Contents - Previous - Next
This is the old United Nations University website. Visit the new site at http://unu.edu
Strategies and styles of the major powers
Academic, administrative, and commercial interests were involved in different combinations in colonial science as practiced within British, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Belgian, and American frameworks. More is known about the role of science in British colonialism than in the other colonial powers. MacLeod has made a sweeping overview of the evolution of scientific institutions and research in their relationships to imperial rule and the distribution of power between Great Britain and other parts of the British Empire. His theoretical construct highlights the function of empire (a moving metropolis), selecting, cultivating intellectual and economic frontiers. "In retrospect," he says, "it was the peculiar genius of the British Empire to assimilate ideas from the periphery, to stimulate loyalty within the imperial community without sacrificing either its leadership or its following" [44, p.245]. Pyenson [62-64] embarked on an ambitious comparative project between France, Germany, and the Netherlands concerning strategies of scientific expansion in the exact sciences associated with the history of cultural imperialism. In France there is a tradition of colonial history, in which attention was occasionally drawn to the role of science in colonization, but its impact on sociology or the history of science has been minimal. Since 1984, the REHSEIS (Recherches épistémologiques et historiques sur les sciences exactes et les institutions scientifiques) team has been working on the subject of science and empires, and has organized an international colloquium on the topic that resulted in the most recent addition to the literature .
On reaching the culminating stage of imperialism in the early twentieth century, the major powers had evolved their international strategies in line with changing policies of colonial development. Conveying scientific practice from metropolis to periphery grew more intense and was marked by rivalry. It had two main aims: cultural influence and competition with other nations, although formally it was possible to identify the need to support science as an inherently international activity . In the period preceding the Second World War, similar agencies and policy instruments were established in the major countries.
Probably one of the better known examples of colonial science is the one resulting from the actions of the British in India. Britain organized scientific activity in India from the time the Crown took over the country from the East India Company (1857), in an effort aimed primarily at meeting the strategic needs of the empire - army, trade, and the welfare of European inhabitants. The social structure of "colonial science" seriously discriminated against natives. For a long time Indians were denied access to scientific departments. At the end of the nineteenth century a Board of Scientific Advice was constituted in India to coordinate the activities of various scientific services, but its purview was limited to the governmental sphere and thus kept separate from Indian society. The requirements of colonial government made science dependent on the British metropolis and limited the scope of the board in India . The characteristic British policy was not to encourage technological development but to increase the productive resources of the country through the agency of imported technology. Whatever information Indians gathered regarding the technology was therefore a result of their quest for it [80, p.222].
In the nineteenth century, France revamped its overseas empire. The "functionary" style scientist, in terms of nineteenth-century science, evokes the behaviour of the French scientist, for a French scientist was a federal civil servant, usually employed as a teacher in a secondary school or institution of higher learning, and his assignments could turn out to be anywhere in greater France or the colonial outposts. He operated within a state bureaucracy. Pyenson argues that this kind of scientist intended to interweave his research institution into the social fabric of his setting. The institution, such as it might be defined by either local or metropolitan directives, was paramount, and the criteria that determined progress up the ladder paid little attention to scientific research. To secure new territories in such places as China, Madagascar, and the Near East, France relied on the enormous resources and organizational talents of French Catholic missionaries. It can be argued, as indeed Pyenson does [62, p. 391], that the most successful overseas French research institutions in exact sciences were those conceived and staffed by Jesuit functionaries.
The beginning of the twentieth century saw a new awareness by the French state of the importance of science and culture for international relations . The "Groupement des Universités et Grandes Ecoles de France pour les Relations avec l'Amérique Latine," created in 1907 at the initiative of French scientists, for example, was aimed at developing university cooperation and at competing with Germany in a strategy of "intellectual expansion" [54, pp. 428-442]. It led to the establishment of French institutes in several Latin American capital cities, and of the journal Revue d'Amérique Latine, through which the notion of "latinité," as opposed to North American panamericanism, was pushed forward. Probably the most important Latin American institution in whose creation and early years the French were involved was the University of São Paulo, founded in 1934. A considerable number of first-rate European scientists and intellectuals gave shape to its central unit, the Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras [55, pp. 339-362].
