Making the Globe: A Cultural History of Science in the Bay of Bengal

Abstract

Starting from Madras, travelling across the Bay of Bengal, to the coast of Sumatra and then to Singapore, this paper provides a cultural history of nineteenth-century knowledge-making as an enterprise in making and breaking three concepts: globe, empire and self. It does so by working outwards from early-nineteenth century pendulum-length experiments to determine the curvature of the Earth. It argues that moving across concepts and scales was vital to a regime of big data. Data-crunching involved different sciences and split across territories and sea and land. As the project of making the globe proceeded, for instance from Madras Observatory, imperial settlements could be located precisely as coordinates, for instance British Singapore, and indigenous intellectuals, like Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir (1797–1854), had to find their place in a world of imperial free trade. Global model-making brought about a detachment from individuals and locations as people and places were fixed on a globe and it led to the erasure of the indigenous informant, a key figure in recent histories of science. In linking the making of the globe to the fate of intermediary, the argument urges the need to place indigenous agency in the sciences within wider accounts of labour, capital and imperial expansion.