Ecological Networks and Transfers between Australia, South Asia and Africa, 1850-1920

在高度帝国主义的时代，在澳大利亚、非洲和英属印度的欧洲科学家交换了种类繁多的动植物。他们这样做有不同的原因。经济利益和对物种如何适应新生态系统的科学好奇心，与改善和教化非欧洲环境的愿望密切相关。这些跨越印度洋的网络和传输被当前的研究大大忽视了。这个项目想要为发现它们做出贡献。通过这样做，它旨在揭示生态帝国主义的历史。该项目追求三个目标：通过分析一些相关科学家的通信，它将首先比以前更准确地描述印度洋上的网络和物种转移。它将研究这些网络和转移是如何与更广泛的全球网络纠缠在一起的，特别是它们如何与帝国科学交流和转移的核心-外围结构相关联。其次，该项目将应用Actor-Network理论和动物研究的新成果，重新审视跨洲物种转移。植物和动物将被定义为具有代理能力的演员。根据这一方法，该项目将显示人与非人行为者之间的关系在跨洋转移方面发生了怎样的变化。引进的物种往往以意想不到的方式发展。例如，在新的环境中，它们可能会不成比例地增加，然后被视为具有威胁性和侵入性。在转移的过程中，人类和非人类之间的等级关系发生了变化。科学家们失去了对转移的控制，意识到了生态工程的局限性。第三，该项目将研究这样的经历在多大程度上创造了对生态失衡和环境破坏的具体认识这一问题。此外，还将探讨这些由殖民地科学家开发的敏感性是否会导致要求国家干预以保护环境。因此，对十九世纪下半叶和二十世纪初澳大利亚、非洲和南亚之间迄今被忽视的物种转移的预测研究，尤其是通过将非人类作为行为者纳入，将对关于殖民动态的原因和起源的讨论作出新的贡献。

In the age of high imperialism, European scientists in Australia, Africa and British India exchanged a large variety of species of plants and animals. They had different reasons to do so. Economic interests and scientific curiosity about how species adjusted to new ecosystems were closely connected with the desire to improve and to civilize non-European environments. These networks and transfers across the Indian Ocean have been much neglected by current research. This project wants to contribute to uncovering them. By doing so, it aims to shed new light on the history of ecological imperialism. The project pursues three goals: By analysing the correspondences of a selection of relevant scientists, it will, firstly, describe the networks and species transfers across the Indian Ocean more precisely than it has been done before. It will examine the ways in which these networks and transfers were entangled in wider global networks, and, in particular, how they can be related to the core-periphery structures of imperial scientific exchange and transfer. Secondly, the project will revisit transcontinental species transfer by applying new results of Actor-Network-Theory and animal studies. Plants and animals will be defined as actors endowed with agency. Based upon this methodological approach, the project will show how relations between human and non-human actors changed in the context of transoceanic transfers. Introduced species often developed in unexpected ways. They could, for example, increase disproportionately in new environments and were then perceived as threatening and invasive. Hierarchies between humans and non-humans shifted in the process of transfer. Scientists lost control over transfers and realized the limits of ecological engineering. Thirdly, the project will examine the question in how far such experiences created a specific awareness for ecological imbalances and environmental destruction. It will, furthermore, be explored whether these sensitivities, developed by scientists in the colonies, resulted in demands for state intervention to protect the environment. Thus, the projected study on the so far neglected species transfers between Australia, Africa and South Asia in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will, not least by integrating non-humans as actors, make a new contribution to the discussions about the causes and origins of colonial dynamics.