The Dutch colonial expansion began during the first half of the seventeenth century. Only with the last quarter of the eighteenth century, however, did scientific institutions come to Batavia, the commercial centre of the principal overseas colony. Particularly from the middle of the nineteenth century the colonial ministry pushed ahead to transform Java into a vast tea and sugar plantation. Those who supervised the extraction of natural resources for the needs of European markets subsequently set up institutions shadowing metropolitan models. The dominant interests in nineteenth-century Indonesia related to geographical botany and ethnology. New institutions of higher learning emerged over the next decades.
The development of the Batavia observatory illustrates that the practical demands placed on colonial scientists related directly to commerce and agriculture. Rainfall had to be measured, weather predicted, and the time of day established. Planters and merchant princes went beyond supporting research into practical problems. They believed not so much that pure science would solve the colony's practical problems, but rather that pure science could bring lustre to them and their bourgeois confederates in the metropolis [63, p. 183].
In their struggle for the partition of the world, the European powers tried to penetrate China from an early date. Specialists usually recognize two main waves of introduction of Western science there: first through the Jesuit missions in East Asia from the sixteenth century on spurred by the Portuguese and later French Asian expansion; then in the nineteenth century, when Britain was the leading colonial power in the opening of China to international trade, through the Protestant missionaries, whose tools of conversion were mainly institutions of higher education and Western medicine . It is interesting to note that by the late seventeenth century, scientific activity in China evinced many characteristics of a continuous and systematic social activity, although it remained weak with respect to the social perception of its value. Unlike Europe, science in China did not achieve the momentum of a radical social and intellectual movement within the larger social system. One answer to why a sustained scientific movement began in China only when the West again intruded in the nineteenth century is provided by Porter [59, pp. 529544], who refers to the broader political and ideological climate prevailing in China after the midseventeenth century.
Although American imperialism, in its early phases, concentrated on ensuring US control of the North American continent, it was never exclusively continental in outlook. From the beginning it looked out across the Pacific to Asia. This expansive imperialism that recognized no geographical limits brought the US into contact, and often into conflict, with the other major powers of the nineteenth century. Prominent American private foundations were instrumental in creating and maintaining an economic and political order of international scope, increasingly interconnected, with the US in its centre. Among them, the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford foundations invested in the growth of institutions of higher education, think-tanks, and research centres all over the world. They were the main architects of international networks of research and agencies involved in the production and diffusion of knowledge, networks connecting talented individuals and their institutional bases among themselves as well as with their benefactors. They stretched from colonial China (the Peking Union Medical College) and Argentina's Institute of Physiology led by Nobel prizewinner Bernardo A. Houssay to W. Cannon's lab at Harvard University, which received scores of Latin American physiologists.
Patterns of metropolitan involvement in scientific cooperation in the early twentieth century did not necessarily reflect historical usually colonial relationships or were circumscribed by the language the recipient country adopted for "higher culture." The example of German cultural imperialism reflects the convergence of a rich flowering of science and governmental policies to acquire territories and influence abroad. The dominant style for intrusion in foreign lands in this case seems to have been the actual production of scientific knowledge, following the tradition that had characterized its wandering scholars, far in excess of the numbers that could be absorbed at home and thus seeking their fortune abroad, through the tangible proof of their scientific talent: scientific publishing . Thus in a society like Argentina, with extensive cultural and economic influences from Spain, France, Italy, and England, strikingly German interests became prominent in several sectors, such as education, the army, and the electrical utilities firms around Buenos Aires. Between 1904 and 1913, the Prussian Kultusministerium (that is, the Prussian Ministry of Spiritual Affairs, Instruction, and Public Health) planned and staffed the Instituto Nacional del Profesorado Secundario in Buenos Aires, which had a lasting impact on the training of secondary school teachers . With the active support of the imperial foreign office, German learning was implanted in the new University of La Plata in open competition with North American interests, and the German tradition in exact sciences came to dominate twentieth-century Argentine research until mid-century.
Other small European countries, like Spain or Italy, which at the beginning of the century were experiencing a renaissance in science and the arts, also endeavoured to reinforce their linkages with the colonies or the post-colonial nation-states. Thus the Institución Cultural Española, created in 1914, had as its goal to diffuse Spanish learning in Hispanic America, through the establishment of chairs to be filled by Spanish intellectuals and the development of other activities directly related to the intellectual exchange between Spain and the region [70, pp. 217-260].
