Please write a historiographical essay, Your essay will be assessed based on the strength and quality of your argument as supported by credible, logical evidence. Making an argument means that you make an intervention – in other words, that you enter the conversation with an opinion of your own – among the scholars provided. Utilizing the “they say, I say” template,1 provide an interpretation of the scholarship on the history of science, race, and colonialism to this point in the course and then enter the conversation with this scholarship to stake out your own position. To the degree that you must summarize, summarize with a point. If you use a source from outside our course literature, then cite it. Instead, your essay must provide an analysis of the course literature. Some questions that you may want to consider For example:
•What are the assumptions and limitations behind the “diffusionist” model of the spread of Western science? Why do they matter?
•What is the relationship between Western science and colonialism in Africa? Why does it matter?
•How has capitalism affected the application of Western science in African colonies? Why?
•How have ideas about these relationships changed (i.e. how has the historiography
developed) over the last fifty years? Why?
The readings are
History, Science, and Africa ;
• Binyavanga Wainaina, “How to Write about Africa.” Granta 92 (Winter 2005).
http://granta.com/how-to-write-about-africa/ (~4 pp.)
• Curtis Keim, “Africans Live in Tribes, Don’t They?” in Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and
Inventions of the American Mind (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), 113-127.
• Peter J. Bowler and Iwan Rhys Morus, Making Modern Science: A Historical Survey
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), Chap. 1: “Introduction: Science, Society,
and History,” 1-20; Chap. 2: “The Scientific Revolution,” 23-52.
The Spread of Western Science
• Charles Coulston Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960): 3-11.
•W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: University Press, 1960): 1-16.
•George Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science,” Science 156 (1967): 611-22.
• Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987), 215-257. powerful?
Imperial Science and Colonization
• Roy Macleod, “On Visiting the ‘Moving Metropolis’: Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science,” in Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg (Eds.), Scientific Colonialism: A Cross-Cultural Comparison (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1987): 217-249.
• James E. McClellan III and François Regourd, “The Colonial Machine: French Science and Colonization in the Ancien Regime,” in Roy Macleod (Ed.), Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise (Osiris 15, 2000): 31-50.
Environment, Geography, Race, and Empire
Jared Diamond, “How Africa Became Black” (Chap. 19), Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1999), 376-401.
. Robert D. Kaplan, “The Revenge of Geography,” Orbis 59, no. 4 (January 1, 2015): 479– 90, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orbis.2015.08.008.
• Achille Mbembe, “At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa,” trans. Steven Rendall, Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 259–84.
Science, Technology and Colonialism
•Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981): 58-76, 105-
126, 192-202 (Chaps. 3, 6, 7, 14).
• Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974), 173-201 (excerpt from Chap. 5: “Africa’s Contribution to the Capitalist Development of Europe – The Colonial Period”).