̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Simon Schaffer

A world of science

lw355 — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 09:20:44 +0000

̽��ֱ��year was 1789; the place Bengal. Isaac Newton’s masterpiece Principia Mathematica was being translated for only the third time in its already 100-year-old history; this time, into Arabic.

̽��ֱ��author of this remarkable feat of scholarship was Tafazzul Husain Khan. According to a member of the ruling East India Company: “Khan… by translating the works of the immortal Newton, has conducted those imbued with Arabick literature to the fountain of all physical and astronomical knowledge.”

For Professor Simon Schaffer, who has researched the story of Tafazzul’s achievements, the complex work of translation is deeply significant. Tafazzul worked with scholars in English, Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit language communities in his efforts to connect Newtonian theories with the Indo-Persian intellectual tradition. For Tafazzul was, as Schaffer describes, “a go-between”.

“ ̽��ֱ��‘go-betweens’ are the individuals who, across the centuries, have been the cogs that have kept science moving,” he explains. “They are the knowledge brokers and translators, networkers and messengers – the original ‘knowledge transfer facilitators’. Their role may have disappeared from mainstream histories of science, but their tradecraft has been indispensable to the globalisation of science.”

Schaffer and Dr Sujit Sivasundaram are historians of science with an interest in understanding how the seeds of scientific knowledge have spread and grown. They believe that the global history of science is really the history of shifts and reinventions of a variety of ways of doing science across the world.

They, and others, have called for a retelling of science’s past, not only to be more “culturally symmetric” but also because the issue has enormous contemporary relevance.

“A standard tale is that modern science spread around the world from Western Europe, starting about 500 years ago based on the work of those such as Newton, Copernicus and Galileo, and then Darwin, Einstein, and so on,” explains Schaffer. “But this narrative about the globalisation of science just doesn’t work at all. It ignores a remarkable process of knowledge exchange that happened between the East and West for centuries.”

“Successful science is seen to be universal in its applicability,” adds Sivasundaram. “Yet, accounts of scientific discovery, heroism and priority have been part and parcel of a political narrative of competitive ownership by empires, nations and civilisations. To tease this story apart, we focus on the exchanges and ‘silencings’ across political configurations that are central to the rise of science on the global stage.”

Over the past two years, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, he and Schaffer have undertaken a programme of debates to ask whether a transregional rather than a Eurocentric history of science could now be told.

To do so, they teamed up with researchers in India and Africa, including Professor Irfan Habib from Delhi’s National ̽��ֱ�� of Educational Planning and Administration and Professor Dhruv Raina of Jawarhalal Nehru ̽��ֱ��, and in December 2014 held an international workshop at the Nehru Memorial Library in New Delhi. “And now our debate is also being carried forward by a new generation of early-career researchers who came to the workshop,” adds Sivasundaram.

One conundrum the researchers debated was how global narratives of science could have been missed by scholars for so long. It largely stems from the use of source materials says Schaffer: “It’s an archival problem: as far as the production and preservation of sources is concerned, those connected with Europe far outweigh those from other parts of the world.”

“If we are to de-centre from Europe, we need to use radically new kinds of sources – monuments, sailing charts, courtly narratives, and so on,” explains Sivasundaram. He gives an example of Sri Lankan palm-leaf manuscripts: “ ̽��ֱ��Mahavamsais a Buddhist chronicle of the history of Sri Lanka spanning 25 centuries. Among the deeds of the last kings of Kandy, I noticed seemingly inconsequential references to temple gardens. This led me back to the colonial archive documenting the creation of a botanic garden in 1821, and I realised that the British had ‘recycled’ a Kandyan tradition of gardening, by building their colonial garden on the site of a temple garden.”

Moreover, says Sivasundaram, the mechanisms of knowledge assimilation are often overlooked. Europeans often accumulated knowledge in India by engaging with pandits, or learned men. “ ̽��ֱ��Europeans did not have a monopoly over the combination of science and empire – the pioneering work of Chris Bayly [see panel] shows how they fought to take over information networks and scientific patronage systems that were already in place. For Europeans to practice astronomy in India, for instance, it meant translating Sanskrit texts and engaging with pandits.”

“Very often, scientific achievement is used as a standard to measure a country’s progress because science and technology can intervene in problems of hunger, disease and development,” adds Sivasundaram. “If a biased history of science is told, then the past can become what Irfan Habib has called a ‘battlefield’, instead of a ‘springboard’ for future research or indeed for conversation across cultures.”

This is why, says Schaffer, it becomes so important to provide a better account of the worldly interaction between the kinds of knowledge communicated, the agents of communication – like Tafazzul Husain Khan – and the paths they travelled.

̽��ֱ��history of science has been centred for too long on the West, say Simon Schaffer and Sujit Sivasundaram. It’s time to think global.