Cultural responses to Western learning
The implantation of Western learning as an integral part of imperial strategies had its counterpart in a multiplicity of cultural responses by which such learning was assimilated or rejected. From the nineteenth century onwards, strong feelings of cultural nationalism sometimes expressed in social movements like the 1899-1900 I-ho t'uan Movement in China (known in the West as the Boxer Rebellion), were apparent throughout the colonial and post-colonial world? including in some cases the revaluation of traditional modes of understanding. In this respect, distinguishing colonial from national periods of a scientific tradition has once again proved to be of doubtful validity. Not only is there usually a considerable overlap between the supposedly colonial institution and the supposedly national institution? but also colonial science is seldom in any significant sense transformed into national science following political independence . The metropolitan-colonial dialectic is a complex process, which by no means moves through logical stages to a preordained denouement. In some instances the formation of a sense of identity may well precede independence, but in others, as in Canada, the search for identity may follow rather than precede effective emancipation [26, pp. 4-5].
The very concept of "identity" in a colonial society is fraught with ambiguity [27, 18]. Whose identity is at issue and what determines it? No culture, no society has ever possessed a single and comprehensive identity. In this essay we are basically concerned with the development of a selfimage among the colonial elites. But it is possible to recognize the development of a sense of identity and even other scientific traditions among the less privileged groups in a colonial society. In Mexico, for instance, there existed at least two distinct cultures: that of the criollos and their descendants, and that of the Indians and mestizos, whose aspirations first emerged in the Hidalgo-Morelos revolt of 1810 and then again, with more lasting results, in the revolution 100 years later [51, pp. 51-93]. Western science? often adopted by the cultivated elites in search of "modernity," helped to reinforce an identification with European culture, which in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often assumed the guise of "cosmopolitanism," variously regarded positively or negatively in the political struggle for self-assertion of the new nations . Probably the feeling of distinctiveness, a lack of identification with Europe, was present very early, most among the Blacks and the children of miscegenation, those for whom the colony was the only "mother country."
Colonial societies, like all societies, were in a constant process of defining and redefining themselves. But, owing their existence to a distant mother country, they found themselves trapped in the dilemma of discovering themselves to be at once the same and yet not the same as their country of origin. The dilemma was made all the more acute in that metropolitan contempt for provincial cousins seems to have known no bounds. The continuous bombardment of calumny to which settler communities were subjected gave them an early and powerful incentive to develop a more favourable image of themselves, if only in self-defence. Where the settlers lived in the midst of an allegedly "barbaric" native population, as in Ireland or Mexico, this meant in the first instance differentiating themselves from these alien peoples, to whose characteristics they were assumed by misguided Europeans to have fallen victim. But the actual relationships between the various social groups making up the new societies told a complicated history of the triangular relationship of mother country, colonists, and subject populations. European ethnocentrism was present not only in the knowledge of the man in the street, but also in the "scientific" knowledge that Europe presumed to have of non-Western cultures. And as such it is to be found in the action of government officials, "experts," and businessmen in their encounters with cultural diversity .
The weaknesses of colonial science can be illustrated by the example of the egg-laying mammals taken from the history of Australian zoology during the nineteenth century . Data from the periphery, transferred to Europe by colonial collectors and observers, was interpreted within a theoretical framework provided by European professionals. It took more than 85 years after the first platypus specimen arrived in Europe for European scientists finally to accept that the monotremes laid eggs. The delay reveals the weaknesses of the system of collecting information in colonial science and the resistance of the European scientific community to evidence that violated their theoretical preconceptions. European biologists made a serious mistake and for a considerable time persisted in it. Australian scientists were more easily convinced by European authority than by the empirical evidence available in Australia. Yielding to the scientific judgement of renowned British biologist Sir Richard Owen, most Australian scientists agreed that monotremes gave birth to live young. Meanwhile, aborigines and other Australians not educated within the European scientific tradition had the necessary knowledge but they were not heard by the scientific community because of the blatant racism of colonial science.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Indian zeal for the learning of European sciences was explicitly demonstrated through actions such as the opening of the Anglo-Indian College in Calcutta by local inhabitants for the promotion of the teaching of European science in India, "in a manner, forcing upon the British" [80, p. 217]. Many of the country's leading scientific and technical institutions were established from the late nineteenth century onwards, at the height of colonialism, by Indian philanthropy. In 1876, as a reaction to British colonial science by the Indian political and scientific intelligentsia, the Indian Association of Cultivation of Science (IACS) was inaugurated, thus giving birth to "national" colonial science. Among its aims, it was explicitly stated that Indians "should endeavour to carry on the work with [their] own efforts, unaided by government. [It ought to be] entirely under [their] management and control. [They wanted] it to be solely native and purely national" (M.L. Sircar, quoted in [41, p. 6]).
