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Beyond Postcolonialism . . . and
Postpositivism
Circulation and the Global History of Science

By Kapil Raj*

ABSTRACT

This essay traces the parallel, but unrelated, evolution of two sets of reactions to traditional
idealist history of science in a world-historical context. While the scholars who fostered
the postcolonial approach, in dealing with modern science in the non-West, espoused an
idealist vision, they nevertheless stressed its political and ideological underpinnings and
engaged with the question of its putative Western roots. The postidealist history of science
developed its own vision with respect to the question of the global spread of modern
science, paying little heed to postcolonial debates. It then proposes a historiographical
approach developed in large part by historians of South Asian politics, economics, and
science that, without compromising the preoccupations of each of the two groups, could
help construct a mutually comprehensible and connected framework for the understanding
of the global workings of the sciences.

I N A WELL-KNOWN ESSAY published in this journal some years ago, James Secord
rightly observes that historians of science of whatever school are unanimous about the
circulatory property of knowledge.1 However, the analytic significance of the concomitant
situatedness and movement of science, in particular on a global scale, has until quite
recently received little scholarly attention. Indeed, the history of science in its classic
positivist-idealist mode hardly ever asked the “Where?” question of the practice of
science. Science was universal knowledge, ideally founded on mathematical formalization
and experimental verification. Its spread was not considered to be worthy of scrutiny,
taken care of by the simple fact that rational beings universally accept what is true; any
resistance to its dissemination was a result of false beliefs or irrationality on the part of the
host community.
There were, however, some nuanced exceptions in the universalist perspective of
traditional history of science. Two are particularly noteworthy for the nature of their

* Centre Alexandre Koyré, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 105, Boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, France.
1 James A. Secord, “Knowledge in Transit,” Isis, 2004, 95:654 – 672, esp. p. 655.

Isis, 2013, 104:337–347

©2013 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
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338 FOCUS—ISIS, 104 : 2 (2013)

particular interest in the global context of scientific practice: Joseph Needham and George
Basalla. Since the approaches they set out have determined thinking among sociologists
as well as both post-colonial and postcolonial historians working on non-Western science,
I shall briefly rehearse their arguments.2 I shall then go on to show how postidealist history
of science developed its own vision with respect to the question of the global spread of
modern science, paying little heed to these debates, before proposing a historiographical
approach that, without compromising the preoccupations of each group, might help
construct a mutually comprehensible and connected framework for the understanding of
the global workings of the sciences. I shall argue that this scholarship engaged almost
exclusively with the global implications of classical history of science, remaining almost
totally oblivious of recent developments in the domain. As is all too well known, these
developments have been a reaction to the view from nowhere on which the classical vision
is based, and local specificity, or the context of scientific practice, has been one of the
main focal points of research in the past decades.3
Let us then turn first to Joseph Needham (1900 –1995). Convinced of the universality
of science as a human enterprise, an expression of an innate curiosity fundamental to
human nature, and intrigued by the momentous scientific and technological achievements
of China up to the fifteenth century, Needham asked why modern science did not arise
there but originated only in Europe.4 The answer, he claimed, lay in the resilience of
China’s agrarian bureaucratic culture, which hindered the emergence of mercantile and
industrial capitalism, a sine qua non in his view for the emergence of mathematical
rationality, the bedrock of modern science. Although technical innovations from China (or
India and the Arab world) spread widely, their underlying theoretical systems could not
spread, being built on local, “ethnic-bound,” categories. Conversely, because it is founded
on mathematical reasoning, modern science can be completely appropriated by all humans
and is thus “ecumenical.” Yet, despite its uniqueness, modern science was not created ex
nihilo. Rather, it subsumed the medieval learning of both West and East, “like rivers
flowing into the ocean of modern science.”5 For Needham, then, while modern science is
uniquely Western in origin, it is culturally universal.
As opposed to this irenic vision of the world and of the history of science, George
Basalla takes for granted the ex nihilo Western origins of modern science and is instead
concerned with the modalities of its spread from Western Europe to the rest of the world.
In an epoch-making paper that appeared forty-six years ago, he proposed a three-stage
model of evolutionary progress for the globalization of what he simply called “Western
Science.” A preliminary period of scientific exploration, where non-European (that is to
say, “non-Scientific”) societies serve as passive reservoirs of data, leads to a second one

