Global Histories of Science Final Essay: History sections

The Western view of energy-- that the Earth is an endless font of resources that warrants an insatiable urge to consume-- was a belief that emerged from white supremacy and European colonization The expansion of this European empire relied on “professionalizing” the bio and field sciences like evolution, botany, zoology, and geology (Tilley 112). Patent laws and communication networks developed to aid the goal of global European colonization (Tilley). Imperial, capitalist motives drove the paths that Western science took to create itself.​ ​

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Daniela Bleichmar’s book, Visible Empire, discusses how botany was used as a tool by European empires solely to strengthen their economic position in the world. She writes, “These images select portions of a specimen… and present them on an overwhelmingly white page… It was the shared pictorial language of European natural history as part of a global cosmopolitan practice… The erasure of geographical specificity is related to an extractive vision of nature and of the relation between Europe and the rest of the world…”. She uses the term “global white space, local color” to describe how plants were studied by imperial scientists of that age through complete divorce of its origin. They were placed on completely white backgrounds, visually erasing their environments and marketing them as a simple product that could circulate around the world. Their scientific practice did not value the local world already existing around their samples-- it actually said they were more correct without them, a completely unfounded yet widely accepted assumption. Economic botany paved the way for more colonizing and white supremacist sciences, particularly in fields related to humanity and biology. ​

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Peter Mandler remarks his chapter of Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History, “The Victorians’ construction of these sequences was neither accidental nor innocent… based on finds of human fossils and of the material culture of “prehistoric” but their “discovery” was not only about new things; it was equally about new ways of understanding these new things… it was fertilized… by a new faith in human power-- the power of technology, of print, education, and science… by a rampant confidence in the superiority of their own moral, social, and economic arrangements.” (Mandler 24-25). This view led to the development of so many scientific disciplines currently shown to be pseudo-scientific, motivated purely by racism, sexism, and white supremacy (to name a few biases). For instance phrenology, measuring all the bumps and curves of a human head to predict mental traits, was pursued to serve as evidence for the superiority of the white race over the African race until the lack of evidence became too much for them to ignore (Qureshi 5). Human exhibitions became extraordinarily popular in the 19th century, dehumanizing and exploiting indigenous peoples from around the globe while creating a highly profitable business (Qureshi 2). Bringing civility to these more inferior, animalistic humans was an equally active goal as the so-called “universal” need to pursue science, and those views combined to create a culture that maintained those values inside the empire as well as out.

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Western medicine has been a field driven by European colonization and white supremacy since its beginning. The Diseased Heart of Africa: Medicine, Colonialism, and the Black Body, an essay by Jean Comaroff, states that both medicine and colonization were at its base, “... driven by a global sense of man that had emerged out of the enlightenment. Both concerned the extensions of “rational” control over domains of nature… medicine both informed and was informed by imperialism in Africa and elsewhere.” The Enlightenment’s view of man was a man who values his racial, class, gender, and moral superiority.  This man is as far divorced from Africa as possible and should maintain that distance to constantly assure his excellence. Comaroff discusses the cultural view of Africans, that they were “... noxious organisms that threatened to invade the inviolable world of white order,” an evil contagion come to destroy the West (Comaroff 234). Daring to taint your future children and generations through mingling with Africans, especially African women, would directly contribute to the deterioration of the West (Comaroff 318). From the 17th century, Europeans abhorred the cultural and linguistic differences between them and Africans (Gomez 234). They viewed their methods of communication as worthless, indecipherable and meaningless (Gomez 234). Europeans regarded African and Afro-Caribbean medicine as unscientific and disregarded their findings, shoving them out of secularity and into the realm of religion. Religion is not a practice free from these biases either; exclusion of African knowledge has become commonplace.

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People are born into a world with problematic principles and subsequently bring those into the laboratory with them. These laboratories were built in the West to be hubs of research, or were created throughout the world through colonization to advance the project of Western science. The products coming out of these laboratories-- technologies, policies, facts, culture-- come out with their view to continue spreading its prejudice. They serve as evidence of the legitimacy of Western science. Warwick Anderson remarks in his article, “Where Every Prospect Pleases and Only Man is Vile”: Laboratory Medicine as Colonial Discourse, “Medical articles, geographical and political texts, administrative reports, novels, and popular travel accounts all represent different levels of the extraction and appropriation of the speech and the bodies of both the colonized and the laboring colonizers… The recognition that even the most formally structured technical knowledge may be implicated in colonial appropriation and acquisition is long overdue.” (Anderson 509). These documents legitimize the institutions research is conducted at and gives them power to direct entire disciplines of science. Anderson namechecks “Joseph Hayden, vice-governor-general of the Islands in the 1930s,” [who] understood the very existence of the [Manila Bureau of Science]in the Philippines and the success of its publications… as evidence of superior American rationality and modernity (Anderson 517). Hayden, along with other scientists of the bureau, returned from their Pacific laboratories to start branches of medicine at Harvard and the United States Army medical school (Anderson 518). They developed the arsenal of Western science, another method to subjugate and (mis)interpret the world. Western medicine has played an incredibly important role in the development of Western culture since its beginnings in the 17th century (Gomez 243). In the 19th century, British colonialism and its universalist claims about humanity led to the addition of biomedicine into Western science, propelling it into a position to affect governance and culture (Comaroff 306-307, 324). This also led to the promotion of individualism and rejection of community, declaring it as “primitive custom” that must be isolated from “modern civilization.” (Mandler 36).