Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950
Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950
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非洲作为一个活的实验室：帝国、发展和科学知识问题，1870-1950
DOI：
10.7208/chicago/9780226803487.001.0001
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发表时间：
2011
影响因子：
4.4
通讯作者：
H. Tilley
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
H. Tilley
热带非洲是世界上最后经历正式欧洲殖民主义的地区之一，这一过程与一系列新的科学专业和研究方法的出现同时发生。 《非洲作为一个活的实验室》是一项雄心勃勃的研究，探讨了帝国主义与环境、医学、种族和人类学等科学专业知识在英属非洲殖民化过程中的作用之间的棘手关系。海伦·蒂利 (Helen Tilley) 分析的一个重要来源是非洲研究调查，该项目于 20 世纪 30 年代开展，旨在探索现代科学如何应用于非洲问题。蒂利认为，该项目采用并推荐了一种跨学科的非洲研究方法，强调了非洲环境的异质性以及所研究问题的相互关系。蒂利认为，虽然英国殖民主义者的目标无疑是改造非洲并使非洲现代化，但他们的努力常常因对当地的科学关注而出乎意料地被破坏。经过细致的研究和优雅的论证，《非洲作为一个活的实验室》改变了我们对帝国历史、殖民发展以及科学在这两者中所发挥的作用的理解。
Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of new scientific specialties and research methods. "Africa as a Living Laboratory" is an ambitious study of the thorny relationship between imperialism and the role of scientific expertise - environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological - in the colonization of British Africa. A key source for Helen Tilley's analysis is the African Research Survey, a project undertaken in the 1930s to explore how modern science was being applied to African problems. This project both embraced and recommended an interdisciplinary approach to research on Africa that, Tilley argues, underscored the heterogeneity of African environments and the interrelation of the problems being studied. While the aim of British colonialists was unquestionably to transform and modernize Africa, their efforts, Tilley contends, were often unexpectedly subverted by scientific concerns with the local. Meticulously researched and gracefully argued, "Africa as a Living Laboratory" transforms our understanding of imperial history, colonial development, and the role science played in both.