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Scientific Advice for British India: Imperial Perceptions and Administrative Goals, 1898—1923

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Roy M. MacLeod
Roy M. MacLeod
Affiliation:
History and Social Studies of Science University of Sussex
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Extract

In recent years there has been a continuing effort to place the history of scientific activity in Europe firmly in the political, economic and social contexts in which ideas and institutions have developed. Hitherto, however, comparatively little attention has been paid to the development of scientific institutions in the European colonial empires, or to the role of scientific activity in the commercial exploitation, civil government, or political development of individual countries.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , May 1975 , pp. 343 - 384
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

This study was supported in part by a research grant from the Department of Education and Science. I am indebted to the following for their kind assistance: Dr R. J. Bingle, India Office Library, and the staff of the India Office Records Department; the Librarian of the Royal Society; the Librarian of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; and Miss D. G. Keswani, Assistant Director, National Archives of India, New Delhi.

1 Perhaps the best available systematic discussion of these issues is that of Basalla, G., ‘The Spread of Western Science’, Science, 156 (1967), 612. An extremely interesting extension of this discussion is the subject of a thesis, currently in preparation by Michael Worboys, a postgraduate student in History and Social Studies of Science in the University of Sussex.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

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Markham took a profoundly Indian point of view. As he once wrote, ‘The naturalisation of these precious trees into the hills of India will become one of the most enduring monuments of our rule.’ Quoted in Ibid., p. 441.

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16 Compare the experiences of Major James Rennell, F.R.S.; Major-General Sir Andrew Scott Waugh (1810–1877) who led the Triangulation Survey; General Sir William Baker (1808–1881), who began public works systems, reorganized the Indian railways (with Sir R. M. Stephenson and George Turnbull) and who retired to England in 1861 as chief adviser to the Home Government on Indian engineering; and Capt. James Basevi son of the architect of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, who died in 1864 during experiments for the Royal Society designed to measure the force of gravity along the great meridional arc.Google Scholar

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Crowther, J. G., Statesmen of Science (London, 1965), p. 242. It would be interesting to explore these relations in other contemporary contexts.Google Scholar

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18 The careers of Lt.-Gen. Sir Richard Strachey (1817–1908), Bombay Engineers, and Lt.-Col. Alexander Strange (1818–1876), Madras Light Cavalry, are instructive. Both men were influential in the mid-century campaigns of the Royal Society and the British Association to secure Government recognition of science. After 35 years in India, Strachey (father of Lytton Strachey) returned to England in 1871 and afterwards became chief of the Meteorological Office in London and President of the Royal Geographical Society. Strange participated in the Trigonometrical Survey in India and returned to England in 1861 to become the Inspector of Scientific Instruments for the India Office. He became F.R.S. and F.R.A.S. in 1861 and served on the Council of the Geographical Society, 1861–62. In speaking of England,Google Scholar

Burn, W. L. comments with great justice. ‘What the country would have done without the services of naval and military officers, especially the Corps of Royal Engineers, it is difficult to imagine.’ The Age of Equipoise (London, 1964), p. 64. Burns' comment seems equally relevant to India.Google Scholar

19 An instructive parallel in the organization of scientific research might be drawn between British India and British Ireland during the 19th century. Cf., R. B. McDowell, The Irish Administration, 1801–1814 (London, 1964), Ch. VIII, esp. pp. 257–65.Google Scholar

20 For an examination of this phenomenon in relation to the history of political jobbery and administrative incompetence in the ‘unreformed’ civil service, see Clark, G. S. R. Kitson, ‘Statesmen in Disguise’, Historical Journal, 11 (1959), pp. 19–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 The Indian Geological Survey was created in 1854 and the Trigonometrical Survey took place in the 1860s. In the 1880s Forestry Officers were trained at the Royal Engineering College, Coopers Hill, under Dr W. Schlich, former Inspector General of Forestry, who included in his syllabus a trip to Germany for his students to acquire practical training under German forestry officers.Google Scholar

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22 By the late 1890s the scientific establishment in India was large enough to be aware of their disadvantages in relation to their administrative colleagues: ‘… the system at present adopted by the Indian Government of treating its scientific servants on a different principle from that adopted in other departments is not really conducive to the best interests of the State. The chief disadvantages under which scientific men now labour in India are want of promotion and of graded increases of salary throughout their service. Men of science are after all men, and are no more likely than others to work heartily without any hope of increased pay or advancement especially when they are reminded by the promotion and increased emoluments granted to those in other branches of the same state service of their own waterlogged condition.Google Scholar

