Scholar's Award: Science and Improvement in South Asia: Empire, Nation, and Colonial Modernity, 1860-1922

学者奖：南亚的科学与进步：帝国、民族和殖民地现代性，1860-1922 年

• 批准号: 0824468
• 负责人: Prakash Kumar
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Colorado State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-08-01 至 2011-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0824468&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Scholar; Award; Science; Improvement; South

The proposed project is a political history of agricultural science in late nineteenth and early twentieth century in colonial south Asia. It builds on the PI's doctoral research "Facing competition: The history of indigo experiments in colonial India, 1897-1920," which was funded in part by the National Science Foundation in 2004. The doctoral dissertation developed a case study of efforts in six laboratories and agricultural stations to improve natural indigo (the blue dyestuff extracted from the leaves of the indigo plant) to highlight the resistance of "plantation science" to the transition towards synthetic dyestuffs. The proposed project incorporates a focus on the science surrounding indigo within a broader study of agricultural science and modern science in late colonial India. It discusses the insertion of new technologies into South Asian agriculture by the moving diasporas of European planters, targeted effort by European entrepreneurs to organize "private" science and their wider impact, the creation of public institutions of science by the colonial state, and colonial cultural reforms in the field of education (particularly the efforts to promote curricula based on western sciences). The research problematizes the transmission of science in the imperial-colonial continuum, maintaining that several earlier studies of technological imperialism failed to engage with the thick local politics in the colony and the context of power at the level of the colony and globally. The scrutiny of documents is planned to proceed on two planes. The analysis consistently emphasizes the engagement of Indians with the passage of western agricultural science and education into the colonial order. In this regard the work probes the political actions of aristocratic landlords in the mid nineteenth century, the vernacular public in Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who wrote in the regional press, and nationalists. Science in this work thus becomes a surrogate for aspirations to nationhood just as much as a tool for making claims to modernity on behalf of the civic society constituted by the people. The research plan expends an equal amount of effort towards understanding the nature of agricultural change with reference to the role played by global actors and ideologues such as the American philanthropist Henry Phipps, the famous Pittsburgh based industrialist and conservationist whose financial contribution was instrumental in the establishment of the Imperial Agricultural Institute at Pusa in India in 1905, and the impact of German state models of agricultural change, in particular the economic model of Friedrich List. This inter-continental research examines the documents of the Agriculture Department and the Education Department of the colonial government in Bengal, popular writings, records at institutions in England, technical publications of the scientists, trade journals, and the archives of printers and dyers in the Yorkshire region of England. Seeking inspiration from postcolonial theory the work plan includes an analysis of the imaginations of a "local" modernity in the multiple spaces of the colonial order and their correspondence with influences emanating from extraterritorial nodes. The international and interdisciplinary scope of this research activity will enable forging of various partnerships. Benefits are likely to accrue across research, teaching, and policy-making. The work fundamentally expands the analysis of western science in the under-analyzed non-western context. It will thus provide useful insights to policymakers and technologists invested in the task of transfer of science and technology from the industrialized West. The firm grounding of this research in the two separate fields of Science and Technology Studies and South Asian history opens possibilities for enlarging the infrastructure for research and teaching. The output from this work will expand the frontiers of knowledge and offer possibilities of collaboration to specialists working on European and Asian history. The resulting monograph will prove to be an important resource for teaching new courses melding the theoretical and empirical contents of history of science and South Asian history like the actor network theory, social construction of technology, frontier science, sociology of scientific knowledge, nationalism, postcolonial theory, and critical studies of modernity and globalization.

拟议的项目是十九世纪末和二十世纪初殖民时期南亚农业科学的政治史。它建立在派的博士研究《面对竞争：1897-1920年殖民时期印度蓝色实验的历史》的基础上，该研究在2004年得到了国家科学基金会的部分资助。这篇博士论文研究了六个实验室和农业站为改进天然青蓝(从青蓝植物的叶子中提取的蓝色染料)所做的努力，以强调“种植园科学”对向合成染料过渡的抵抗力。拟议的项目将重点放在对殖民晚期印度的农业科学和现代科学的更广泛研究中，重点放在围绕蓝色的科学上。它讨论了通过散居国外的欧洲种植园主将新技术引入南亚农业，欧洲企业家有针对性地组织“私营”科学及其更广泛的影响，殖民地国家建立公共科学机构，以及教育领域的殖民文化改革(特别是促进以西方科学为基础的课程的努力)。这项研究使科学在帝国-殖民连续体中的传播产生了问题，认为早期对技术帝国主义的几项研究未能涉及殖民地厚重的地方政治以及殖民地层面和全球层面的权力背景。文件的审查计划在两架飞机上进行。分析始终强调，随着西方农业科学和教育进入殖民秩序，印度人参与其中。在这方面，这部作品探讨了19世纪中叶贵族地主的政治行动，19世纪末和20世纪初在孟加拉发表文章的白话公众，以及民族主义者。因此，这部作品中的科学成为立国愿望的替代品，就像是代表由人民组成的公民社会提出现代性主张的工具一样。该研究计划致力于理解农业变化的性质，参考了全球行为者和思想家所发挥的作用，如美国慈善家亨利·菲普斯，著名的匹兹堡工业家和自然资源保护者，他的财政贡献有助于1905年在印度普萨建立帝国农业研究所，以及德国农业变化国家模式的影响，特别是弗里德里希·李斯特的经济模型。这项洲际研究考察了孟加拉殖民地政府农业部和教育部的文件、流行著作、英格兰机构的记录、科学家的技术出版物、贸易期刊以及英格兰约克郡地区的印刷商和染料商的档案。为了从后殖民理论中寻求灵感，工作计划包括分析殖民秩序多个空间中的“本地”现代性的想象及其与域外节点所产生的影响的对应关系。这项研究活动的国际性和跨学科范围将有助于建立各种伙伴关系。研究、教学和政策制定都可能带来好处。这项工作从根本上扩展了在分析不足的非西方背景下对西方科学的分析。因此，它将为投资于从工业化的西方国家转让科学和技术的决策者和技术专家提供有用的见解。这项研究在科学和技术研究和南亚历史这两个不同的领域奠定了坚实的基础，为扩大研究和教学的基础设施提供了可能性。这项工作的成果将扩大知识的前沿，并为从事欧洲和亚洲历史研究的专家提供合作的可能性。由此产生的专著将被证明是教学新课程的重要资源，融合了科学史和南亚历史的理论和经验内容，如行动者网络理论、技术的社会结构、前沿科学、科学知识社会学、民族主义、后殖民理论以及对现代性和全球化的批判性研究。