Abstract
In the history of science of the British empire, the romance of drawing out global connections extending from Saharanpur to Kew Gardens with a stop in China, seems to have thankfully ended. Lachlan Fleetwood's book Science on the Roof of the World (Cambridge University Press, 2022) shows us the continuing relevance of globalizing science, not for the sake of connections, but for disconnections. Here, science is not triumphant and all conquering, and we see it for its messy processes. Science is determined by the hierarchy and inequality of colonialism; ridden with trials and errors that persist for years; and often characterized by breakdowns in communication, instruments and the health of the humans who pursue it. Part of the messiness of the disconnections comes from taking seriously the situatedness of science. Fleetwood wants to globalize science from the Himalaya where disconnection is the norm, and not, say, Calcutta, that ‘center in the periphery’ as described by Pratik Chakrabarty. 1 This is not to say connections are not drawn here – global comparisons between the Andes and the Alps and the Himalaya are thought out with care and are shown to be profoundly illuminating in the making of the universal category of the mountain in the 19th century. However, unlike the smoothness of connections, comparisons are shown to be inherently uneven and are deployed to show the specificity of place in the making of something global. It is the centering of the Himalaya as an ‘edge of empire’, rather than the periphery of imperial knowledge networks, that is a key concern in this work, and I want to unpack what this means for understanding science as both global and imperial.
The scientific knowledge that Fleetwood is tracking through the book is always imperfect and on the cusp of being replaced. He captures a time when the Himalaya were not the highest mountains in the world – they came to be understood as the highest in the mid-19th century through global/imperial comparisons. Similarly, altitude sickness was less understood in the first half of the 19th century than the latter half, with important implications for European and South Asian travelers’ self-fashioning. Volcanoes were once imagined into the Himalayan landscape, where there were none. The line of perpetual snow appeared at different heights in mountains at the same latitude, across the globe, leading to confusion among travelers and scientists in the 19th century trying to figure out a law for when and where to expect this phenomenon. Botanical knowledge was uneven across the gardens planned by the British in Calcutta, Saharanpur, and Mussoorie. In this one book, Fleetwood masterfully brings together many kinds of scientific knowledge – botanical, geological, topographical, medicinal and so on – along with their attendant historiography in South Asia. These moments of scientific experimentation and outright failure are mined expertly by Fleetwood to get at how the Himalaya is constructed in European scientific and intellectual traditions as a coherent space – of mountain, distinct from lowland; of verticality, aberrance, remoteness and, ultimately, instability. There is also an implicit difference here between the mountain and lowland places in South Asia, where, we are given to understand, colonialism is more explicitly expansionist, and the science is more surefooted.
The picture of scientific practice that emerges here is differentiated by place in addition to a particular attention to race. The creation of the Himalaya as a coherent space, however aberrant and unstable, is always understood here to be an exercise of the colonizer's imagination, and in contrast to Himalayan peoples, workers, collaborators, brokers, go-betweens, who make meaning of this space in different ways. Working sensitively with the limitations of the colonial archive, Fleetwood brings out the labor of South Asians in all the many scientific pursuits described in this book. The role of brokers and go-betweens is particularly pressing, and the South Asian people discussed here, in these precise roles, interrupt the making of the Himalaya as a coherent space. South Asians are shown here with their humoral explanations of mountain sickness, cosmological explanations for the origins of mountains and the existence of fossils, in addition to the intergenerational and embodied knowledges they employ in working with the colonial state. Without dwelling too much on that difference between European and indigenous knowledges of space, there is a sense here that global comparisons belonged to the former and questions of agency and embodiedness to the latter. This brings out the imperial nature of globality very well indeed, but perhaps an examination of South Asian travelers and their self-fashioning in the Himalaya would have added another layer to understanding the complexity of the universal category of the Himalaya as vertical, as mountain. We could then see this geographical knowledge not just as an imperial imposition but likely as still more powerful because co-produced by both Europeans and South Asians.
There are critical lessons in this book for how to globalize science. Fleetwood shows how science is made more by disconnections than connections, and its contested nature is more pronounced in the mountain than in the lowland. If we take seriously the imperative to situate science in place, it is necessary to show such difference across space. There is no easy correlation here between ‘less imperial’ and ‘more imperial’ that maps on to these different spaces, but it is certain that there is a center and an edge to the British empire in India which plays an important role in the workings of science. This science of disconnections is as much imperial as it is global, and no other recent work as much as this one has shown us the lineaments of it in such fine detail. The implications of the construction of the Himalaya in the European, imperial and global imagination as aberrant and unstable remain unnamed, but we can presume them to be vast. What we now know is that perhaps the best way to globalize science is to track its unevenness and see what that tells us about how it changes the world.