2 I use the term “post-colonial” in a purely chronological sense, in order to designate the period following the

collapse of West European colonial empires after World War II; this is in contrast to the use of “postcolonial,”
mainly by literary critics, to refer to the various cultural effects of colonization.
3 The bibliography is too large to be cited here with justice. See, however, Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin, “The

Place of Knowledge: A Methodological Survey,” Science in Context, 1991, 4:3–21; and David N. Livingstone,
Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2004).
4 For the Zeitgeist of Needham’s generation see Gary Werskey, The Visible College: A Collective Biography

of British Scientists and Socialists in the 1930s (London: Free Association, 1988).
5 Joseph Needham, “The Roles of Europe and China in the Evolution of Oecumenical Science,” in Clerks and

Craftsmen in China and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 396 – 418, on p. 397. See also
Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1954 –2005), esp. Vol.
7; and Needham, The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969).
For a critique of Needham’s theses see Nathan Sivin, Science in Ancient China: Researches and Reflections
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 1995).

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of colonial dependency in which European scientific institutions encourage Western S
scientific activity outside of Europe by European colonists or settlers or else by accultur-
ated indigenes. Eventually, colonized societies gain maturity, a phase characterized by a
struggle to establish independent national scientific traditions based nonetheless on West-
ern professional standards.
Historical studies of science outside the West have thus mainly focused on bringing to
light the contributions of non-Western cultures to the “ocean of modern science,” on the
one hand, and on the diffusion and response to modern science, on the other. Indeed, ever
since he formulated it almost half a century ago, Needham’s “Grand Question” has
constituted one of the major determinants in shaping globally contextualized explanations
for the rise of modern science—and modernity—in the West. Along with its Weberian
counterpart (“Why did industrial capitalism not emerge in China?”), this question is at the
core of the “divergence” approaches to world history of a number of prominent economic
historians, notably those of the so-called California School.6 Besides, Needham himself
had tremendous influence in giving a material form to his vision through his position as
the first head of the natural sciences section of UNESCO, thereby shaping the scientific
and technological policies of the post-colonial world. Basalla’s model, for its part, is a
typical product of the Cold War era; it echoes Walt Whitman Rostow’s anti-Communist
five-stage model for economic development based on the American ideal and has thus, not
surprisingly, attracted much favor but undoubtedly more critical response.7 Its publication
in Science assured the article a wide readership among the American political elite, and
it crucially contributed to shaping U.S. foreign policy in science during the Cold War
years. It is thus not surprising that the overwhelming majority of studies engendered by
both Needham and Basalla contain a very strong political, and moral, dimension.
In the South Asian context, a number of general surveys of the history of science and
technology have been written in the past decades, all striving to complement Needham’s
magnum opus without, however, even remotely approaching its quality or range.8 This
ensemble appears to plead for the peaceful coexistence of different cultures and their
forms of knowledge. Basalla’s thesis, on the other hand, has been more critically engaged
with on three major themes: the non-West as a scientific tabula rasa, diffusionism, and

6 Among the best known of these works are R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the

Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1997); and Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great
Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press,
2000). See also Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic
Change in China and Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2011); and Prasannan Parthasarathy,
Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600 –1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2011). Cf., however, David Washbrook, “From Comparative Sociology to Global History: Britain
and India in the Prehistory of Modernity,” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, 1997,
40:410 – 443.
7 See George Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science,” Science, 5 May 1967, 156:611– 622; Basalla, “The

Spread of Western Science Revisited,” in Mundialización de la ciencia y cultura nacional, ed. Antonio Lafuente,
Alberto Elena, and Marı́a Luisa Ortega (Aranjuez: Doce Calles, 1993), pp. 599 – 603; and Walt Whitman
Rostow, Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1960).
8 See, e.g., Devendra Mohan Bose, Samarenda Nath Sen, and B. V. Subbarayappa, eds., A Concise History of

