‘Recent studies of Babylonian sources have shown that we must revise former estimates of the extent to which the Greeks were indebted for the details of their astronomy to the Babylonians; the debt proves to have been much greater than had been imagined, and further researches may prove it to have been greater still.’ So wrote Sir Thomas Heath in 1932; in the previous year, Professor Filon had written, ‘It is gradually beginning to be realized that many of the achievements of Greek culture in the fields of astronomy and mathematics did not spring, fully armed, from the Hellenic brain, but had their more remote origins in the civilizations of the ancient East.’

There is available now sufficient evidence to show that a great deal of the astronomical knowledge which has come down to us from the Hellenistic period (c. 500 b.c. to a.d. 150) was not initially discovered during that period; and such new empiric discoveries as were made in that time were not all due to Greeks, for important contributions were still being made by Babylonians during the Seleucid Era.

To a large extent it seems that the Greeks kept very closely, even in astronomy, to the mode of research advocated by Plato, who said in The Republic, ‘Which things (i.e. “the variegated bodies in the heavens”) truly are to be comprehended by reason and intellect, but not by sight’. The Greeks founded a ‘school’ of theoretical astronomy and, with their highly developed mathematics, were able to go far with it; but their source-material was in very many cases not Greek.

The author of Epinomis states, ‘We may assume that whatever the Greeks take from the barbarians, they bring it to a finer perfection’. Adrastus (second century a.d.) wrote that the methods used by the Chaldeans and Egyptians in astronomy were imperfect because these people lacked physiologia; no doubt this was true, but it was people of these races who had done, and continued to do, most of the equivalent of modern observatory routine work.

This article explores the activities of the Society of Apothecaries and its members following the foundation of a laboratory for manufacturing chemical medicines in 1672. In response to political pressures, the guild created an institutional framework for production which in time served its members both functionally and financially and established a physical site within which the endorsement of practical knowledge could take place. Demand from state and institutional customers for drugs produced under corporate oversight affirmed and supported the society's trading role, with chemical and pharmaceutical knowledge utilized to fulfil collective and individual goals. The society benefited from the mercantile interests, political connections and practical expertise of its members, with contributions to its trading activities part of a much wider participation in London's medical, scientific and commercial milieu. Yet, as apothecaries became increasingly engaged in the practice of medicine rather than the preparation and sale of drugs, the society struggled to reconcile the changing priorities of those it represented, and tensions emerged between its corporate and commercial activities.

By the turn of the twentieth century a distinct ‘social domain’ – along with its constituent parts, problems and internal dynamics – was turned into a political entity, and a concern for state bureaucracies existed across the industrializing world. Specific motivations for this trend may have varied from location to location, but included arguments for higher industrial productivity and less political discontent, often intertwined with a humanitarian impulse in calls for better housing, expanded public health or improved working conditions. As has been well documented, the politicization of the social domain in early twentieth-century Britain owes much to the consolidation of British sociology as a distinct discipline. Yet while the link between the rise of social politics and sociology has been established with regard to Britain, little has been said about the occurrence of this coupling elsewhere in the twentieth-century British Empire. This article aims to rectify that omission by showing the interplay between newly raised social concerns of the colonial administration in the Bombay Presidency, Western British India, and the establishing of sociological research within the borders of the Presidency around the time of the First World War. The article will explore how the colonial administration in Bombay planned to meet new demands for sociological knowledge in colonial state policy, how sociology was subsequently introduced into the Presidency as a research subject, and how new sociological methods were applied in actual colonial government.