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Week 8 Science and Empire - Coggle Diagram
Week 8 Science and Empire
Colonies, European industrialisation & Science spurred each other on
Industrialization and colonialism spurred development of science; science offered knowledge of the world & ways turn the natural resources of the colonial holdings into wealth.
As Western Europe underwent rapid industrialization, it turned more and more to colonial holdings for natural resources and captive markets.
Non-European countries started to adopt ideas and practices, including the study of nature, from their contacts with European thought.
Science makes up for lack of natural resources
For European nations that had limited colonial holdings, science offered a way to deal with economic disadvantage by creating new tools and techniques to solve problems that resulted from a lack of cheap natural resources
Communication & Empire
Between rail, steamship, and telegraph, the information flow needed to control global empires and international trade was now possible.
Collecting and Classifying: Biology and Empire; classification and understanding were part of the process of controlling and exploiting
Natural history to biology: transformation of the study of the living world from 18th C natural history to 19th C biology
Humboldt’s descriptions of flora and fauna differed markedly from those of Banks or other eighteenth-century naturalists. He combined exact measurement using precise instruments with intensive fieldwork and an overall concept of the interconnectedness of all living things.
Law-like regularities of living body, based on Chemistry and physics. Debates over whether vital force was sole means of producing some compounds. E.g. Urea. Could certain substances be produced only by living organisms?
Teleomechanists: body as self balancing system, designed as such to maintain integrity. How could such a well-working body come into being? It must be intelligent design.
Holists: biological forces organised under a superior organisation not reducible to material laws. Bodies subject to some higher order that is not material. Huxley: funded Darwin. Materialist tradition: animals as machines
The categorization of new flora and fauna continued with the discovery of additional, and potentially exploitable, species.
Hans Sloane & chocolate; Naturalists and explorers searched out and found uses for these new plants
Quinine, the only known treatment for malaria; in an era of greater European exposure to the disease; it helped make imperialism in the equatorial regions possible.
Because Cinchona was hard to grow and expensive, the efforts to produce artificial quinine became one of the great quests of organic chemistry
Scientific move to classify came to include human beings as well.
Linnaeus had paved the way for this through his classification of humans as thinking mammals (Homo sapiens)
Race: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752– 1840) believed that all people were of one species, but that there was a hierarchy of perfection among the races.
Nineteenth-century racial theorists soon took this pyramid as indicative of biological and cultural achievement and as an excuse and opportunity for exploitation.
The Origin of Species
Lamarkism
When the environment changed, forces internal to the individual plant or animal encouraged physical changes to take place to ensure adaptation to the new conditions. e.g. if a short-necked ancestor to a giraffe came to live in an environment where all available food grew close to the top of very high trees, the internal forces within that giraffe would encourage the growth of its neck over time. These changes acquired in one generation could be inherited by the next;
Chambers’ Vestiges of Creation
Based on a LaPlacean view of an expanding universe, was wildly popular among the general public but ridiculed by scientists. Chambers was seen as an outsider, with no proper professional standing, and thus with no right to make such speculative claims.
Darwin took this lesson to heart and worked to establish his credentials before publishing any “wild” theorizing.
Darwin’s
He read An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) by Thomas Malthus, and the mechanism for evolution suddenly appeared clear. Malthus had argued that food supply would at best increase arithmetically but population would increase geometrically resulting in life-and-death competition for resources. While Malthus developed this theory in order to explain population crisis he saw looming in Britain, Darwin immediately saw its application to the plant and animal world.
Social Darwinism
Spencer was influenced by Malthus and saw life as a struggle in which only the strong tended to survive: “survival of the fittest”.
To ensure the economic and social progress, he argued that it was desirable to keep state control to a minimum. Spencer did not support a completely individualistic morality, however, but maintained that strong communities were based on understanding the natural unity of interests of individuals.
Spencerianism and forms of Social Darwinism provided justifications for capitalism, laissez-faire economics, and arguments against a welfare state.
Other forms of social Darwinism stressed the struggle between races or nations, thus justifying the military and industrial competition taking place in Europe.
Social Darwinism also had an individual expression in eugenics, presented as the science of race. Eugenists claimed that the state had a duty to limit the multiplication of its least fit citizens and to encourage its most fit to increase. An early proponent of this was Francis Galton who wrote Hereditary Genius.
Geology
Flourished under imperial competition because of its link to industrial development associated with coal, iron, and other exploitable mineral resources.
Britain, for example, embarked on major field projects to understand, map, and name the strata; and imperial geological surveys were undertaken in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and India.
Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social Theory
Author(s): Robert M. Young
Five aspects of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population were developed by different figures in the debate on man's place in nature in the nineteenth century.
Both Paley and Chalmers had interests in the established order of society and of nature.
Theodicy muted by Paley, who absorbed struggle in a "higher illumination than Reason alone affords us'.
Palliative of "moral restraint" which was added to the second edition of Malthus's Essay became a scourge for the punishment of the sinful in the hands of Thomas Chalmers.
Wallace impressed by the actual phenomena of human suffering in the environment, and having grasped this with respect to man, he applied it analogously to all of nature
Darwin seized on the image of nature as at war and used Malthus's view of natural law as applied to man as his authority for extending the principle of selection from the breeders' wishes to nature, that is, from artificial to natural selection.
Malthus was progressively abandoned; Malthus’ theory limits man's self-improvement and stresses struggle as an almost inescapable impediment to progress rather than as a mechanism for inevitable progressive change
Spencer's preoccupations with social progress were such that Malthus never found a place in his evolutionary theory, since Malthus had stressed the impediments to Godwin's and Condorcet's belief in indefinite progress.
These impediments were also anathema to the social philosophy of Marx and Engels, who wanted to embrace Darwin while rejecting Malthus.
Influences in the history of science can be exploited as variously as in political and social history; Claims for progressive separation of "objective" natural science and woolly social science can find no support in the history of evolutionary theory; Integration of the history of science with other aspects of history
Thomas huxley vs Samuel Wilberforce At the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1860. Challenged theological notion of soul. Darwin’s was not an anti theological position. At that point he was talking about animals, not humans. But Huxley took a very critical position against theology. Samuel Wilberforce, Archbishop of Oxford. Argued that Darwinism countered human decency, morality