Colonial Encounters and the Forging of New Knowledge and National Identities: Great Britain and India, 1760-1850

In opposition both to the dominant vision of colonial science as an hegemonic European enterprise whose universalization can be conceived of in purely diffusionist terms, and to the more recent perception of it as a simple reordering of indigenous knowledge within the European canon, this essay seeks to show the complex reciprocity involved in the making of science within the colonial context. Based on the example of India during the first century of British colonial conquest, it examines the specificities of intercultural encounter in the subcontinent, the formalized institutions that were engendered, and the kinds of knowledge practices that emerged in the case of the geographical survey of India. The essay suggests that the knowledge created in this context is not just local in character, but participates wholly in the emergence of universal science, as well as of other institutions of modernity.