Empire and the Social Sciences

This is an ambitious volume, which emerged out of debates funded by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies in 2014. Editor Jeremy Adelman writes that the goal of the volume is to ‘explore ... [the] global history of the social sciences’ (p. 8). Adelman and the contributors to the collection approach this task by engaging with the ways in which social scientists both shaped and were shaped by imperialism, as well as the effect the global spread of these disciplines had on international political economy. The volume certainly achieves its goal of making the reader think more complexly about the tangled webs of local and global knowledge starting in the eighteenth century and, most interestingly, in relation to evolving forms of global imperialism; however, some under-studied areas and an inescapable (if visible and critiqued) Eurocentrism make it clear that more studies of this nature with a different focus

Ancient history · Economic history · Empire · Sociology · Anthropology · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · History · History of Science and Medicine