Scientific Colonialism: A Cross-Cultural Comparison ed. by Nathan Reingold, Marc Rothenberg

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 685 endnotes are in the form of scientific referencing, the reader must first look there and then to the appropriate bibliographic section to identify the source. Cambridge University Press should use either scientific referencing or the traditional format. This well-written, well-documented study (with an excellent index) provides much information about the Chinese coal industry and in­ tegrates technology, economics, politics, society, and culture. The book will be useful for those who study diffusion of technology since, in addition to mine modernization, Wright discusses foreign investment and railroad development. Kathleen Ochs Dr. Ochs is associate professor at the Colorado School of Mines. She has taught a course on the history and contemporary conditions of foreign mining industries and is currently working on a history of the 20th-century American hard rock mining industry. Scientific Colonialism: A Cross-Cultural Comparison. Edited by Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987. Pp. xiii + 398; notes, index. $29.95 (paper). Scientific Colonialism is a selection of papers from a conference of the same title held at Melbourne, Australia, in May 1981. Some of the conference papers have been omitted from the book, and others added, without explanation or justification. The book lacks the spon­ taneity and vitality of the conference, which represented a stimulating conjunction of experiences, but it is tidier. The papers come now in three fairly neat packets: Australia, the United States, and “Other Perspectives.” They include some very perceptive essays, such as John Mulvaney on Australian anthropology and Edwin Layton on Amer­ ican engineering style, but the individual pieces do not relate well to each other or to any central theme. In particular, there is never any common understanding about the nature of the exercise. It is one thing to write about the development of specific sciences in clearly identified colonies, as most of the contributors do very well, even though it is difficult to see in what sense the United States can be classified as a colony in the 19th century. It is quite another thing, however, to conceptualize “scientific colonialism” as a distinctive form of science and to analyze its development over time, especially as there is a notable lack of contributions treating the development from the point of view of the initiating countries. Among the fifteen papers in this collection, only that by Roy MacLeod on “The Moving Metropolis” attempts to make such an analysis. It does so by criticizing the familiar George Basalla three-stage model, moving from an initial phase in which a subject territory serves as the area of scientific research, through a colonial phase of scientific de­ 686 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE pendence on the mother country, to the establishment of an inde­ pendent scientific culture. MacLeod is also critical of the model that distinguishes the central “metropolitan” science from the peripheral “colonial” science. But the interpretative pattern he suggests, with five successive phases of development, although more complicated, is not completely free from the criticisms made against the other models. At the end of this selection, therefore, the reader is left with some large unanswered questions about the nature of colonialism and the subtle relationship between scientific investigation and the political and cultural ethos of the colonial mentality. As far as Australia is concerned, as it now commemorates 200 years of intimate ties with Britain, this involves penetrating the rhetoric of colonial exploitation and the “cultural cringe” to understand how the country has made a genuinely independent contribution to the scientific experience of the world community. This task remains to be done. R. A. Buchanan Dr. Buchanan is director of the Centre for the History of Technology, Science and Society at the University of Bath and Secretary-General of ICOHTEC. From Maxwell to Microphysics: Aspects ofElectromagnetic Theory in the Last Quarter of the Nineteenth Century. By Jed Z. Buchwald. Chicago: Uni­ versity of Chicago Press, 1985. Pp. xv + 339; figures, appendixes, bibliography, indexes. $70.00. This formidable book is an internalist study of Maxwellian electro­ dynamics in the 1880s and 1890s. Its prime purposes are to explain British methods in electromagnetic theory and to begin to understand European adaptations to field...