By the 1920s, as part of an emerging nationalism, the efforts of eminent individual Indian scientists such as J.C. Bose, C.V. Raman, and C.P. Ray led to the creation of basic research institutions in physics, chemistry, mathematics, and plant physiology, which were the genesis of Indian science. A common platform for the small teams and scientific societies spread all over India was provided by the launching of the Indian Science Congress Association (ISCA), in 1914. Mathematical and engineering societies were established in the 1920s. During the next quarter-century, about 10 professional societies were established, along with scientific periodicals and professional journals. Current Science from Bangalore and Science and Culture from Calcutta, and two scientific weeklies patterned on Nature were launched in the mid-1930s. By the 1940s there were at least six universities established by Indians and more than one hundred colleges where science and technical teaching was introduced. The demand to Indianize the colonial scientific organizations was an important plank of the political agenda to mobilize mass support. Thus, when India achieved its independence in 1947, Nehru could launch an ambitious programme in science and technology.
If in the contacts that China had kept with the West since the sixteenth century, Chinese interest in Western science was linked to a renewal of "concrete studies" within the Chinese tradition, by the end of the nineteenth century, the learning of Western science and technology had become a necessity because they were regarded as a key to military power by a country in havoc after facing the successive attacks of Britain, the United States, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, and Italy [38, p. 86].
The Japanese adoption of Western science and technology with the Meiji Restoration offers a case-study of historical discontinuity . It would appear to be a strong argument in favour of the peripheral nature of science in Japanese society prior to industrialization, at the same time that there was a social ability to respond to new influences coming from outside. The presence of forces exogenous to the nation was significant, and the receptiveness of Meiji society and the economy to those external forces helps to explain the radical nature of the social transformation. Among the external forces that stand out are foreign teachers of new technologies. The most prestigious scientific centres were serviced by foreigners. There were also foreigners employed as technicians and applied scientists or general advisers. One Japanese publication cites 1,392 as the number of foreigners employed by Japanese industry and government between 1860 and 1912, at least 900 of whom were invited. Many young Japanese officials and businessmen were sent to Europe during the early Meiji years. Scientific and technical works in Western languages were published in Japan, and foreigners dominated the major science-cum-technical associations formed for the diffusion of knowledge, such as the Tokyo Academy or the Electrical Society . Thus the resulting Japanese science involved a discontinuity with regard to its own past and to past European experiences of industrialization. The scientific community in Japan, in contrast to Europe at the time, had a "planned character," planned for the set purpose of catching up with the Western standard of science as quickly as possible .
However, the institutionalization of science and technology by government initiative, which was very efficient for transplanting and introducing foreign science and technology, was not good for the purpose of fostering original creative activity. The Meiji government paid little attention to scientific research. From 1886 a reorganization of institutions took place, accompanying the maturation of the industrialization process. Up to the 1880s, the scientific institutions created by government were mostly of the geophysical kind for survey work, typical of a non-industrial modern state. Starting in the 1890s, however, many national research institutes were established for fostering industrial development. The war mobilization of research in Europe and the USA during the First World War led government and scientists in Japan to think about financing scientific research. The creation of the Riken(Institute for Physical and Chemical Research) in 1917 was a landmark of this change, since the major source of funds was the industrial sector (85 per cent) rather than the government. During and after the First World War, several private firms, notably in the chemical industry, established their own industrial laboratories. Another unique arrangement was the creation of university-affiliated research institutes and of government research funds .
