It is an honour and a pleasure to be able to converse with four such generous and thoughtful readers. I am relieved that Guillaume Calafat agrees with me, rather than with Julien Duvivier, that prisoners of war are, as the saying goes, good to think with! I also appreciate their suggestions for future research avenues, which I think open up a number of exciting possibilities. In order to give those readers who have not read the book a sense of what they will get out of it, my response will focus on issues on chronology, historiography, and methodology.

The term ‘cultural history of science’, as others have observed, is clumsy and imperfect. Cultural history is itself riddled with ambiguities which the addition of ‘science’ is unlikely to clarify. However, the term loosely describes a genre of historical writing which has become a staple of cross-disciplinary research: books which examine science's wider cultural ‘impacts’ and ‘contexts’. The heterogeneity of this field is so great, however, that an examination of methodology is called for.

For historians of empire, scandals provide a useful starting point for investigating how the operations of imperial power were contested and reworked in moments of crisis. Yet, existing scholarship on imperial scandal consists mostly of case-studies that do not always reflect on the larger trend of which they are a part. This review draws on six accounts of imperial scandals to produce a general picture of the characteristics and functions of scandals in the historiography of the nineteenth-century British empire. What this comparison suggests is that imperial scandals possessed distinctive stakes and seem, as a result, to have represented periodic ruptures in longer-term patterns of local silence and complicity. Scandals, if used cautiously, can therefore provide evidence to support ongoing discussions about the logic of colonial concealment. At the same time, scandals also remind us that publicity is not a simple cure-all. By including a wider range of actors and non-governmental sources, future studies of scandal might elucidate the political limits of transparency, as well as exploring how imperial subjects negotiated gendered and racialized access to public and political platforms.