̽��ֱ��‘go-betweens’ have been the cogs that have kept science moving ... their tradecraft has been indispensable to the globalisation of science

Simon Schaffer

Private collection/Bridgeman Images

̽��ֱ��European in India, 1813 by Charles D'Oyly (1781-1845)

̽��ֱ��art of listening in

Knowledge networks were as important to the building of British political intelligence in north India in the 18th and 19th centuries as they were to the diffusion of science.

No discussion of Indian history, or of the communication and the movement of knowledge, would be complete without reference to the work of the late Professor Sir Christopher Bayly (1945–2015).

Bayly saw the role of Indian spies, runners and knowledgeable secretaries as crucial to the British in helping to keep information and gossip flowing in the 1780s and 1860s. His ground-breaking research uncovered the social and intellectual origins of these informants, and showed how networks of ‘go-betweens’ helped the British understand India’s politics, economic activities and culture.

“One overriding reason why the East India Company was able to conquer India… was that the British had learnt the art of listening in on the internal communications of Indian polity and society,” he explained in his seminal work Empire and Information (1996).

Ultimately, however, India’s complex systems of debate and communication challenged the political and intellectual dominance of the British; it was their misunderstanding of the subtleties of Indian politics and values, he argues, that contributed to the British failure to anticipate the 1857 Mutiny–Rebellion.

World-renowned for his enormous contributions to his subject, Bayly was the Director of Cambridge’s Centre of South Asian Studies until his retirement in 2014, as well as President of St Catharine’s College, and the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History in the Faculty of History.

He completely transformed people’s understanding of India in the 18th and 19th centuries, explains Professor Joya Chatterji, the Centre’s current Director: “Chris has been one of the most influential figures in the field of modern Indian history. Every one of his monographs broke new ground, whether in political, social and economic, or latterly intellectual history.”

His work was increasingly drawn towards ‘world historical’ comparisons and connections; his ̽��ֱ��Birth of the Modern World (2004) transformed the understanding of the history of modernity itself, drawing attention to its richly complex, overlapping global roots.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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̽��ֱ��longitude problem: 300-year-old archive opened to the world

sjr81 — Thu, 18 Jul 2013 09:12:37 +0000

Now, for the first time, the full story of attempts to solve the longitude problem - unravelling the lone genius myth popularised in film and literature - will be made freely available to everyone via Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library’s Digital Library.

Launched today, the complete archive of the Board of Longitude, held by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library, and associated National Maritime Museum collections, will take their place alongside the works of Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton at cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk.

Treasures of the Longitude archive, available to view in high-resolution for the first time, include accounts of bitter rivalries, wild proposals and first encounters between Europeans and Pacific peoples. This includes logbooks of Captain Cook’s voyages of discovery, the naming of Australia and even a letter from Captain Bligh of HMS Bounty, who writes to apologise for the loss of a timekeeper after his ship was ‘pirated from my command’.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� Library’s Digital Library project was launched in June 2010 following a £1.5m gift from the Polonsky Foundation. ̽��ֱ�� Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “With the digitisation of this incredible collection, we have taken another important step towards realising our shared ambition of creating a digital library for the world.”

̽��ֱ��Board of Longitude collection is the largest project undertaken to date by the Cambridge Digital Library team, comprising more than 65,000 images. Funded by Jisc (http://www.jisc.ac.uk), a charity which provides digital services for UK education and research, the collection has been developed in partnership with a wider five-year research project by Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Greenwich’s National Maritime Museum.

In July 1714 an act of parliament established a £20,000 prize, worth about £1.5 million today, for the discovery of longitude at sea: determining a ship’s position east and west from a fixed meridian line.

Cambridge historian Professor Simon Schaffer said: “ ̽��ֱ��problem of longitude could be a lethal one. ̽��ֱ��act of parliament established the Board of Longitude – think the X Factor, only much more money and much more important – that would reward anyone who could solve the problem of longitude.

“ ̽��ֱ��longitude story is a spectacular example of expert disagreement and public participation. As well as attracting the greatest scientific minds of the day, the board enticed people who belong to one of the most important traditions in British society; the extreme eccentric.”

̽��ֱ��hugely significant archive preserves detailed minutes from the first recorded meeting in 1737 right through to the Board of Longitude’s dissolution in 1828.

Royal Museums Greenwich’s Dr Richard Dunn, who is currently curating a major exhibition inspired by longitude, said the archive proves that John Harrison, while a towering figure in the story, is not the start and end point for all things longitude.

" ̽��ֱ��archive places the familiar story of Harrison in its richer context. He was a crucial figure but the story is much broader. It takes in the development of astronomy, exploration and technological innovation and creativity during the period of the Industrial Revolution, the work of the first government body devoted to scientific matters, and public reactions to a challenge many considered hopeless.”

