Science, Africa and Europe: Processing Information and Creating Knowledge

Description

Historically, scientists and experts have played a prominent role in shaping the relationship between Europe and Africa. Starting with travel writers and missionary intellectuals in the 17th century, European savants have engaged in the study of nature and society in Africa. Knowledge about realms of the world like Africa provided a foil against which Europeans came to view themselves as members of enlightened and modern civilisations. Science and technology also offered crucial tools with which to administer, represent and legitimate power relations in a new global world but the knowledge drawn from contacts with people in far-off places provided Europeans with information and ideas that contributed in everyday ways to the scientific revolution and that provided explorers with the intellectual and social capital needed to develop science into modern disciplines at home in the metropole. This book poses questions about the changing role of European science and expert knowledge from early colonial times to post-colonial times. How did science shape understanding of Africa in Europe and how was scientific knowledge shaped, adapted and redefined in African contexts? Cover Title Copyright Contents List of figures List of contributors Preface: tribute to Patrick Harries (1950–2016) 1 Science between Africa and Europe: creating knowledge and connecting worlds (introduction) Part I Mapping and exploring 2 Peter Kolb and the circulation of knowledge about the Cape of Good Hope 3 A naturalist’s career: Hinrich Lichtenstein (1780–1857) 4 ‘Nothing but love for natural history and my desire to help your Museum’? Ludwig Krebs’s transcontinental collecting partnership with Hinrich Lichtenstein 5 The African travels of Hans Schinz: biological transfer and the academisation and popularisation of (African) Botany in Zurich Part II Knowledge practices between colonial and local actors 6 Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee: one work’s significance for European knowledge production about the Asante Empire 7 Tropical soldiers? New definitions of military strength in the colonial context (1884–1914) 8 Disease at the confluence of knowledge: kifafa and epilepsy in Ulanga (Tanzania) 9 Standards and standardisations: the history of a malaria vaccine candidate (SPf66) in Tanzania Part III International discourses, transnational circulations of knowledge 10 The politics and production of history on the birth of archaeology at the Cape (1827–2015) 11 Davos of Ghana? local, national and international perspectives on tuberculosis treatment and control (ca. 1920–1965) 12 When economics went overseas: epistemic problems in the macroeconomic analysis of late colonial Africa Index