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24 Report of the Indian Famine Commission, H.M.S.O., Pt. I [C2591], pp. 7–9; Pt. II [C2735], p. 139.Google Scholar

25 SirCharles, Bruce, The Broad Stone of Empire (London, 1910), p. 114.Google Scholar

26 Kew Papers, Despatch No. 72, 1898. Government of India, Department of Revenue and Agriculture to Lord Hamilton, Secretary of State for India, 22 December 1898.Google Scholar

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28 Royal Society Mss, Cmb. 59, Godley, A., India Office to Secretary, Royal Society, 28 March 1899.Google Scholar

29 SirHenry, Lyons, The Royal Society 1660–1940 (Cambridge U.P., 1944).Google Scholar

30 In 1887, for example, when the Imperial Institute was created, the President of the Royal Society was made one of its governors. There was some tacit assumption that the post would carry some power to influence the Institute's destiny. Kew Papers, I.A.C., Thiselton-Dyer to Secretary, Royal Society, 18 January 1902.Google Scholar

31 Kew Papers, I.A.C., Thiselton-Dyer to Secretary, Royal Society, 18 January 1902.Google Scholar

32 Summary of the Administration of Lord Curzon of Kedleston in the Department of Agriculture and Revenue (Simla, 1905).Google Scholar

33 In March 1904 the cornerstone was laid of a research laboratory and herbarium provided by a benefaction of £20,000 from Mr Henry Phipps, the American millionaire who had toured India in 1902–03.Google Scholar

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35 Quoted in SirThomas, Raleigh, Lord Curzon in India, 1898–1905 (London, 1906), p. 286.Google Scholar

36 Kew Papers, I.A.C., Curzon to Walpole, India Office, 4 09 1902; transmitted by Walpole to the Royal Society, 9 October 1902. Albert (later Sir Albert) Howard who came as the Imperial Economic Botanist was later described as one of ‘those Western scientists who were brought to India to fulfil Lord Curzon's ideal of serving the Indian communities.’ He took it for granted that ‘it was the function of the British Government in India to confer on the peoples of India all the advantages of Western scientific democracy.’Google Scholar

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39 The Devonshire proposals were not in substance acted upon in Britain until 1915, when the Advisory Council on Scientific and Industrial Research was created to serve many of the functions envisaged by Strange.Google Scholar

40 Nature, 67 (16 04 1903), 568.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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48 The campaign for ‘national efficiency’ led by Haldane, Balfour and the Webbs, described in Searle, G. R., The Quest for National Efficiency (London, 1971),Google Scholar

had several important imperial repercussions. In January 1903, by the Imperial Institute (Transfer) Act, the Imperial Insitute, with its Scientific and Technical Department (founded 1896) was transferred to the Board of Trade and placed under the Commercial, Labour and Statistical Departments, assisted by an Advisory Committee representing other departments and the Government of India. This devolution to departmental control represented an early attempt to move away from the classic Privy Council status of research (later described as the ‘Haldane Principle’), seeking the coordination of scientific and economic policies. In 1903, Professor Wyndham Dunstan, formerly head of the Scientific and Technical Departments, was made Director of the Imperial Institute.Google Scholar

49 In 1902 Thiselton-Dyer had also been appointed Botanical Adviser in the Colonial Office, making him analogous with Sir Patrick Manson, the Medical Officer. This new position gave him an authority far exceeding the boundaries of Kew and the Thames—governing, in fact, over 200 botanists in Asia, Africa and Australia and the West Indies, and directing the cultivation of plants over almost one fifth of the earth's surface. Cf. Bruce, op. cit., pp. 114–145.Google Scholar

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51 SirJohn, Eliot (1830–1908), Second Wrangler, St. John's College, Cambridge, 1869; F.R.S., 1895, Professor of Maths in India; appointed Meteorological Reporter in 1886 and Director-General of Indian Observatories in 1899–1903. Eliot was credited with organizing meteorological research on an Imperial basis.Google Scholar

52 SirDavid, Prain (1857–1944), M.A. Aberdeen; MB, 1883; Director of the Herbarium, Royal Botanic Garden Calcutta, 1887; Superintendent of the Botanic Garden, Director of the Botanical Survey and Government Quinologist, 1898–1905. Prain returned to England in 1905 to become an F.R.S. (1905), Director of Kew Gardens, a Knight (1912), and chairman of the Council of the John Innes Institute (1909–44).Google Scholar

