disastrous 1819–22 attempt. The Royal Geographical Society awarded Simpson their Founder's Medal; however the Company refused his request immediately to lead an expedition further east along the coa…
Murder and Media in the New Rome: The Fadda Affair
An insightful look into the origins of modern Italian media culture by examining a sensational crime and trial that took place in Rome in the late 1870s, when a bloody murder triggered a national spec
Tuberculosis risk among migrant farm workers on the Delmarva peninsula
A survey was conducted to ascertain the risk of tuberculosis (TB) among migrant farm workers on the Delmarva peninsula. Relevant histories were obtained from 842 migrants; a total of 709 skin tests were completed, and 239 sputum specimens were examined for acid-fast bacilli (AFB) and culture. No cases of infectious tuberculosis were ascertained by history or AFB examination. One sputum culture was positive for M. tuberculosis and 13 were positive…
Th-Century Consort
The Police Academy: An Inside View
Bordering and Frontier-Making in Nineteenth-Century British India
From the 1820s to the 1850s, the British Indian state undertook its final major phase of expansion to assume the approximate geographical extent it retained until its demise in 1947. It confronted at its north-eastern and north-western outskirts seemingly intractable mountains, deserts, and jungles inhabited by apparently stateless ‘tribal’ peoples. In its various attempts to comprehend and deal with these human and material complexities, the col…
Clean out of the map: Knowing and doubting space at India's high imperial frontiers
During the second half of the nineteenth century, land frontiers became areas of unique significance for surveyors in colonial India. These regions were understood to provide the most stringent tests for the men, instruments, and techniques that collectively constituted spatial data and representations. In many instances, however, the severity of the challenges that India's frontiers afforded stretched practices in the field and in the survey off…
Modern Mountains From the Enlightenment to the Anthropocene
Recent scholarship across a range of historical sub-disciplines shows that uplands are where many forms of modernity are both crafted and overwhelmed. Maintaining multiple tensions – between assimilation and distinction, between projections of power and material and human resistance, and between knowledge and elusiveness – is essential to the modernities crafted in mountain spaces. This review highlights a number of common threads running through…
Tuberculosis risk among migrant farm workers on the Delmarva peninsula
A survey was conducted to ascertain the risk of tuberculosis (TB) among migrant farm workers on the Delmarva peninsula. Relevant histories were obtained from 842 migrants; a total of 709 skin tests were completed, and 239 sputum specimens were examined for acid-fast bacilli (AFB) and culture. No cases of infectious tuberculosis were ascertained by history or AFB examination. One sputum culture was positive for M. tuberculosis and 13 were positive…
Realising the rhetoric: Refreshing public health providers’ efforts to honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi in New Zealand
Public health has an ethical commitment to reduce health disparities. Advancing Te Tiriti obligations in everyday practice has the potential to address inequalities
Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya
The Police Academy: An Inside View
Th-Century Consort
Tuberculosis risk among migrant farm workers on the Delmarva peninsula
A survey was conducted to ascertain the risk of tuberculosis (TB) among migrant farm workers on the Delmarva peninsula. Relevant histories were obtained from 842 migrants; a total of 709 skin tests were completed, and 239 sputum specimens were examined for acid-fast bacilli (AFB) and culture. No cases of infectious tuberculosis were ascertained by history or AFB examination. One sputum culture was positive for M. tuberculosis and 13 were positive…
Murder and Media in the New Rome: The Fadda Affair
An insightful look into the origins of modern Italian media culture by examining a sensational crime and trial that took place in Rome in the late 1870s, when a bloody murder triggered a national spec
Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coast of America: Effected by the Officers of the Hudson's Bay Company during the Years 1836–1839
In 1829, Thomas Simpson (1808–1840), born in Dingwall, Scotland, joined the fur-trading Hudson's Bay Company. Under its auspices, he was the junior officer of a successful survey expedition along the North-West Passage, beyond the limits of Franklin's disastrous 1819–22 attempt. The Royal Geographical Society awarded Simpson their Founder's Medal; however the Company refused his request immediately to lead an expedition further east along the coa…
Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coast of America: Effected by the Officers of the Hudson's Bay Company During the Years 1836-1839
The Morality of Defensive War
I recall vividly a moment from pre-deployment training before a tour of Northern Ireland. A lawyer had been briefing us on the rules of engagement. We were going under Card A, which states that ‘You may only open fire against a person if he/she is committing or about to commit an act likely to endanger life and there is no other way to prevent the danger’. A corporal, already decorated with a Military Cross from an early tour of Afghanistan, said…
Bordering and Frontier-Making in Nineteenth-Century British India
From the 1820s to the 1850s, the British Indian state undertook its final major phase of expansion to assume the approximate geographical extent it retained until its demise in 1947. It confronted at its north-eastern and north-western outskirts seemingly intractable mountains, deserts, and jungles inhabited by apparently stateless ‘tribal’ peoples. In its various attempts to comprehend and deal with these human and material complexities, the col…
Réguler les robots-tueurs, plutôt que les interdire
Les futurs systèmes d'armes létales autonomes ( LAWS selon leur acronyme anglais), aussi appelés « robots tueurs », seront-ils une menace pour l'humanité ? Dans cet article de proposition prescriptive, nous soutenons qu'ils ne privent pas les humains de leurs responsabilités. Au contraire, ils augmentent notre capacité à leur faire rendre des comptes de leurs crimes de guerre, même si leur diffusion et leur utilisation doivent impérativement être…
Health activism against barriers to indigenous health in Aotearoa New Zealand
Racism and government policies of colonisation and assimilation contribute to the disproportionate burden of disease carried by indigenous people globally. In colonial contexts such as Aotearoa New Zealand, these inequities are routinely monitored but governments believe economic growth and better lifestyles will resolve the issues. Stop Institutional Racism (STIR), a group of health activists, is challenging this dominant discourse and building …