Science in India (New Delhi: Indian National Science Academy, 1971); Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, History of
Science and Technology in Ancient India, 3 vols. (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1986 –1996); Om Prakash Jaggi,
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in India, 15 vols. (Delhi: Atma Ram, 1969 –1984); and G.
Kuppuram and K. Kumudamani, eds., History of Science and Technology in India, 12 vols. (Delhi: Sundeep
Prakashan, 1990). For an overview of the influence of Needham on the historiography of science in the South
Asian context see S. Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina, eds., Situating the History of Science: Dialogues with Joseph
Needham (New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999); and, more generally, Roger Hart, “Beyond Science and
Civilization: A Post-Needham Critique,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine, 1999, 16:88 –114.

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340 FOCUS—ISIS, 104 : 2 (2013)

colonial scientific policy. These critiques have brought to the fore the racial and economic
discriminations involved in the workings of science in the colonial context and have,
above all, convincingly shown that “diffusion” occludes the active processes of reception
and appropriation on the part of receiving groups in scientific and technological transfers.9
Indeed, their greatest success perhaps resides in banishing diffusion from the repertoire of
political correctness.
Nevertheless, these studies and critiques share with Needham and Basalla the belief that
science is the embodiment of the basic values of truth and rationality, the motor of moral,
social, and material progress, the marker of civilization itself. It is not surprising, then, that
the history of science has become a site of controversy in the post-colonial world, with
nationalist historians pressing the claim of scientificity for their indigenous knowledges
and ways of knowing. In the hands of religious and political extremists, this has led to a
lot of chauvinistic gerrymandering, if not pure historical falsification.10 We are then
presented with the following dilemma. Are we to understand modern science as a pure
emanation of Western Europe, constituting the Great Divide between the West and the
Rest and reaching non-European peoples only as they come into contact with Euro-
peans— or capitalism? Or are we to think solely in terms of competing nationalist, or
civilizationist, narratives claiming precedence in scientific reasoning for their respec-
tive societies?
One way out of this predicament has been to question the moral and political values of
modern science. Indeed, many postcolonial scholars have espoused this line of argument
in recent years, seeking to denounce science—and all other institutions of modernity—as
alienating and dehumanizing and, in certain cases, to open up alternative visions of what
science might be. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s and Edward Said’s writings, and some-
times by those of Daniel Headrick, these scholars see modern science as a hegemonic
“master narrative” of Western power, a discursive formation through which the rest of the
world was simultaneously subjugated and relegated to the role of Europe’s binarily
opposed Other.11 The spread of Western science is, in this view, achieved by means of an

9 The first theme largely overlaps Needham-inspired historiography. For a historical critique of pure diffu-

sionism see Ahsan Jan Qaisar, The Indian Response to European Technology and Culture, AD 1498 –1707
(1982; New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999). For a history of colonial science policy see Deepak Kumar,
Science and the Raj, 1857–1905 (New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995); and John Lourdusamy, Science and
National Consciousness in Bengal, 1870 –1930 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004). For an engagement with
Basalla’s general perspective see Deepak Kumar, Science and Empire: Essays in Indian Context, 1700 –1947
(Delhi: Anamika Prakashan, 1991). More generally, see Roy MacLeod, “On Visiting the ‘Moving Metropolis’:
Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science,” Historical Records of Australian Science, 1982, 5(3):1–16;
Ian Inkster, “Scientific Enterprise and the Colonial ‘Model’: Observations on Australian Experience in Historical
Context,” Social Studies of Science, 1985, 15:677–704; Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg, eds., Scientific
Colonialism: A Cross-Cultural Comparison (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987); and Paolo
Palladino and Michael Worboys, “Science and Imperialism,” Isis, 1993, 84:91–102.
10 For a sample of such work in the Indian context see K. Ramasubramanian, M. D. Srinivas, and M. S. Sriram,

