British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Writing the History of the Global
British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1
21-22 May 2009
Knowledge interchange and Colonial Cities
Kapil Raj (EHESS, Paris)
Since its beginnings as an independent discipline a century ago, the history of science has moved a long way from universalist pretentions to highly localist ones. The question of the global has mostly been addressed either using the diffusionist “centre-periphery” model, arguing that modern science spread in the course of European expansion from a western European centre to the “peripheries” of the planet. However, concomitant with the rise in recent years of cross-cultural and global approaches in the social sciences, a small but growing body of work has been revisiting this Eurocentric approach to the history of the sciences. One of these new approaches studies the contribution of intercultural encounter the emergence and making of modern science. In this talk I shall illustrate this knowledge interchange and development through the example of Calcutta in the 18th century as a colonial intercultural contact zone. Founded as a trading entrepôt in 1690, Calcutta was at the intersection of a number of heterogeneous long- and short-range networks of trade, finance, diplomacy, law, crafts and learning. This talk explores the history of the first century of its existence during which it grew from insignificance to become the second most-important city of the British empire. During this period Calcutta also emerged as a world-renowned centre of scientific knowledge making in botany, geology, geodesy, map-making, geography, history, linguistics and ethnology. Calcutta thus provides an excellent case study of the co-construction of knowledge and urbanity in the early-modern context of globalisation. As a contact zone between different ethnic, professional and religious communities, each with their specific knowledge practices, new knowledges are produced in this city through the management of difference in this cosmopolitan context.