This chapter describes the wider political and economic changes that enabled foreigners, and particularly the British, to increasingly access and engage with the existing world of collecting, education and the sciences on the subcontinent. The result would be a slowing of the growth of resources in Indian centers such as Seringapatam and an acceleration of the growth of individual European-owned collections. The chapter begins by exploring changes in the patterns of accumulation that accompanied the conquest of Bengal. Here, I focus on the early careers of several Company servants who would eventually bring significant collections to Britain: Robert Orme, Alexander Dalrymple and Charles Wilkins. Each of these individuals would play an important role in the establishment of Company science back in Britain. And each, in their modes and methods of acquiring collections of knowledge resources from Asia, illustrate the debt that the growth of British resources would owe, in this period, to two major factors: wartime conventions of looting and plundering, and (in consequence of the wartime upheaval) deepening social and political interaction between foreigners and local scholars and educators. While foreigners in India had always collected, both wartime plundering and the Company’s new position relative to the Mughal Empire would open up many new avenues of access for Britons intent on acquiring manuscripts, curiosities and other knowledge resources. But the large collections that were beginning to be brought back to London would remain, for now, part of the private trade, destined for personal collections or sale by individuals. The final section of this chapter follows the Company’s first steps toward moving from contracted-out to Company-owned science, which began with institutional changes on the subcontinent in the wake of the major land reforms in the 1790s.

While the conventional understanding within many Latin American historiographical traditions is that science went hand in hand with political liberation from the metropole, this chapter seeks to elucidate the ways in which the public sphere in both Spanish America and Brazil cultivated very different narratives and historiographies. In Spanish America, the republican public sphere aggressively set out to erase all connections between Spain, monarchy, and empire. Science became antithetical with the Spanish empire. The erase was deliberate and painstaking, a careful process of both forgetting and ignoring. By the time national historiographies emerged, the idea of revolution, republic patriotism, and science as casually connected became inextricably linked. In Brazil, there was a different process of forgetting. Science, empire, and monarchy never became disconnected and antithetical in the same fashion, dependent as science was on monarchical institutions that had arrived with the Portuguese royal family in 1808 Brazil. Yet the meaning of science did take a strange turn as science became, in print, the handmaiden of industry in a society that continued to witness a significant expansion of plantation slavery and the slave trade well into the nineteenth century.

The knowledge commons framework, deployed here in a review of the early network of scientific communication known as the Republic of Letters, combines a historical sensibility regarding the character of scientific research and communications with a modern approach to analyzing institutions for knowledge governance. Distinctions and intersections between public purposes and privacy interests are highlighted. Lessons from revisiting the Republic of Letters as knowledge commons may be useful in advancing contemporary discussions of Open Science.

This chapter illuminates the role of science in colonial expansion since the time of the Enlightenment, as well as the varied forms of contestation, creative appropriation, and counter-science among the colonized.