“Modification of the Earlier Indian Planetary Theory by the Kerala Astronomers (c. 1500 AD) and the Implied
Heliocentric Picture of Planetary Motion,” Current Science, 1994, 66:784 –790; Saroja Bhate and Subhash Kak,
“Panini’s Grammar and Computer Science,” Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1993,
72:79 –94; Kak, “Computational Aspects of the Aryabhata Algorithm,” Indian Journal of History of Science,
1986, 21:62–71; Kak, “The Astronomy of the Vedic Altars and the Rgveda,” Mankind Quarterly, 1992,
33:43–55; Kak, “Early Theories on the Distance to the Sun,” Indian J. Hist. Sci., 1998, 33:93–100; Kak, The
Astronomical Code of the Rig Veda (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2000); and B. N. Narahari Achar, “On the
Astronomical Basis of the Date of Satapatha Brahmana: A Re-Examination of Dikshit’s Theory,” Indian J. Hist.
Sci., 2000, 35:1–19.
11 Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century

(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981).

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often violent imposition of “rationality” on cultures originally endowed with “another S
reason.” Thus, far from replicating those in Europe, the resulting practices in the non-
Western colonial world are a mere travesty of Western metropolitan science, a hybrid or
pale copy valid only locally, in contrast to the universality of the European original.12
Their political appeal notwithstanding, these critiques tell us nothing about the nature
of putative non-Western “reason(s)” that, if only through the Manichean thrust of their
argument, are assumed to have preserved a pristine innocence through the millennia
preceding contact with Europeans. More important, they share with the more optimistic
earlier positions the widely accepted idea that there is something essential and unified
called modern science that, like modernity itself, originated in Western Europe and
subsequently spread to the rest of the world. In short, they have shied from engaging with
postpositivist scholarship in science studies and the Gestalt switch in the image of science
that emerges through this work, to which we shall now turn.
In a parallel and largely unrelated development, historians, sociologists, and philoso-
phers of science have radically undermined this traditional, essentialist understanding of
modern science. Moving away from a conception of science as a system of formal
propositions or discoveries, these recent studies understand it as the construction, main-
tenance, extension, and reconfiguration of knowledge, focusing equally on its material,
instrumental, corporeal, practical, social, political, and cognitive aspects. Systematically
opting for detailed case studies of the processes through which knowledge and associated
skills, practices, procedures, methods, and instruments are created in preference to “big
picture” accounts, they have investigated the negotiated, contingent, and situated nature of
the sciences. This new scholarship has convincingly shown that scientific research is not
based on logical step-by-step reasoning but on pragmatic judgment, much like that
involved in practical crafts, and is thus historically and geographically situated. In concert
with, and indeed in significant measure inspired by, ethnomethodology and microhistori-
cal approaches, on the one hand, and anthropological insights into the ever-local nature of
knowledge across cultural divides, on the other, contingencies of place have thus come to
acquire key importance in recent sociological and historical studies of science.13
Accounting for the mobility and spread of the sciences beyond their site of origin has
accordingly become another major concern for recent science studies. It has been con-
vincingly shown that scientific propositions, artifacts, and practices are neither innately
universal nor forcibly imposed on others. Rather, they disseminate only through complex
processes of accommodation and negotiation, as contingent as those involved in their
production. Some scholars have identified these processes in the standardization of
methods and measurement, others in the rendering of new knowledge immutable or in the
multiplication of identical contexts, while for yet others negotiability or open-endedness
is the inherent property of the knowledge, practice, or device that seeks to impose itself

12 Typical examples are Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999); and Pratik Chakrabarti, Western Science in Modern India:
Metropolitan Methods, Colonial Practices (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004).
13 For the sources of inspiration of this recent approach see Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology

(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967); Edoardo Grendi, “Microanalisi e storia sociale,” Quaderni Storici,
1972, 7:506 –520; Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
(1976; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981); and Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in
Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic, 1983).

