Helen Tilley’s work examines the role that colonial
science played in the expansion of empire in British Africa. Rather than
succumb to the traditional narrative that scientists and colonial
administrators blindly employed pre-conceived epistemologies to African
environmental issues of the day, she reveals an intellectual and administrative
history whereby African indigenous knowledge played a formative role in how
western scientific concepts evolved and were translated back to the seats of
Empire. Being able to govern an empire, with the attendant necessity of
integrating varying disciplines and realms of knowledge, meant that these
emergent scientific understandings also had to be integrated into a broader
framework that scientists at the time were beginning to refer to as ecology.
Tilley’s work gives voice to a heretofore overlooked concern of colonial
science that still speaks strongly to our contemporary concerns: how do we
apply practical and conceptual developments within the sciences to address complex
and heterogeneous environments? Not only does this work address the role of
science in the development of Africa, it asks us to consider the role of
colonial Africa in the development of modern western science. Surely such an
inversion is potentially grounds for fruitful discussion concerning ways of
knowing, localized and universal knowledge, and how the sciences speak, not
only to one another, but to the world at large.
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