In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Physicians and scientists dominated the first generation of nationalists in at least three East Asian colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the Philippines under the Spanish and U.S. regimes, the Dutch East Indies, and the Japanese territory of Taiwan. There is substantial evidence that in each place decolonization was practically and symbolically yoked to scientific progress. Members of the first generation to receive training in biological science and to become socialized as professionals used this education to imagine themselves as eminently modern, progressive, and cosmopolitan. Their training gave them special authority in deploying organic metaphors of society and state and made them deft in finding allegories of the human body and the body politic. These scientists and physicians saw themselves as representing universal laws, advancing natural knowledge, and engaging as equals with colleagues in Europe, Japan, and North America. Science gave them a new platform for communication . This essay examines how scientific training shaped anticolonialism and nationalism in the Philippines and the East Indies, concluding with a brief comparison of the situation in Taiwan. The modern roots of anti-imperial nationalism are widely recognized. It seems national sensibility finds its earliest and most explicit expression in sectors of society that are meritocratic, qualification based, mobile, and atomized. Intellectuals and professionals trained in the manipulation of abstract, technical data and skilled in the development of wide-ranging networks often constitute the nationalist avant-garde.1 Ironically, their Enlightenment or universal projects could assume romantic or contingent form. Thus, as Ernest Gellner observes, “[N]ationalism is a phenomenon of Gesellschaft using the idea of Gemeinschaft: a mobile, anonymous society simulating a closed community.”2 Benedict Anderson also recognizes the contributions of “emerging nationalist intelligentsias” in Scientific Patriotism Medical Science and National Self-Fashioning in Southeast Asia warwick anderson and hans pols  the imagining of these political formations. National awakening tends to occur in “the first generation in any significant numbers to have acquired a European education.” These young men bonded through schooling and their enhanced access to contemporary models of the nation and went on to fill “subordinate echelons of the colony’s bureaucracy and larger commercial enterprises.”3 Gellner notes the shift in the late nineteenth century “from history to biology as the main mythopoetic science” of nationalism, thereby rendering the nation natural, making it into a sort of necessary organism.4 Yet neither Gellner nor Anderson critically interrogate the biological character and scope of nationalism . They repeatedly emphasize the importance of education, bureaucratization, and communication in the humanistic imagining of the nation, but the specific role of science in these modern processes receives scant attention. Pheng Cheah provides further elaboration on the philosophical origins of the “organismic metaphors” and “political organicisms” undergirding national aspirations, but he, too, mines few medical or scientific sources. Using Indonesian and Kenyan literary texts as illustrations, Cheah argues that both nationalism and cosmopolitanism are based on “the same organismic ontology.”5 Not surprisingly, the texts he cites happen to be full of examples of how scientific training cultivates national sensibility and the ways in which medicine can diagnose and treat the colonial or protonational body politic. Some historians of science, focusing on isolated case studies, do make claims for the scientific shaping of national consciousness. Most important, Gyan Prakash argues that “the emergence and existence of India is inseparable from the authority of science and its functioning as the name for freedom and enlightenment, power and progress.” Prakash also identifies a Western-educated indigenous elite enchanted by science, even though few local nationalist leaders boasted scientific training: “They saw reason as a syntax for reform, a map for the rearrangement of culture, a vision for producing Indians as a people with scientific traditions of their own.”6 For nationalists and colonizers alike, science possessed cultural authority and progressive legitimacy. In the Indian setting Prakash gives especially close attention to those nationalists who tried to reinscribe Western science , to translate “tradition” into a distinctive Hindu modernity, refiguring it as indigenous science. Prakash therefore cautions that his story concerns India alone, yet his recognition of the significance of science seems pertinent to a more general line of inquiry.7 Our argument has an unavoidable tendency to conflate science and medicine. In general, medical training provided the first, sometimes only, exposure of the colonized elite to science. Of course, one can identify a few exceptions, but throughout late colonial Southeast Asia, advanced science education commonly meant training in medical science. Even if these...

Share