As the schemes for longitude needed to be tested on long voyages, the archive includes much detail on Britain’s maritime interests, explorations and encounters with other cultures. It also played a major role in plans for voyages by James Cook and successors into the Pacific in the 1770s - and into the Arctic in the opening decades of the 19th century. ̽��ֱ��archive includes four eyewitness accounts of Cook’s Second Voyage and contains the first Western maps and descriptions of many Pacific places and peoples.

̽��ֱ��Board’s work continued long after longitude was effectively solved and its many interests and long duration makes the archive a hugely important primary source on the development of science and technology in the 18th and early 19th centuries. It also provides valuable insight into the social history of the era with thousands of names featuring in its files; from Isaac Newton, to eccentric inventors who berated the Board for not following up on their ideas.

Indeed, the archive contains two volumes of ‘impractical’ schemes submitted in the hope of finding a reward. They were later bound and prefaced with title pages such as ‘wild proposals resulting from dreams’. They came via a diverse cross-section of society, from prisoners seeking release in return for their ‘solutions’ to citizens like Mr William Lester, who proposed solar experiments to find longitude that involved igniting points on a globe with a lens. ̽��ֱ��board underlined his statement that if the globe is correct and properly adjusted ‘you will set fire to London’.

Flickr Gallery of images from the Cambridge and Greenwich archives can be seen here

Inset image: Sextant, made by Jesse Ramsden. Copyright National Maritime Museum

It was the conundrum that baffled some of the greatest and most eccentric experts of the 18th century - and captivated the British public during an era of unprecedented scientific and technical transformation.

̽��ֱ��problem of longitude could be a lethal one.

Simon Schaffer

Introduction to the Board of Longitude

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Three Cambridge academics elected as Fellows of ̽��ֱ��British Academy

fpjl2 — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 14:01:14 +0000

̽��ֱ��British Academy is the UK's national body for the promotion of the humanities and social sciences.

It is the counterpart to the Royal Society, which exists to serve the natural sciences.

̽��ֱ��British Academy aims to inspire, recognise and support excellence and high achievement across the UK and internationally.

Established by Royal Charter in 1902, it is an independent, self-governing body of more than 900 Fellows.

̽��ֱ��newly elected Fellows of ̽��ֱ��British Academy are as follows:

Professor Huw Price is the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy and a Fellow of Trinity College. Prior to joining the ̽��ֱ�� in 2011, Professor Price headed the Centre for Time in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the ̽��ֱ�� of Sydney, which he helped establish in 2002. He has also held the post of Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Edinburgh.

Born in Oxford, he emigrated to Australia at the age of 13, returning to the UK to complete his PhD in Philosophy at Cambridge. He has written several books, including Facts and the Function of Truth and Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point, and is internationally renowned for his contributions to the areas of time-asymmetry, the philosophy of physics and pragmatism.

Professor Simon Franklin is a Fellow of Clare College, and Professor of Slavonic Studies at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages. He has written extensively on Russian history and culture of all periods, but his principal research interests are medieval.

In 2008 he was awarded the Lomonosov Gold Medal by the Russian Academy of Sciences for outstanding achievements in research in Russian history and culture. Professor Franklin’s major long-term project is a cultural history of information technologies in Russia.

Professor Simon Schaffer is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and has been a Fellow of Darwin College since 1985. Until recently he was editor of ̽��ֱ��British Journal for the History of Science.

Professor Schaffer was jointly awarded the Erasmus Prize in 2005 for the book Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, which he co-authored with Steven Shapin. In 2004, he presented a series of documentaries for the BBC about light and the history of its study and knowledge.

̽��ֱ��British Academy’s President, Sir Adam Roberts, said of the election: “ ̽��ֱ��new Fellows, who come from 23 institutions across the UK, have outstanding expertise across the board – from social policy and government, to sign language and music.

"Our Fellows play a vital role in sustaining the Academy’s activities - from identifying excellence to be supported by research awards, to contributing to policy reports and speaking at the Academy’s public events.

"Their presence in the Academy will help it to sustain its support for research across the humanities and social sciences, and to inspire public interest in these disciplines.”

In addition, Lord Rees of Ludlow, Master of Trinity College, and Dame Fiona Reynolds, Master-elect of Emmanuel College, have been elected to the prestigious category of Honorary Fellowship.

Three Cambridge academics are among the thirty eight scholars elected Fellows of ̽��ֱ��British Academy this year, in recognition of their research achievements.

Our Fellows play a vital role in sustaining the Academy’s activities - from identifying excellence to be supported by research awards, to contributing to policy reports and speaking at the Academy’s public events.

