The Curious Case of Science and Empire

Those busy Europeans of the early modern era. Among the many things they managed to do in the centuries that stretched from 1500 to 1800, they defined modern science and they created modern empires. How did they do it? Did the work depend on an efficient synergy, the two projects somehow supporting each other, science as handmaid to empire? Or did Europeans' accomplishment depend on a division of labor, in which different people did different things in parallel, nevertheless contributing to a larger program of European definition and control of the globe? Or were the revolutions in science and in global domination merely coincidental, having nothing, really, to do with each other?

It is difficult enough to answer these questions by looking at the Europeans who were central to science and to imperial government. It is even harder to comprehend the dual accomplishments abroad, within the colonial empires themselves. The residents of Britain's American colonies are, for this reason, an interesting case study: they were equals neither in the empire (as the American revolutionaries would complain) nor in science, most of the modern features of which were defined in Europe, not abroad. With her book American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World, Susan Scott Parrish joins what now seems to be a third stage of interpretation about science and empire in British America, one that pointedly argues for a kind of trans-Atlantic partnership between denizens of old and new worlds.

Two earlier schools of analysis had represented colonists as the junior partners, at best. In the first stage of interpretation, which ran roughly from 1940 to 1980, historians defined natural science as part of the progress that they assumed was a characteristic of European culture in the early modern era, particularly during the Enlightenment. They saw science as the work of white men, the most accomplished of whom (Boyle, Newton, Linnaeus, Buffon, and so on) lived in Europe. The insights and projects of these great men then traveled overseas. In British America, some settlers were recruited for or signed onto the project of scientific investigation of the natural world. Their early contributions to science would form the foundation of science in the United States; the colonial period was, accordingly, a period of intellectual dependency, of instruction by old world masters, with the outcome, quite unintended, of a later intellectual independence.

This interpretation coincided with the emergence of Big Science in the United States—and this was by no means a mere coincidence. The rise of a world-class scientific community in the United States greatly depended on government support; that support in turn reflected the anxiety of U. S. leaders that their nation achieve technical prowess, first to address the needs of defense in World War II and then as part of an arms (and prestige) race during the Cold War. As the United States became a superpower, both in politics and in science, it was perhaps inevitable that scholars would try to identify the seeds of national power in both realms.

I. Bernard Cohen was the real pioneer in this initial phase of interpreting early American science. In 1941, Cohen produced the first scholarly edition of Benjamin Franklin's Experimentsand ObservationsonElectricity (first published in London in 1751). Franklin's work was the finest and most respected scientific work done in the colonized Americas by someone born there—indeed, it remained, until the twentieth century, unparalleled. Cohen thus advertised the intellectual achievement of early America's peerless man of science. He followed up with a magisterial study of Franklin and Newton: An Inquiry into Speculative Newtonian Experimental Science and Franklin's Work on Electricity as an Example Thereof (1956). Cohen's point was clear: Englishmen (above all Newton) had defined science, Americans followed their definitions; some, especially Franklin, had done so brilliantly, in a way that almost challenged the underlying assumption that science was...