Realising the rhetoric: Refreshing public health providers’ efforts to honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi in New Zealand
Public health has an ethical commitment to reduce health disparities. Advancing Te Tiriti obligations in everyday practice has the potential to address inequalities
The Philosophy of Trust
Trust is central to our social lives and trusting relations are themselves of great value. In trusting others, we realise distinctive forms of value. What are these forms of value, and how is trust central to our lives? These questions are explored and developed in this volume, which collects fifteen new essays on the philosophy of trust
Clean out of the map: Knowing and doubting space at India's high imperial frontiers
During the second half of the nineteenth century, land frontiers became areas of unique significance for surveyors in colonial India. These regions were understood to provide the most stringent tests for the men, instruments, and techniques that collectively constituted spatial data and representations. In many instances, however, the severity of the challenges that India's frontiers afforded stretched practices in the field and in the survey off…
Science Without Frontiers: Cosmopolitanism and National Interests in the World of Learning, 1870–1940, by Robert Fox
The title of Robert Fox’s brief and deftly written book is not only a statement of its object of inquiry—scientific internationalism before and after the First World War—but also a declaration of the author’s optimistic adherence to ‘the goal of knowledge open to all’ (p. 111). The latter element is only explicit in the introduction and epilogue, but substantially informs the analysis in between: a tone of celebration pervades the first chapter’s…
Modern Mountains From the Enlightenment to the Anthropocene
Recent scholarship across a range of historical sub-disciplines shows that uplands are where many forms of modernity are both crafted and overwhelmed. Maintaining multiple tensions – between assimilation and distinction, between projections of power and material and human resistance, and between knowledge and elusiveness – is essential to the modernities crafted in mountain spaces. This review highlights a number of common threads running through…
Forgetting like a State in Colonial North-East India
What if governing and "seeing" like a state is actually about forgetting and misdirecting as much as it is about accumulating and communicating? In the colonial north-east during the early nineteenth century, governing and knowing peoples and spaces relied not on flows of knowledge, but on intermittent and selective adaptations of previously formulated information. This was not simply a product of unintended shortcomings, but resulted from delibe…
The Frontier in British India: Space, Science, and Power in the Nineteenth Century
Thomas Simpson provides an innovative account of how distinctive forms of colonial power and knowledge developed at the territorial fringes of colonial India during the nineteenth century. Through critical interventions in a wide range of theoretical and historiographical fields, he speaks to historians of empire and science, anthropologists, and geographers alike. The Frontier in British India provides the first connected and comparative analysi…
Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future: Colin Mackenzie, the early colonial state and the comprehensive survey of India by Tobias Wolffhardt
Reviewed by: Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future: Colin Mackenzie, the early colonial state and the comprehensive survey of India by Tobias Wolffhardt Thomas Simpson Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future: Colin Mackenzie, the early colonial state and the comprehensive survey of India By Tobias Wolffhardt, trans. Jane Rafferty. New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2018. The expansive collections, writings, and images that Colin Mackenzie (1754—1821) …
Cartography and empire from early modernity to postmodernity
Cartography has both helped and hindered empires from earliest early modernity to postmodernity. Imperial formations developed in conjunction with particular mapping projects, which acted as instruments of violence, extraction, and dispossession, facilitating vast inequalities and iniquities. But maps have never been under the exclusive control of narrowly defined imperial elites; instead they have drawn on the knowledge and labour of subject peo…
Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya
Planetary pictures: Historicizing environmental and climate sciences in the Anthropocene
How should historians of environmental and climate sciences respond to the Earth's move from the blank canvas to a foreground feature of ‘big-picture’ scholarship? This article highlights three crucial themes for histories of science in the Anthropocene: categories of scale and methods of scaling, the relationship between history of science and the disciplines it historicizes, and the entanglement of environmental damage and environmental knowled…
A call for transdisciplinary trust research in the artificial intelligence era
Trust is a cornerstone and enabler of human civilization, determining the very nature of how people interact with each other. The swift integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into daily life poses grand societal challenges and necessitates a reevaluation of trust. Our bibliometric literature review calls for scientists and stakeholders to cross traditional academic boundaries to address emerging and evolving societal challenges arising from …
Does enhanced expectancy mitigate the negative impact of gender stereotype threat on women’s motor learning, perceived competence and self-efficacy
A substantial body of literature has demonstrated that women may be negatively influenced by gender stereotypes, especially when induced in an evaluative situation, during a task where a negative stereotype toward women exists (e.g., soccer). Although numerous studies have been conducted with the aim of reducing these negative effects of stereotype threat, exploring newer methods such as using enhanced expectancy, achieved through the simplificat…
An Encroaching Sea: Nature, Sovereignty and Development at the Edge of British India 1860–1950. By Devika Shankar
The Efficiency of Moral Character: Modelling Principal–Agent Relations and Caring Agents Within the Fiduciary
This paper reconsiders how intrinsic motives that support trustworthiness should be modelled within economic theory, contributing to a methodologically pluralist business ethics. We re-examine the principal–agent problem, exposing a hidden assumption in the classic Jensen and Meckling (1976) solution. By introducing a lying cost—reflecting the agent’s concern for honesty—we reveal their model as a limiting case and distinguish between opportunist…
Political science (14 works) · History (13 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Archaeology (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Colonialism (6 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Art (5 works)