Sir Adam Roberts

Claudine Hartzel

British Academy

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Longitude project to chart new waters in untold story

bjb42 — Wed, 12 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In a new project announced today (Wednesday, May 12th), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, researchers will embark on the first full investigation of the barely-studied archives of the British Board of Longitude, the eighteenth century organisation which oversaw the search for an accurate method of determining how far east or west a ship was at sea.

̽��ֱ��aim is not just to write the first history of the Board, but to reclaim its place in the story of a long series of breakthroughs, arguments, projects and schemes that until now have largely been associated with the efforts of a lone, self-educated clockmaker, John Harrison.

Harrison, whose life has been the subject of both a best-selling book and a film, was responsible for the development of a marine timekeeper, later called the chronometer. This key piece of technology enabled Longitude's accurate measurement and thus helped crack a conundrum that had baffled the world's most eminent scholars and navigators for generations.

As the project will seek to prove, however, the achievement was not his alone. Researchers will examine how he was one of an array of astronomers, inventors and craftspeople whose talents were harnessed and exploited by the Board's actions, and how it continued to sponsor innovations in science, exploration and industry long after Harrison had claimed his prize.

̽��ֱ��study, which is a collaboration between the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, will produce the first ever complete history of the British Board of Longitude in time for 2014, the 300th anniversary of the Longitude Act that established it. To mark the launch, a short film about the project will be available from today on the ̽��ֱ��'s YouTube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/cambridgeuniversity).

" ̽��ֱ��Board of Longitude has had a pretty bad career in history, because it has either been forgotten or condemned," Professor Simon Schaffer, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, who will lead the research, said. "Its creation was a turning point in British history, but after it was abolished in 1828 it was largely forgotten and its impact was never properly assessed."

"Part of the reason is that we still like to believe that we are a nation of enthusiastic amateurs like Harrison, making huge breakthroughs against the odds and in spite of a state hostile to scientific progress. In fact, we have a long history of state-sponsored ingenuity which made Britain into a military and technological world player. ̽��ֱ��Board is in many ways that history. By writing it we want to change the narrative."

̽��ֱ��Board of Longitude was set up to administer a prize of £20,000 (almost £3 million in modern money) to anyone who could solve the Longitude Problem. In addition, however, it had the discretion to support any sufficiently "promising" experimental work that might help along the way.

After Harrison claimed the prize, its patronage extended further still. ̽��ֱ��Board became involved with a wide range of scientific and maritime initiatives, including Captain Cook's voyages of exploration, the worldwide survey of geomagnetism, the establishment of the first overseas state observatory and the search for a North-West passage.

̽��ֱ��research will attempt to piece together its entire story, from 1714 to 1828, by focusing on two collections that represent the Board's Legacy.

̽��ֱ��first, an internationally-important collection of instruments and materials at the National Maritime Museum, attracts two million visitors a year, not least because it includes Harrison's own timekeepers. In addition, the team will open up the Board of Longitude papers at Cambridge's ̽��ֱ�� Library; a vast archive of manuscripts, letters, log-books (including those of Captain Cook) and other documents that have never been systematically studied. These papers include invaluable material ranging from climate records across the world to reports of encounters between Europeans and other peoples.

Researchers argue that while Harrison has been hugely important in popularising Longitude, it is important to rectify what they claim is a national myth that elevates his heroic role at the expense of the whole truth.

"One of the things we will be doing is taking apart the timekeepers Harrison made, which can give us an alternative version of the story," Richard Dunn, Curator of the History of Navigation at the National Maritime Museum, said. "If you look inside the first clock, it quickly becomes clear that several people were involved in making it. Clearly this wasn't just about a lone genius working by himself."

̽��ֱ��project also promises to illuminate the lives of a multitude of people who worked with the Board, corresponded with it, or wrote about and sometimes satirised it in newspapers and magazines of the time. ̽��ֱ��majority - artisans vying for the prize - would have been lost to history themselves without the archive's existence.

"Essentially the Board represents the germs of our national science policy," Professor Schaffer added. " ̽��ֱ��materials and correspondence it left behind is a window on to the cosmology of an entire class of people, and also on to the beginnings of Government-sponsored science in Britain."

"State-backed science is still an issue which matters a lot now, whether it's on stem cell research or climate change. We don't always know whether to trust it, and we don't know how to respond when scientists and the state fall out. If we can find out what worked as that relationship was beginning - and why - then we will have lessons to teach from the project we are starting now."

̽��ֱ��forgotten story of the British organisation that enabled the development of a system for measuring Longitude, only to disappear from memory after its demise, is to be told in full for the first time.

̽��ֱ��Board of Longitude has had a pretty bad career in history, because it has either been forgotten or condemned.

Professor Simon Schaffer

Norman B. Leventhal Map Center from Flickr

longitude

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