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342 FOCUS—ISIS, 104 : 2 (2013)

in the outside world.14 As one scholar has aptly put it, there is no “algorithmic recipe” for
successful replication.15
The revolutionary nature of these recent accounts notwithstanding, however, they still
share with earlier traditions and with postcolonial critiques of modern science the dogma
of its Western origins, a significant pointer being the absence of case studies from
anywhere but Europe and America, knowledge production in non-European spaces of
modernity being left largely to anthropologists and area studies specialists. They also
implicitly share with them a belief in the “center/periphery” model for the spread of the
sciences as well as in the use of the dichotomous vocabulary of “metropolitan” versus
“colonial” science, although they do endeavor to bring to light the mechanisms that make
diffusion possible instead of simply taking the phenomenon for granted. It is thus worth
remarking that while the domain has evolved orthogonally to the earlier positivism and
fundamentally reconfigured approaches to questions of knowledge, postpositivist histori-
ans have acquiesced willy-nilly to the obdurate Eurocentric postulate that modern science
is “distinctly Western in its inception—although no longer in its pursuit or execution.”16
In what remains of this essay, I shall suggest a way of opening a conversation between
these two trends, inspired by recent approaches successfully advocated by historians of
society, culture, and science who focus on South Asia in a global context, approaches that
could be relevant in other world-historical contexts.17 I propose to do so by taking on
board the recent critical reconception of science. However, instead of attending exclu-
sively to its making in confined spaces, such as laboratories, cabinets of curiosity,
libraries, and the like, I shall focus on the (long- or short-range) movement of scientific
skills, practices, material, and ideas and their encounter with the skills, practices, material,
and ideas of other specialized communities in natural history, medicine, cartography,
linguistics, ethnology, and so forth—fields that actually counted as mainstream science

14 See, e.g., Harry M. Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (London:

Sage, 1985); Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Engineers through Society (Milton Keynes: Open
Univ. Press, 1987), Ch. 6: “Centres of Calculation,” pp. 215–257; Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer,
“Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations,’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Mu-
seum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39,” Soc. Stud. Sci., 1989, 19:387– 420; Simon Schaffer, “Late Victorian
Metrology and Its Instrumentation: A Manufactory of Ohms,” in Invisible Connections: Instruments, Institutions,
and Science, ed. Robert Bud and Susan E. Cozzens (Bellingham, Wash.: SPIE Optical Engineering Press, 1992),
pp. 23–56 (Contrast however with Schaffer, “Exact Sciences and Colonialism: Southern India in 1900,” in
Science as Cultural Practice, Volume 1: Cultures and Politics of Research from the Early Modern Period to the
Age of Extremes, ed. Moritz Epple and Claus Zittel (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010), pp. 121–139); and Peter
L. Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1997), pp.
803– 844.
15 Collins, Changing Order, p. 143. The founding works for spatially contextualizing scientific practice are

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985); and Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledge: The Science
Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, 1988,
14:575–599. See also Latour, Science in Action (cit. n. 14). An excellent introduction to these new approaches
in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science, along with a substantial bibliography, is to be found in Jan
Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Construction and the History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1998). On problems of replication see Harry M. Collins, Gravity’s Shadow: The Search for Gravitational
Waves (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2004).
16 Margaret C. Jacob, “Science Studies after Social Construction: The Turn toward the Comparative and

Global,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, ed. Victoria E.
Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1999), pp. 95–120, on p. 95.
17 See esp. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected History, 2 vols. (New Delhi: Oxford Univ.

