Empires of Opportunity

German naturalists in British India and the frictions of transnational science

Bibliographic Data

ID3609022
AuthorsMoritz Von Brescius (0000-0003-1392-5929, University of Bern, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume55
Issue6
Pages1926-1971
Publication date2021-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueModern Asian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0026-749X • E-ISSN: 1469-8099
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0026749x19000428
OpenAlexW3035356796
LanguageEN
References cited50

This article examines the little-known but exceptionally well-documented German Schlagintweit brothers' expedition to India and Central Asia in 1854-58, under the auspices of the British East India Company and the king of Prussia. The brothers' careers present an instructive study of the opportunities and conflicts inherent within transnational science and the imperial labour market in colonial India in the course of the nineteenth century. Until now, historians have largely emphasized the ways in which European East India companies provided scientific practitioners with professional mobility from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. In these accounts, German scientific practitioners are represented as especially mobile, moving more or less freely within foreign empires, because at the time no 'German' empire existed that might compete for allegiances and make them appear suspect. My article, in contrast, offers a revisionist account of this globalizing picture in two senses. First, a close look at the local everyday practices of the Schlagintweit brothers' expedition highlights the considerable tensions and frictions that accompanied imperial recruitment to South Asia-even for German scientific practitioners. What emerges instead is a rich picture of the contradictory interpretations of supposedly cooperative projects among contemporaries, and the instrumentalization of scientific activities for political ends in the Indian subcontinent, for both established and aspiring colonial powers. Second, the ways in which the Schlagintweits' scientific expedition was represented and remembered in subsequent decades shows how the politics around transnational science projects only intensified with German unification

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Economic history · Empire · German · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Suspect · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law

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