Differences of degree: representations of India in British medical topography, 1820-c. 1870.

After several decades of scholarship on science and empire, it is now largely accepted that disciplines such as medicine and geography played a crucial role in imperial expansion. On a purely technical level these disciplines were important "tools of empire", enabling colonizers to map their new domains and to exploit more effectively their human and material resources.2 But following the work of Michel Foucault3 and Edward Said,4 historians have become more sensitive to the ideological dimensions of colonial science; not least its role in naturalizing distinctions between rulers and ruled. Such issues form part of a more general interest-typified by the work of the Subaltern Studies school of South Asian historians-in how the