Press, 2005); C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780 –1914: Global Connections and Comparisons
(London: Wiley, 2003); and Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of
Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650 –1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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until well into the nineteenth century.18 I shall argue that the resulting interactions are S
themselves a locus of knowledge construction and reconfiguration. In other words, I shall
focus on the unanimously acknowledged centrality of circulation to analyze its conse-
quences for the sciences and their history on a global scale. It will be seen that many of
the shortcomings of postpositivism and postcolonialism pointed out above can thus be
addressed— on condition that both sides pay a price: that by science we understand not
free-floating ideas, but the production of knowledge, practices, instruments, techniques,
and services; and by circulation we understand not the “dissemination,” “transmission,” or
“communication” of ideas, but the processes of encounter, power and resistance, negoti-
ation, and reconfiguration that occur in cross-cultural interaction.19 It is precisely this
transformative conception of circulation that I want to develop, articulate, and theorize
here. As the editors of a recent book on circulation and society stress in their introduction:
“Circulation is different from simple mobility, inasmuch as it implies a double movement
of going forth and coming back, which can be repeated indefinitely. In circulating, things,
men and notions often transform themselves. Circulation . . . therefore . . . implies an
incremental aspect and not the simple reproduction across space of already formed
structures and notions.”20
Let us then look very briefly at an example from early modern botany. Making
inventories of local flora was crucial to European nations engaged in ever-increasing trade
networks across the globe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A knowledge
of plants and their uses was important not only for introducing new commodities on the
European markets but also for maintaining the health of the thousands of sailors and
traders who found themselves in the hostile climes of the tropics. The Portuguese, the
Dutch, the English, and the French prepared voluminous herbals of Asian plants. Of
course, the stories told so far about the making of this knowledge invariably involve
indigenous people who are described as “informants,” responding to questions determined
by European investigators designated as “collectors” or “travelers.” This information is
transformed into certified knowledge in the metropole and can then be disseminated urbi
et orbi.21
Looking at this history through the prism of the circulation of a fourteen-volume herbal
containing more than 720 Indian plants painted by Indian artists, commissioned by a
French surgeon in Orissa at the end of the seventeenth century, along with associated
correspondence, helps us to understand the character of the early Indo-European economic
and social networks that made such works possible. Focusing on the interaction between
multiple circulations and on the long- and short-range networks and heterogeneous
practices at play in the construction of the manuscript, the complex processes of inter-
cultural negotiation, power play, and collaboration involved in the making and legitimi-

18 Josef W. Konvitz, Cartography in France, 1600 –1848: Science, Engineering, and Statecraft (Chicago:

Univ. Chicago Press, 1987).

19 In effect, even in his otherwise highly instructive piece Jim Secord stresses circulation as communication

most of all; see Secord, “Knowledge in Transit” (cit. n. 1).

20 Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Introduction: Circulation and

Society under Colonial Rule,” in Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia,
1750 –1950, ed. Markovits, Pouchepadass, and Subrahmanyam (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 1–22, on pp.
2–3. A similar vision is expressed by the editor and various authors in Michel Cotte, ed., Circulations
techniques: En amont de l’innovation: Hommes, objects et idées en movement (Besançon: Presses Univ.
France–Comté; Belfort: Univ. Technique de Belfort–Montbéliard, 2004).
21 For a schematic representation of the received notion of the information– knowledge relationship see H. V.

Wyatt, “When Does Information Become Knowledge?” Nature, 1972, 235:86 – 89.

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zation of this botanical and medical knowledge are clearly brought to the fore, turning the
standard agonistic topos of East/West encounter on its head. In effect, a closer look shows
that, far from being mere passive informants, the indigenes have varied roles, from fakirs
as depositories of herbal and medicinal knowledge to male and female collectors, illus-
trators, translators, bookbinders, and mediators. As a matter of fact, the French surgeon
designates himself a mere translator of the text from Hindustani to French (although that
does not do justice to his true role). The template for the structure of the work is a Dutch
compilation made in southwestern India. Its fate upon its arrival in France, where it is
deliberately ignored in a controversy over what counted as knowledge for early eighteenth-
century France, is another aspect of the story that emerges only when the question of
circulation is asked.22 It is only by seeking the different movements involved that certain new
evidence comes to light and new ways of questioning the historical material can be
honed.23
More important, however, the term “circulation” serves as a strong counterpoint to the
unidirectionality of “diffusion” or even of “dissemination” or “transmission,” of binaries
such as metropolitan science/colonial science or center/periphery, which all imply a
producer and an end user. “Circulation” suggests a more open flow—and especially the
possibility of the mutations and reconfigurations coming back to the point of origin.
Moreover, the circulatory perspective confers agency on all involved in the interactive
processes of knowledge construction. This does not imply, as some Indologists have
contended, that South Asians played a determinant role in the dialogical process through
which knowledge emerged and even “exercised greater dominance than did the British”
in this process.24 Nor does it give credence to the opponents of this position, who argue
that indigenes were deprived of all agency in knowledge production, at best playing the
role of passive informants providing raw information to intellectually active Europeans
who then organized it into knowledge according to Western modes of knowing.25 Rather,
it shows that being colonized and having agency are not antithetical. It is in the asymmetry
in negotiation processes that the power relationship resides, and it can be brought to light
in its specificity only through a rigorous analysis of these processes, instead of being
raised to the status of an explanatory category.
Of course, not everything circulates, and the term could suggest a blindly optimistic
vision of books, ideas, practices, people, and material flowing smoothly between different
cultures, communities, and geographical spaces.26 As the example of the herbal makes

