Listing of Sessions and Abstracts of Papers - History of Science ...

The pursuit of Natural Knowledge in eighteenth century Britain was an important activity for producing
personal and national identity. The importance of the Royal Society in the eighteenth century depended
upon its role in articulating epistemological standards and serving state interests. By considering
the antiquarian, military, and scientific works of William Roy (1726-1790) FRS, FSA, it is possible to
explore the relationship of science to nation and of the Royal Society to His Majesty’s Government in
the British Enlightenment. In his antiquarian and scientific work Roy marshalled resources to define
and narrate Britain as an historical and geographical truth. Combining the instrumental empiricism
characteristic of the Royal Society with the organizational logic of the Office of Ordnance, he created a
social pathway for other military engineers and cartographers while naturalizing the ideas of Britain and
Britishness. Roy, like Joseph Banks, was ever zealous in the cause of science‚ not only in service of
government, but also for the creation of his own social role. Roy’s movement in elite segments of
Georgian Britain provides an opportunity to address the network of institutional, intellectual, personal,
and political commitments which supported scientific practice. His activities within the Royal Society
reveal not only the tensions within British science, but also the ways in which the Society maintained its
integrity as a social body and producer of reliable knowledge.
Green Musselman, Elizabeth
E-mail Address: greenmue@southwestern.edu
Race and Science: Cape Colony Natural History as Hybrid Knowledge
Until recently, most studies of science and imperialism have focused on a single expedition or scientist.
However, as we know particularly from the recent wealth of studies on science in colonial India,
Australia, and Africa, we get a very different picture of how colonial science forms when we plant
ourselves within a colonial space, rather than simply following the Europeans as they trek to and from
the imperial metropole. In this paper, I present some of the exciting possibilities that open up when we
examine the development of sciences within one colonial space, in this case the Cape Colony under
earlier British rule and occupation, ca. 1815-70. I will argue here that the process of cultivation, in every
sense of that word, lay at the core of the Cape experience. Since the colony began as a garden to supply
fresh food to passing ships, cultivation literally formed the colony’s raison d’etre. But cultivation also
fueled the colony’s expansion and defined the colonial elite’s dreams for the European and African
populations at the Cape. I will focus in this paper on nineteenth-century British Cape botanists’ visions
of a cultivated South African society, and the extent to which Africans played a part in that cultivation,
both as subjects of improvement and (usually unacknowledged) agents in the expansion of natural
historical knowledge. Specifically, I argue that the primary purpose of botanical work in the Cape
Colony was to encourage cultivation--both in the agricultural and in the cultural sense. My paper will
respond particularly to two articles in the most recent Osiris volume: David Wade Chambers and Richard
Gillespie's "Locality in the History of Science" and Harriet Deacon's "Racism and Medical Science
in South Africa's Cape Colony in the Mid- to Late Nineteenth Century."
Greene, Mott
E-mail Address: greene@ups.edu
Attitudes Concerning Latitudes
A useful example of the details of social construction is the evolution (between 1884 and 1928) of a
classification scheme for the earth's climate regimes based (with varying emphases at different times) on
agriculture, anthropology, geology, botany, rainfall, temperature, latitude, and proximity to the oceans.
This scheme, invented by the German meteorologist Wladimir Köppen (1846-1940) still provides the
basic structure geographers and climatologists use to discriminate climate zones. It has a peculiar history,
beginning with Köppen's childhood experiences in Russia, and provides a beautiful example of