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041 _afre
042 _adc
100 1 0 _aSivasundaram, Sujit
_eauthor
245 0 0 _aMaking the Globe: A Cultural History of Science in the Bay of Bengal
260 _c2022.
500 _a87
520 _aStarting from Madras, travelling across the Bay of Bengal, to the coast of Sumatra and then to Singapore, this paper provides a cultural history of nineteenth-century knowledge-making as an enterprise in making and breaking three concepts: globe, empire and self. It does so by working outwards from early-nineteenth century pendulum-length experiments to determine the curvature of the Earth. It argues that moving across concepts and scales was vital to a regime of big data. Data-crunching involved different sciences and spilt across territories and sea and land. As the project of making the globe proceeded, for instance from Madras Observatory, imperial settlements could be located precisely as coordinates, for instance British Singapore, and indigenous intellectuals, like Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir (1797-1854), had to find their place in a world of imperial free trade. Global model-making brought about a detachment from individuals and locations as people and places were fixed on a globe and it led to the erasure of the indigenous informant, a key figure in recent histories of science. In linking the making of the globe to the fate of intermediaries, the argument urges the need to place indigenous agency in the sciences within wider accounts of labour, capital and imperial expansion. This paper also cross-contextualises colonial and indigenous sources without reifying either.
786 0 _nRevue d’histoire du XIXe siècle | o 64 | 1 | 2022-07-18 | p. 97-121 | 1265-1354
856 4 1 _uhttps://shs.cairn.info/journal-revue-d-histoire-du-dix-neuvieme-siecle-2022-1-page-97?lang=en&redirect-ssocas=7080
999 _c685439
_d685439