22 For a detailed account of the history of this manuscript see Raj, Relocating Modern Science (cit. n. 17), Ch.

1: “Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen: Making L’Empereur’s Jardin in Early Modern South Asia,” pp.
27–59.
23 See Carlo Ginzburg, “Alien Voices: The Dialogic Element in Early Modern Jesuit Historiography,” in

History, Rhetoric, and Proof (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis Univ. Press/Historical Society of Israel, 1999), pp.
71–91.
24 See, e.g., Eugene Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South Asia, 1795–1895 (Berkeley: Univ.

California Press, 1994), p. 9 (quotation); Thomas Trautmann, “Hullabaloo about Telugu,” South Asia Research,
1999, 19:53–70; and Phillip B. Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2003, 45:783– 814.
25 See esp. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton Univ. Press, 1996); Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001); and Prakash, Another Reason (cit. n. 12). See, however, C. A.
Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780 –1870
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997); and Moritz Deutschmann, Edward Said and the Cultural History
of British Colonialism in India (Munich: Grin, 2011).
26 This criticism has recently been made in Fa-ti Fan, “The Global Turn in the History of Science,” East Asian

Science, Technology, and Society, 2012, 6:249 –258.

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amply clear, certain conditions are required to be fulfilled for them to circulate.27 These S
conditions could depend on the exchange of favors, patronage, friendship, obligation, or
just economic exchange, to name but a few possibilities. Besides, not everyone wants
everything to circulate freely, as the historian of Indian merchant networks Claude
Markovits argues:

Most crucial [for the sustained existence of merchant networks] is probably the circulation of
information. . . . This means two things: first, that ‘leaks’ have to be avoided as much as
possible to the outside world, secondly, that information must circulate smoothly within the
network, both spatially and temporally, as it gets transmitted from one generation to another.
Although academics are generally dismissive of the cognitive aspect of merchant activity, often
deemed to consist of nothing more than the three Rs, in the long run the most successful
merchant networks have been those most able to process information into a body of knowledge
susceptible of continuous refinement.28

As this passage suggests, circulation occurs within bounded spaces. The geography of
these spaces of circulation changes historically, depending on the nature, morphology,
geography, and relative power of the networks that interact in any given situation.
Likewise, the morphology of spaces of circulation is seen to change over time: from one
closely linked to trade and commercial networks in early modernity in the case of South
Asia, it gradually becomes more intimately related to state-run institutions with the rise
and development of colonial and imperial states.
The focus on circulation itself as a “site” of knowledge formation constitutes a major
change in approach with respect to science studies orthodoxy. For, as outlined above,
social studies of science have so far, albeit implicitly, separated three moments in the
making of knowledge: the collection of information or objects; their accumulation and
processing within the local, segregated space of the laboratory; and, finally, the spread—
and eventual universal acceptance— of the knowledge thus engendered.29 However, it is
precisely the mutable nature of the knowledge makers themselves, as much as of the
knowledges and skills that they embodied, their transformations and reconfigurations in
the course of their geographical and social displacements, that the focus on circulation
helps bring to the fore.30
In conclusion, then, the circulatory perspective allows one to see science as being
co-produced through the encounter and interaction between heterogeneous specialist
communities of diverse origins. (See Figure 1.) It allows one to tell a story that seeks not

