COST A36, Tributary Empires Compared
Romans, Ottomans, Mughals and Beyond
Report of the St Andrews working group meeting,
30th March – 1st April 2007
Science and other Knowledges in Tributary Empires
The fifth meeting of COST Action 36 was a Working Group 1 meeting devoted to considering scientific and other intellectual responses to empire. Among the questions speakers were asked to consider were the following. How was scientific enterprise institutionalised in tributary empires? How were imperial and intellectual orderings of the world related? Did empires and emperors indulge in peculiar species of collection and patronage? Were certain enterprises promoted at the expense of others? How convertible were social, intellectual and political capital? Papers presented included case studies from the Roman, Abbasid, British Indian, Mughal and late imperial Chinese Empires. (Last minute illness prevented papers being presented on Ptolemaic and Ottoman empires.) Two papers presented were explicitly comparative in scope. The closing discussion was introduced by an historical sociologists and an historian of the early modern period. Following decisions made at the Warsaw Management Committee meeting more time was allocated for general discussion, much of it connecting the papers presented with the aims of Working Group One. The conference was supported mainly by COST with additional funding from the School of Classics at the University of St Andrews and from the Leverhulme Trust through its project “Science and Empire in the Roman World."
The first session was opened by one of the local organizers Greg Woolf with a comparativist paper looking at different kinds of relationships that had been postulated between empire and science in recent scholarship. This drew on Geoffrey Lloyd’s contrastive study of ancient Greek and Chinese science and on the response of Chris Bayly and others to Foucauldian discourse analysis of scientific writing. Among the key issues raised were the extent to which scientific communities and disciplines operated autonomously, the effect and effectiveness of imperial patronage and This papers was followed by presentations by Giovanni Salmeri and Peter Pormann on two case studies. Salmeri considered the way ancient accounts of Asia written by geographers working within the Hellenistic and Roman empire made use of language to map ethnic populations. Pormann considered the creation of hospitals in the Abbasid empire in the light of Gutas’ work on the translation movement through which a selected portion of Greek scientific literature was appropriated by the Caliphate and put to new ends. The crucial role of bilingual populations was emphasised along with the creation of non-faith based institutions.
The second session considered contrasting examples from imperial China, the Roman world and Mughal India. The papers also contrasted in style, Ben Elman focusing on institutions, education and governance; Jason König on writing practices and André Wink on the courtly context of scholarship under Akbar. A range of different relationships between science and empire were illustrated. The examination system of China, heavily dependent on the technologies of print and paper, grew to involve a very large number of the population in education and to link education very closely with the creation of an imperial governing class. The relationship in the Roman case was much more tangential, and characterised by mutual appropriations with some scientific writers borrowing the language and ideology of empire to make universalizing claims for encyclopaedic works. (This theme will be followed up by a conference on Encyclopaedism before the Enlightenment to be help in St Andrews in June 2007, sponsored in part by the same Leverhulme project.) The actual impact of imperial patronage in the ancient Mediterranean and in Mughal India was less clear, although the display of discoveries and also collecting were among the means these and other imperial courts displayed their power.
The afternoon session that followed picked up some of these themes. Kim Wagner developed a case study of how knowledges (and misconceptions) arose in the treatment of the Thug phenomenon in British India. While empire certainly made use of what were regarded as authoritative scientific advice in responding to ‘banditry’, it is clear that the public perception was shaped largely by the racial preoccupations of science at the time. Peter Bang’s paper picked up the theme of imperial collecting, drawing material from a range of empires to advance a general synoptic thesis about the means by which empires built legitimacy through amassing and then representing knowledge, marvels and discoveries. The discussion that followed returned to a recurrent theme of the Action, the difficulty of balancing the need for analytical differentiation with the aim of generalization.
The morning session of the last day was devoted to the theme of geographical knowledge and empire, introduced in the first session by Salmeri. Kai Brodersen discussed the geographical writing and knowledge of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, largely as a body of scholarship and corpus of writings. Adam Ziolkowski focused on the issue of how geographical knowledge of northern Europe was obtained, discussing in particular the sources of the Germania. As in the first session, there was a contrast between the view of science as a discipline composed of practitioners and texts but relatively un-institutionalised and the application of scientific knowledge to particular issues of concern to imperial authorities.
The final session was a general discussion led off by John Hall and Jeroen Duindam. As well as summing up the proceedings an emphasis was placed on the range of different knowledges that jostled together within tributary empires, the difficulties of demarcating science out as a separate domain and the limited capacity of empires described as ‘puny leviathans’ to dominate discourse. A number of key variables were discussed, the most salient being the relationship between religious authority and knowledge and the court, and the relationship of education to government. Several themes from Ben Elman’s presentation returned in discussion.
Greg Woolf Peter Fibiger Bang
St Andrews Copenhagen