53 SirThomas, Holland (1868–1947), educated Royal College of Science and Owens College, Manchester. Appointed 1890 an Assistant Superintendent, Geological Survey of India; curator of Geological Museum and Laboratory and a part time lecturer in geology at Presidency College, Calcutta in 1903; promoted over the heads of several officers to succeed C. L. Griesbach as Director; reorganized the department, secured increased staff and pay and ordered comprehensive scientific and economic surveys of coal, manganese, petroleum. Revived annual Records of the Geological Survey of India and instituted quinquennial reviews of mineral production. Elected F.R.S. in 1904 and awarded K.C.I.E. in 1908; left India for the chair of geology at Manchester in 1909, following disagreements with the Government of India over staff and pay in his department. Under his directorship, the Geological Survey gained 'a position of prestige in India, both with Government and with the public from which it has never fallen back'; 1916–18, chairman of Indian Educational Commission and Indian Munitions Board; K.C.S.I., 1918; 1920–21 Viceroy's Executive Council; 1922–29, Rector, Imperial College, London; 1929–1944, Principal of Edinburgh University President of the British Association, 1929;Google Scholar

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57 India Office Records [I.O.R.], File L/E/7/491/2392/03. Secretary, Royal Society to India Office, 2 March 1905. Somewhat surprisingly only one set of the Board's Reports today exists in the Royal Society Library and none can be found in the Libraries of the other leading learned societies of London.Google Scholar

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61 ‘Perfecting simple practical methods of carrying out the operations are already in vogue in every well-appointed serum station, and to spend more time on trying to improve these methods seems unpractical and a waste of time’. Resolution 5 of the Diseases of Animals Subcommittee, 31 January 1905, transmitted to the India Office, 12 August 1905.Google Scholar

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65 Membership of subcommittees was as follows: Botany: W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, James Sykes Gamble, Sir George King, Sir David Prain. Economic and Industrial Chemistry: H. Brown, Sir Wyndham Dunstan. Forestry: W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, J. S. Gamble, Sir George King, and Professor William Schlich. Geology: Sir Archibald Geikie, Richard Lydekker. Zoology: Alfred William Alcock, A. C. G. Gunther, Richard Lydekker. Minutes of the Meeting of the I.A.C., 26 June 1907, Royal Society Mss, Cmb. 59, Vol. VI.Google Scholar

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76 Nature, 75 (21 02 1907), 403.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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88 Ibid., p. 6. Testimony by M. Travers, 4 June 1909.

89 I.O.R. L/E/7/669. Testimony of Henry, Burkill, F.L.S., 23 June 1909.Google Scholar

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99 This phase of independence differs from that described as ‘Phase 3’ in Basalla, , Science, 156 (1967), 612.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

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123 The last recorded meeting of the I.A.C. took place in London in May 1910.Google Scholar

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131 In 1929 the Royal Commission on Agriculture reported that ‘the transfer of agriculture to popular control had clogged the wheels of such machinery as previously existed for [guiding, promoting and coordinating agricultural and veterinary research] and… research on which all progress in developing agriculture must needs be based had suffered in consequence.’ Cf. N.A.I., ‘Establishment of a Central Council of Agricultural Research in India on the Recommendation of the Royal Commission on Agriculture’, Department of Education, Health and Lands, file 1–3, (March 1929), Reports and Minutes by Habibullah, M., 12 July 1928.Google Scholar

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138 Ibid., Willingdon to Hoare, 14 May 1934.

139 Ibid.

140 Cf., Research Survey and Planning Organization, Science Policy in India (Occasional Paper Series No. 1, 1967).Google Scholar

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141 For a description of this phenomenon in terms of academic political science, see William, Hamilton (ed.), The Transfer of Institutions (Duke University, 1964).Google Scholar

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144 The expanding political role of the Royal Society in this period has received relatively little attention. Sir Henry Lyons' official history (The Royal Society) does not make much of the fact, although it is implicit in his discussion (especially Chs VIII–IX). Recent work on the Society's role in international relations during and after the First War is becoming more explicit. Brigitte, Cf. Schroeder-Gudehus, ‘Challenge to Transitional Loyalties: International Scientific Organisations after the First World War’, Science Studies, 3 (04, 1973), 93–118.Google Scholar

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