27 Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005).
28 Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750 –1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 2000), p. 25.
29 See Latour, Science in Action (cit. n. 14). A recent book on the subject of intercultural scientific encounter

is based on a similar model: Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural
Encounter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2004).
30 A burgeoning interest in circulation as a site of knowledge making is attested to in at least two recent

publications by eminent historians of science, technology, and medicine. See Yves Cohen, “The Soviet Fordson:
Between the Politics of Stalin and the Philosophy of Ford, 1924 –1932,” in Ford, 1903–2003: The European
History, 2 vols., ed. Hubert Bonin, Yannick Lung, and Steven Tolliday (Paris: PLAGE, 2003), Vol. 2, pp.
531–558; and Maneesha Lal, “Purdah as Pathology: Gender and the Circulation of Medical Knowledge in Late
Colonial India,” in Reproductive Health in India: History, Politics, Controversies, ed. Sarah Hodges (New Delhi:
Orient Longman, 2005), pp. 85–114. It is also significant to note that a recent quadrennial joint meeting of the
British, Canadian, and American history of science societies, held in Halifax, Canada, in August 2004, had as
its theme “Circulating Knowledge.” See also Mary Terrall and Kapil Raj, eds., Circulation and Locality in Early
Modern Science, British Journal for the History of Science, 2010, 43(4).

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346 FOCUS—ISIS, 104 : 2 (2013)

Figure 1. “An European Gentleman with His Moonshee, or Native Professor of Languages.” From
Charles D’Oyly, The European in India, from a Collection of Drawings (London, 1813), Plate 1.

to highlight the non-Western origins of modern science but to offer a grounded global
history that links the large-scale processes and the fine-grained observations of everyday
life, echoing the global ethnographic method proposed by Michael Burawoy.31 Detailed

31 Michael Burawoy et al., eds., Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern

World (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 2000).

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and microhistorical in its narrative, it constantly changes scales, places, and territories, S
venturing out into spaces with uncertain or moving boundaries, creating or using net-
works. Its actors are neither “local” nor “regional” nor “global.” They cross “classical”
territorial disciplinary formations by juggling possibilities and constraints, construct
spaces tailored to their own activity, cultivate solutions of continuity, and function through
networks.32
Appropriating this perspective offers rich theoretical alternatives to the center/periphery
trope, which ensnares world histories of science as it does “science and empire” studies.
For, not only does it not efface the inherent asymmetries involved in the making and
movement of knowledge in its material and non-material dimensions, this perspective also
allows us to reconfigure the moral and political dimensions of the sciences in telling the
story of a world far more complex end intertwined than that suggested by these simple
dichotomies. It also opens prospects for fruitful collaboration between historians of
modern and contemporary Indian science and those investigating encounter and interac-
tion between heterogeneous specialist cultures within the “West” or in other regions of the
world.33 This will certainly help in the emergence of a meaningful methodological
approach for the transnational and global history of science, a sine qua non for the study,
among other domains, of “big science,” the environment, and medicine.

32 This vision is based on Pierre-Yves Saunier’s depiction of mobile actors; see Saunier, “A l’assaut de

l’espace transnational de l’urbain, ou la piste des mobilités,” Géocarrefour, 2005, 80:249 –253, esp. p. 251.
33 I have in mind the project “Practical Knowledge Traditions and Scientific Change, 1750 –1870,” begun at

the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, at the initiative of Otto Sibum in 2002 and continued
at the University of Uppsala since 2007. For examples of writings in this perspective see Otto Sibum, “Les gestes
de la mesure: Joule, les pratique de la brasserie et la science,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 1998,
53:745–774; and Sibum, “Exploring the Margins of Precision,” in Instruments, Travel, and Science: Itineraries
of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, Christian Licoppe, and
Sibum (London/New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 216 –242. Another excellent example is Mary Terrall,
Catching Nature in the Act: Reaumur and the Practice of Eighteenth-Century Natural History (Chicago: Univ.
Chicago Press, forthcoming). See also David J. Hess, Science and Technology in a Multicultural World:
The Cultural Politics of Facts and Artifacts (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1995); Amit Prasad, “Scientific
Culture in the ‘Other’ Theater of ‘Modern Science’: An Analysis of the Culture of Magnetic Resonance Research
in India,” Soc. Stud. Sci., 2005, 35:463– 489; Arun Bala, ed., Asia, Europe, and the Emergence of Modern
Science: Knowledge Crossing Boundaries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and Prakash Kumar, Indigo
Plantations and Science in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012).

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