What is Colonial Science ? Alice

For many historians the term “colonial science” implicitly refers to any scientific knowledge produced in the colonies, usually by professionals trained in the metropole. Other historians eager to “provincialize Europe” have highlighted the role that colonial administrators played in creating new forms of scientific knowledge, which then returned to Europe; still other scholars have explored how subaltern subjects adopted aspects of colonial knowledge only to bend them to their own ends. Meanwhile postcolonial critics have argued more broadly that the same violent processes that produced colonial power also produced scientific knowledge. These critics have brilliantly theorized the ways in which science and power were related, but paid less attention to how experts instrumentalized knowledge in particular settings, or to the unintended consequences of scientific research carried out within the asymmetrical power relations of empire.