Hist 229A/329A | HPST 159:
Colonial Exchange: Eighteenth-Century Europe and Its Colonies

Winter 2004/2005
5 units

Professor Londa Schiebinger


This colloquium focuses on global exchange of knowledge, technologies, flora, peoples, disease, and medicines. We will consider primarily French, British, and Dutch interests in the West Indies, but take examples from Iberian, Jesuit and other traditions in China, India, North and South America, and elsewhere as needed. We read key primary and secondary texts on voyaging, colonialism, science, slavery, materia medica, and environmental exchange. Although the course treats the eighteenth century, it offers analytical frameworks for science and colonialism more generally.

In conjunction with this course, I have edited a forum for Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society entitled the "European Colonial Science Complex" (forthcoming in March). This forum presents four all-too-brief historiographic essays on science considered from a colonial or imperial point of view. My charge to authors was to present a thematic discussion of work on this topic in their particular field of expertise, to analyze new scholarly directions, and to pose questions that have not yet been asked or perhaps not yet completely formulated. The essays here treat globally from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries Iberian, British, and French colonial traditions, and - to breakup the national paradigm - the multicultural Jesuit order. We read these essays as part of the colloquium. In addition, the authors of those essays will visit our class (please see schedule below). Each guest will present a lecture on his research on the Friday following our Thursday session. The Friday lectures will be held at 4:15 in History (Building 200), room 307.

Speakers for Winter 04-05:

  • Dr. Mark Harrison Director, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine; Reader, History of Medicine, and Fellow, Green College, Oxford University

    Harrison has published widely on the history of disease and medicine, especially in relation to the history of war and imperialism from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. He is currently working on a history of medicine and British imperial expansion, c.1700-1850.

    Thursday, January 13, 2005 Class session
    Jan. 14 Public lecture: "Science and the British Empire"

  • Dr. Steven J. Harris Associate, Department of History of Science, Harvard University.

    Harris has published widely on Jesuit science from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. He is well known for his path-breaking "Long-Distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography of Knowledge," Configurations 6 (1998): 269-304.

    Thursday, Jan. 20, 2005 Class session
    Jan. 21 Public lecture: "Messengers of God, Merchants of Nature: Jesuit Scientific Commerce in the Overseas Missions, 1540-1773"

  • Professor Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra Department of History, SUNY-Buffalo, University; Harrington Faculty Fellow, University of Texas at Austin (2004-2005).

    Cañizares-Esguerra's How to Write the History of the New World won both the John Edwin Fagg Book Prize and the Atlantic History Book Prize from the American Historical Association in 2001.

    Thursday, January 27th, 2005 Class session
    Jan. 28 Public lecture: "Seventeenth-Century Colonialism and Demonology: New-World Nature and Landscapes"

  • Professor Michael A. Osborne Department of History and Environmental Studies Program, University of California, Santa Barbara.

    Osborne has written extensively on nineteenth-century imperial French science. He is the author of Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism.

    Thursday, February 10, 2005
    Feb. 11 Public lecture: "Commerce, Science, and Colonialism: The Colonial Institutes of France"

    These lectures sponsored by the Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology

  • Dr. Trevor Burnard Professor of American Studies, University of Sussex.

    Burnard's Mastery, Tyranny, & Desire analyzes the diaries of plantation overseer Thomas Thistlewood, who documented his life experiences in thirty-five volumes written over the course of 40 years. An extraordinary document!

    Thursday, March 3, 2005 Class session
    March 4 Public Lecture: "Gender in the Anglo-Jamaican World of the Eighteenth Century"

    Sponsored by the Department of History, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and the Center for the Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity

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