Introduction

As Western empires drew Europeans into contact with new ‘exotic’ peoples and environ­ments, new domains of knowledge emerged to make sense of and enable this process. In this section we consider four examples of imperial science involving the human, animal and botanical worlds.

Having laid the foundation for a binomial nomenclature that classifies every living thing into genus and species, the name of the Swedish Professor of Medicine Carl Linnaeus has become synonymous with European science. If Linnaean classification is often invoked in studies of imperialism, race and science, the connection between his investigations and Swedish imperial expansion is just as frequently overlooked. Christina Skott explores the relationship between Linnaeus and Linnaean science with the Swedish East India Company in the eighteenth century, and demonstrates how commercial and economic interests linked both scientific and imperial endeavours.

European scientific classification is perhaps most notorious in its relationship to ideas of racial difference. Martin E. Thomas’ work on British anthropology concerns the symbiotic relationship between the growth of science and the expansion of empire. The data upon which anthropology depended came from the interaction between indigenous peoples and colonising Europeans. Thomas tracks these encounters through the Indian Ocean Andaman Islands of the 1880s and 1890s and Arnhem Land in the north of Australia in the 1930s. Finally he turns to the question of how the post-colonial context has changed the practice and uses of anthropology and shifted the relationship between scientists and informants.

Imperial exploration and expansion not only brought Europeans into contact with new cli­mates, pathogens and parasites, but also saw Europeans introduce new diseases to the popula­tions they encountered, often with devastating consequences. Laurence Monnais and Hans Pols show how medicine was implicated in exploration, expansion and colonisation from the very start of this process. Drawing on a wide range of European examples, and paying particular attention to the emergence of the field of tropical medicine, they track the rise of public health and the changing technologies that spread the reach of Western empires across the globe.

In tracing knowledge networks across an expanding imperial world, Peter Hobbins warns us against an overly secure view of Western science. Emphasising the importance of human— animal relations in imperial expansion, he charts the European response to threatening spe­cies, specifically poisonous animals. Drawing examples from India to Australia, he points out how unstable this definition was, and demonstrates the ways in which the knowledge net­works that constructed such definitions were both profoundly localised and trans-imperial.