Science and Empire: Technology, Authority, and Domination

Core Idea

European science provided both justification and tools for imperial domination. Racial science — phrenology, comparative anatomy, Social Darwinism — was used to justify colonialism and slavery by asserting the natural inferiority of non-European peoples. Yet science also provided practical tools: astronomical measurement enabled accurate maps and ocean navigation essential to colonial trade; natural history collecting documented colonial territories; agricultural science improved productivity in colonial plantations. The telescope, microscope, and thermometer were technologies of power — they allowed new forms of observation and measurement. Western science's emphasis on quantification and mathematical formalism — which elevated it in the eyes of European thinkers — also made it seem authoritative and irresistible. Understanding the relationship between science and empire is crucial for multiple reasons: it explains how science was used to justify injustice; it reveals that science is not culturally neutral but shaped by power; and it opens the possibility of imagining different science, organized differently and in service of different goals. This is not to say science is merely a tool of domination, but rather that science, like any human practice, is entangled with power.

Explainer

European science was deeply entangled with empire from the 16th century onward -- as a tool that enabled expansion, a framework that justified domination, and an institution that extracted knowledge from colonized peoples while suppressing indigenous knowledge systems. This entanglement shaped both the development of modern science and the human costs of colonialism.

European maritime expansion required practical science. Accurate astronomical measurement enabled longitude calculation at sea (the Royal Observatory at Greenwich was founded in 1675 specifically for this purpose). New cartographic methods produced maps useful for navigation, military operations, and administrative control. Botanical expertise guided the extraction of economically valuable species: the British moved cinchona (the source of quinine, essential against malaria) from South America to India; rubber from Brazil to Southeast Asia. Kew Gardens served as a biological transfer station, systematically exploiting colonial territories' ecological knowledge for metropolitan benefit.

Natural history expeditions were engines of knowledge extraction. European naturalists traveled to colonial territories, guided by Indigenous knowledge of local environments, and returned with thousands of specimens that filled European museums and formed the basis of European biological classification. The Linnean system that classified all life on Earth was built partly from specimens gathered this way, with Indigenous knowledge rarely credited. Contemporary debates about repatriation of human remains, cultural objects, and genetic materials from colonial-era collections reflect this inheritance.

Most consequentially, science provided the ideological justification for colonialism. "Scientific racism" -- using craniology, comparative anatomy, and evolutionary classification to assert biological racial hierarchies -- flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach classified five human "varieties"; Samuel Morton measured skull volumes to rank racial intelligence; Paul Broca studied brain weights. These studies were methodologically corrupt (data selectively reported, conclusions predetermined) but carried authority because they were "scientific." They argued that African and Asian peoples were biologically less capable and thus suited to labor and colonial rule, that Indigenous peoples could not govern themselves and needed European "civilization." The eugenics movement drew directly on colonial racial science: Francis Galton's proposals for "improving stock" assumed the racial hierarchies that colonial anthropology had constructed.

Science was not merely an instrument of empire -- it was also shaped by imperial power structures. Questions that mattered to colonial administration received funding and attention; questions that might destabilize empire did not. Non-European knowledge systems were cataloged as "folk knowledge" rather than legitimate science. The very standards of rigor and objectivity that science claimed were partly constructed to exclude non-European practices.

Postcolonial science studies, developed since the 1980s by scholars like Sandra Harding and Warwick Anderson, have examined how power relations shaped scientific content -- not just which questions were asked but which answers were accepted as valid. This does not imply that all scientific claims are equally power-distorted; it implies that understanding science's history requires understanding the power contexts in which knowledge was produced.