The pinnacle of the colonial hierarchy was reserved for Europeans, and even in the nations that achieved independence in the nineteenth century, the arrogance and rigidity of European teachers often created conflicts with the nationals who wanted to make a career in science [74, p. 427]. This the Argentine evolutionary palaeontologist Florentino Ameghino learnt bitterly in his confrontation with German creationist zoologist Carl Burmeister in Buenos Aires during the last decades of the nineteenth century [46, 9, 71]. Burmeister never recognized Ameghino's value as a scientist and tried to block his career. Even at Burmeister's death, Ameghino was prevented from being appointed to the directorship of the Buenos Aires Museum because the German professor had left it in the charge of another European, Carl Berg. However, Argentine palaeontology as led by Ameghino had managed to constitute a critical mass, creating an original disciplinary approach in evolutionary studies. Among the signs of maturity was the presence of an interconnected disciplinary group, the control by Darwinians of two first-rate local museums, the support of the Ministry of Education, and broad contacts with the European research front. The earliest works by Ameghino were published in France and the United States, and he kept intense contact (even an active collaboration with Henri Gervais) with the great figures of French transformism. Ameghino attracted to his cause nationalist forces that helped to rally support and at the same time to reduce the efficacy of traditionalist opposition .
The disciplines and institutions of colonial science
By the end of the eighteenth century, agricultural and mineral sciences were employed more systematically to exploit the resources of the colonies. New soil conditions, surveying, pests, weather conditions, transportation, and communication required scientific inputs. Economic and geobotany acquired enormous importance. Every new plant was scrutinized for its use as food, fibre, timber, dye, or medicine. Among their central tasks, professional botanists sought the best techniques for transplanting commercially viable species from one part of the world to another. Their technical work was closely linked to the establishment of plantation economies on conquered land, as reflected in the history of sugar, cocoa, coffee, tea, rubber, quinine, and sisal. These activities were best carried out on institutional locations in situ. There was a proliferation of institutions from the last quarter of the eighteenth century onwards in many different latitudes. Botanic gardens consciously served the state as well as science, and shared the mercantilist and nationalist spirit of the times. Initially intended for the introduction and acclimatization of plants, like the Real Hôrto of Rio de Janeiro, many grew into institutes for serious experimentation and study. Kew Gardens, the Calcutta Garden, Peradeniya Garden on Ceylon, and Buitenzorg Garden on Java became important research centres . Major agronomical research institutions also emerged in the colonies and other tropical nations in the second half of the nineteenth century, as in Campinas in Brazil, Buitenzorg on Dutch Java, and at Amani in German East Africa.
Other institutions that witnessed significant growth throughout the world during the nineteenth century were the museums of natural history. Successful metropolitan museums served as inspiration and example, not only for materials but also for architectural designs, organizational models, and qualified personnel. In Africa, museums of natural history were concentrated in the extreme southern portion of the continent. South African and Rhodesian museums survived only in centres with large White populations, such as Cape Town, Durban, Pietermaritzburg, and Grahamstown. A common feature was the exclusion of Blacks every day but Thursday, when admittance depended on wearing boots or shoes. In India, museums are said to have counted for little, were meagrely supported, and few and far between. As in Africa, widespread illiteracy, extreme poverty, and patterns of rural settlement made museums irrelevant to the vast majority of the populace . Elsewhere, however, the museum movement was more successful. A handful of active, enthusiastic men directed museums located in the principal urban centres of Canada, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand. South American museums tried to function both as research institutions and as instruments of popular enlightenment. Supported by national and provincial governments, important museums could be found in every capital city of the new republics. Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, and Montevideo built autonomous museums of natural history. While not reaching funding equivalents to that of the top museums in the world, their budgets rank with those of the better European institutions.
In Mexico, as mining was the principal source of income for the Spanish Crown, this activity received special attention in the context of social and economic renewal of the late eighteenth century. An impressive Royal School of Mining was founded in 1792 as part of a larger project, sponsored by Charles III of Spain, with the purpose of preparing individuals to direct the work of the mines and the exploitation of metals in those metal-poor minerals normally thrown away [l, pp. 137-146]. In Brazil, the School of Mines, built in the colonial town of Ouro Preto, close to the country's richest mineral deposits, was created only in 1875 [14, 85]. Alongside mining and engineering schools, we find astronomical observatories and meteorological stations. The scientific instruments available in some of those institutions suggest an interest in the basic sciences that occasionally went beyond practical concerns.
The intense competition between European colonial powers in seeking cures for the major tropical diseases that hindered the further colonization and exploitation of the tropics led to the emergence of tropical medicine as a distinct scientific specialty around the turn of the century, first in Britain, then in France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and, somewhat later, in the USA. European doctors were posted to the four corners of the world to service the imperial outposts that secured markets, trade, and raw materials for the imperial economies. A School of Tropical Medicine was needed to increase the quantity and quality of Colonial Medical Officers as an integral part of late-nineteenth-century British imperialism, the strengthening of political control, and attempts at more systematic exploitation [197, p. 93]. However, tropical medicine became a legitimate metropolitan scientific specialty and not merely a satellite activity instrumental to general public health in the colonies. Also in the French case, although relatively little attention has been paid yet to the export of pasteurianism to the tropics and around the world (an exception being Arnold ), it has been argued that the scientific imperialism of the Pastorians cross-reacted with colonial imperialism without being absorbed into it [47, pp. 307-320].
