Metrological techniques to establish shared quantitative measures have often been seen as signs of rational modernization. The cases considered here show instead the close relation of such techniques with antiquarian and revivalist programs under imperial regimes. Enterprises in survey sciences in Egypt in the wake of the French invasion of 1798 and in India during the East India Company's revenue surveys involved the promotion of a new kind of oriental metrology designed to represent colonizers’ measures as restorations of ancient values to be applied to current systems of survey and measurement. Surveyors’ practice and hardware help clarify the significance of the complex historical and political functions of scientific standards. The balance of the paper discusses the survey work of later nineteenth-century indigenous Egyptian astronomers at a conjuncture of major economic and political dislocation to explore the various versions of antiquity at stake in these metrological programs.
...More
Chapter
Patrice Bret;
(2019)
Instruments of Knowledge and Power in a Colonial Context: Scientific Instruments during the French Occupation of Egypt, 1798–1801
(/isis/citation/CBB412844931/)
Book
Maifreda, Germano;
(2012)
From Oikonomia to Political Economy: Constructing Economic Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution
(/isis/citation/CBB001201675/)
Book
Schlitz, Michael;
(2012)
The Money Doctors from Japan: Finance, Imperialism, and the Building of the Yen Bloc, 1895--1937
(/isis/citation/CBB001320919/)
Chapter
Bronislaw Średniawa;
(2002)
The Development of Astronomy, Physics and Mathematics at Jagellonian University in the Last Two Centuries on the Background of Historical Changes in Cracow
(/isis/citation/CBB697269661/)
Article
Robert T. McMaster;
(2020)
Edward Hitchkock's geological survey of Massachusetts, 1830-1833
(/isis/citation/CBB010072242/)
Article
Barany, Michael J.;
(2010)
Great Pyramid Metrology and the Material Politics of Basalt
(/isis/citation/CBB001023790/)
Article
Wayne Orchiston;
Darunee Lingling Orchiston;
(2021)
King Rama IV, Sir Harry Ord and the total solar eclipse of 18 August 1868: power, politics and astronomy
(/isis/citation/CBB569389751/)
Thesis
Gallo, Marcus Terran;
(2012)
Imaginary Lines, Real Power: Surveyors and Land Speculation in the Mid-Atlantic Borderlands, 1681--1800
(/isis/citation/CBB001567382/)
Article
Anna Winterbottom;
(2021)
Becoming “Traditional”: A Transnational History of Neem and Biopiracy Discourse
(/isis/citation/CBB618192348/)
Thesis
Siva Prashant Kumar;
(2021)
Colonizing Time: Caste, Colonial Rule, and the Exact Sciences in India, 1783–1874
(/isis/citation/CBB845659840/)
Thesis
Calandra McCool;
(2016)
Native American Stories as Scientific Investigations of Nature: Indigenous Science and Methodologies
(/isis/citation/CBB631274656/)
Article
Lachlan Fleetwood;
(2018)
“No Former Travellers having Attained such a Height on the Earth’s Surface”: Instruments, Inscriptions, and Bodies in the Himalaya, 1800–1830
(/isis/citation/CBB221245616/)
Article
Ting Chen;
Lingfeng Lü;
(2022)
Astronomical or political: Interpretation of comets in times of crisis in Qing China
(/isis/citation/CBB395595446/)
Thesis
E. Bennett Jones;
(2021)
'The Indians Say': Settler Colonialism and the Scientific Study of North America, 1722 to 1848
(/isis/citation/CBB627267294/)
Article
Pierre Briant;
(2013)
La figure de Néarque dans l’historiographie européenne (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles)
(/isis/citation/CBB289056239/)
Book
Fischer-Tiné, Harald;
(2013)
Pidgin-Knowledge: Wissen und Kolonialismus
(/isis/citation/CBB001551249/)
Article
Meghan C. L. Howey;
(2010)
"The question which has puzzled, and still puzzles": How American Indian Authors Challenged Dominant Discourse about Native American Origins in the Nineteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB834825020/)
Book
Anna Greenwood;
Harshad Topiwala;
(2015)
Indian Doctors in Kenya, 1895-1940: The Forgotten History
(/isis/citation/CBB796041613/)
Article
Oyndrila Sarkar;
(2017)
Science Surveying and Scientific Authority: The Brothers Schlagintweit in India and High Asia 1854-57
(/isis/citation/CBB785593502/)
Article
Oyndrila Sarkar;
(2017)
Science Surveying and Scientific Authority: The Brothers Schlagintweit in India and High Asia 1854-57
(/isis/citation/CBB917755784/)
Be the first to comment!