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Reviewed by:
  • Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire by Erik Linstrum, and: Hunting Africa: British Sport, African Knowledge and the Nature of Empire by Angela Thompsell, and: Beyond the State: The Colonial Medical Service in British Africa ed. by Anna Greenwood
  • Will Jackson
Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire. By Erik Linstrum. Harvard University Press, 2016. 320 pp. $39.95 (hardcover).
Hunting Africa: British Sport, African Knowledge and the Nature of Empire. By Angela Thompsell. Palgrave Macmillan, Britain and the World series, 2015. 229 pp. $100 (hardcover).
Beyond the State: The Colonial Medical Service in British Africa. Edited by Anna Greenwood. Manchester University Press, 2016. 208 pp. £70.00 (hardcover).

Colonial Knowledge Old and New

Writing on colonial knowledge has travelled a long way since the then path-breaking works of Edward Said, Bernard Cohn and Terence [End Page 672] Ranger.1 Where once scholars stressed the reach of colonial knowledge, now they stress its limits. Far from enabling the exercise of power, knowledge gave rise to anxiety and doubt. Never formulated in abstraction, knowledge lived and its lives, social and political no less than intellectual and imaginative, had histories of their own. Knowledge in any case was less a resource than a site of encounter and a frame for situating human (and non-human) relations. It was contested and claimed, borrowed from and denied, parodied and appropriated by subalterns, collaborators and resisters of every kind.2

Of the three books reviewed here, only Linstrum's Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire might be described as world history. All three, however, concern the situating of ideas and ideologies, within networks of experts and institutions and within local communities that both lived with and contributed to forms of knowledge that were at once highly esoteric yet grounded in the everyday. Essentially, these are stories of movement: of the travel of ideas and the diffusion of power.

Perhaps the most fitting metaphor for such a situated, mobile knowledge is Linstrum's image of the laboratory in the field. At the end of the nineteenth century, Linstrum explains, a small group of Cambridge-educated medical men began experimental research on the Torres Strait islands between Australia and New Guinea, their objective: a modern, scientific understanding of the psychology of "primitive" peoples. There, these men laid down what would be imperial psychology's enduring and paradoxical motif. On the one hand, the laboratory, with its mechanical precision and its universal standards of measurement; on the other, the field, with its ethnographic ideal that local environments could be understand on their own terms, by human observation, from the inside out. In the Torres Strait, Linstrum argues, the laboratory and the field were not opposed but complementary, blending objectivity and immediacy to create a new kind of research in the human sciences. [End Page 673]

To this extent, the laboratory in the field would reveal the parochialism of techniques conceived of in Europe but within epistemic frames that assumed a global appeal. At the same time, the results of these early experiments yielded data that revealed the limits of prevailing colonial common sense. Research showed the emptiness of racial thinking that posited "native" peoples as intellectually inferior compared to Europeans while exhibiting heightened sensory acuity. Comparing results from the Torres Strait with data gathered from control groups in Britain revealed there was no meaningful differences in the ways Europeans and "primitives" perceived their environments. Getting to know the locals in the course of their research reminded the Cambridge men of acquaintances back at home. Personal impressions chimed with quantitative data. Variations within groups were more impressive than comparisons between them.

These were revelations not confined to the narrow circles of expert debate. Along with Charles Myers, Alfred Haddon, the expedition's leader, took his findings to the 1911 Universal Races Congress where Myers most vociferously denied the existence of a "native mind." Children in the South Pacific, Myers argued, were mathematically superior to children in an average British school. European peasants were as superstitious as people anywhere. "Savages" were as logically minded as Europeans. Another member of the expedition, W.H.R. Rivers, ran for election to parliament on a radical, anti-colonial...

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