Empires of knowledge: introduction

Abstract

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the mobilization of knowledge as an adjunct to modern state power became essential to imperial projects worldwide. As traditional empires consolidated colonial rule by backing administrative legal structures with coercive policing and military force, they found that legitimacy also called for legibility. The gathering and creation of information about local custom and habit, indigenous structures of power and productive practices that could be ‘improved’, resources that could be exploited – such forms of knowledge facilitated governance, whether by engaging local elites in the colonial project, displacing and supplanting existing structures of political authority, extending systems of surveillance and control, or otherwise expanding the reach of imperial rule. Empires combined hard with soft power, producing a cohort of trained imperial agents in metropolitan institutions – universities, foundations, and, in the post-WorldWar II period, international organizations, think tanks –whose fieldwork aided the projection of power abroad. Our mutual interests in science, nation-building, the movement of knowledge, and the global dimensions of power (whether in national or colonial contexts, or the blurred boundaries between the two) have brought the editors of this special issue together to reflect upon the twentieth-century history of knowledge and empire. In particular, we take inter-imperial collaboration as our organizing theme, in order to explore the extent to which the global project of empire rested upon, and even required, interchange and joint action among colonial powers. As Anne L. Foster has noted, studies of imperialism have generally confined themselves to the colonizer-colonized dyad, and the scholarly literature has only just begun to consider the forms of collaboration between empires that shaped the age of high imperialism. This volume foregrounds inter-imperial relations as a framework for understanding global movements of science, technology, and expertise. It moves beyond our earlier concerns with nineteenth-century US nation-building, and twentieth-century nation-building worldwide, to engage in an ongoing reassessment of the place of the Cold War in our historical imagination, this time focused on the production, circulation, and inter-imperial sharing of expert knowledge at diverse sites from the late nineteenth century into the 1960s. Multiple forms of inter-imperial collaboration operated in tandem with the political rivalries that so often marked the Age of Empire. Imperial governments found that they