In the educational division of labour between metropolis and colonies, little importance was usually placed on developing local training and research capacities beyond those in applied fields, but differences were remarkable. In cases like that of the backward Portuguese Empire, timid, unstable, and bureaucratized attempts were made simply to train cadres for the state administration and the discovery of new wealth in the huge possessions of Brazil. But there was an absence of a social sector with greater interest in the development of education and science locally . One may ask to what extent, for example, did the absence of universities in Brazil or the West Indies, and their continuing dependence on the home country for higher education, reduce those societies' chances for establishing a firm sense of their own identities in comparison with Mexico or New England, which had their own universities [26, p. 12]. In Africa, too, the establishment of governmental scientific institutions usually preceded the founding of universities in many countries by several decades .
By contrast, universities arrived in Spanish America with the Spanish conquerors as a conscious administrative expression of the will of the Crown and the Church. Thus they remained linked from their very inception to the powers of the audience and the viceroy or of the Church and the monastic orders. Until independence, the 33 existing universities led a precarious existence, mainly devoted to the training of priests, lawyers, and administrators. Current systems of higher education have little to do with colonial institutions. Instead, there is a more direct genealogical linkage with the public universities created during the nineteenth century, when the classic Latin American "lawyers' university" emerged, exemplified by the University of Chile, created by Andrés Bello . With the advent of the new republics, being a lawyer became the main socialization and access channel for the national political elites, ensuring at the same time the necessary training for positions within the state apparatus, to which normally one arrived through family or political patronage. The University of Buenos Aires was founded in 1821, the Republican statutes of the Central University of Venezuela were approved in 1826; the University of Chile was established in 1842, that of Uruguay in 1860, Asunción in 1889. In Mexico, after independence the old colonial university was suppressed by government on the grounds of its being "useless, irreformable and pernicious," and it was reopened several times (1833, 1857, 1861, and 1865), reaching consolidation only after 1920 [13, pp. 13-106]. However, higher education continued to be relatively simple until 1950. By then, in half the 20 countries total enrolment did not reach 5,000 students, and in seven of them was less than 2,000. Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico accounted for 64 per cent of the regional enrolment. The total number of students in Latin American institutions of higher education in 1950 was less than the number of students currently enrolled in just one of the region's universities, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM).
Throughout the nineteenth century, Americans expanded all levels of their educational system. Typically, four-year residential colleges provided education to a growing portion of the population. A few of the colleges were associated with professional schools of law and medicine. Conventional wisdom equated the first two college years with the work in the gymnasium, the grammar school, and the lycée, and the last two years, hopefully, with the European university level. Elevating the entire college course to university level often appeared to be beyond attainment. The assumption and reality was that hardly anybody would attend a real university. For that reason, the colleges had to provide what society required in the way of both cultivation and preparation for selected occupations. The motivation of some of the US professoriate for higher courses and for research opportunities is usually stressed in the historical literature . Apparently around 1900 the United States had surpassed Germany, at least in numbers; quality was another question [66, p. 17].
In Australia, the government supported most scientific and technological research. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the establishment of a number of higher learning institutions that provided technical or practical information. The first two Australian state universities were established in the early 1850s, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne. Four other universities were created before 1914. The incumbents of chairs and directorships often came from England. They did little research or practical work. With the waning of European interest in this natural wonderland, there was little in the local scene to sustain intellectual endeavour. Indeed, almost everything was against the development of science: isolation from Europe, the small size of the population, colonial economies based on the exploitation of readily available natural resources, as well as the export of a narrow range of staple commodities, and an emerging egalitarian and anti-intellectual tradition more intense than in North America. As late as 1937, the various Australian governments and even the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), created in 1926, hesitated to finance pure research into anything beyond local knowledge, for it was believed that it would "be made available by close liaison between Australian scientists and the great overseas laboratories," meaning those of Britain [81, p. 188].
Contents - Previous - Next