Kapil Raj- PhD
- Research Professor at School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences
Kapil Raj
- PhD
- Research Professor at School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences
Research Professor
About
88
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Introduction
Kapil Raj is a Directeur d'études (distinguished research professor) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France. His research focuses on the construction of scientific knowledge through circulation and intercultural interaction and mediation – natural history, linguistics, ethnology, geography, and medicine – in the context of the European encounter with South Asia in the early modern and modern periods.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
January 1984 - present
January 2000 - present
Publications
Publications (88)
While a lot of attention has been focussed on mesmeric and hypnotic phenomena in Europe and Britain, little is known of their history in other parts of the world during the same period. One intriguing case study is that of Dr. James Esdaile (1808–1859), an Edinburgh-trained Scottish surgeon who spent 20 years practising in British India. In the las...
In order to explore the ways knowledge travels across spatial and cultural boundaries, this article focuses on the intriguing case of the Edinburgh-trained Scottish surgeon James Esdaile (1808–59), who, after practising conventional surgery for almost fifteen years in British colonial India, quite unexpectedly turned to mesmeric anaesthesia in the...
The so called ‘global turn’ of the 1990s had a profound influence on the history of science and science studies. Indeed, the domain has seen a rising spate of publications, both books and articles, ever since the turn of the present century. In addition to the continued deployment of an irenic vision where all human cultures contributed to the ocea...
This introductory chapter takes stock of the last several decades of history of science studies focused on the connections between science and empires, ranging from George Basalla's 1960s diffusionist model of the “spread of Western science” to debates on the emergence of modern science in Latin America, through critical examinations of science as...
This chapter presents a panorama of the parallel development of the history of science and the history of ideas (and intellectual history) from the beginning of the 20th century until the present. It contrasts the political and intellectual contexts within which the two fields rose during the interwar years, their evolution after WWII, especially t...
Review of Thomas Simpson, The Frontiers of British India: Science, Space and Power in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021
This article questions the notion that Europeans were the sole producers of knowledge that was subsequently diffused to the rest of the world. Based on a study of Sir William Jones’ life as a Supreme Court judge in Calcutta, it brings to light his encounter with the many indigenous intellectual networks, remnants of the erstwhile Mughal empire and...
Science moderne, science globale remet en question la croyance selon laquelle la science moderne a été créée uniquement en Occident pour être ensuite diffusée ou imposée ailleurs. À travers six études de cas présentées chronologiquement sur la construction du savoir à un moment clé de son histoire – en botanique, cartographie, arpentage terrestre,...
Through a comparison between Sir William Jones' initial intellectual project before his arrival in India and his Indian writings this chapter brings to light the crucial importance of place in the production of knowledge. Locality thus takes a central place in this analysis, and also helps shed light on the nature of its constitution: localities, i...
Amongst the many narrative strategies in the recent “global turn” in the history of science, one commonly finds attempts to complement the single European story by multiplying histories of knowledge-making in as many different regional and cultural contexts as possible. Other strategies include attempts to generalize the “Needham Question” of why t...
C’est au XXe siècle, alors que l’Europe est affaiblie sur le plan international, que la Révolution scientifique des XVIe et XVIIe siècles est placée au centre d’un discours sur la primauté européenne. Après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, États-uniens et Britanniques vont se servir de ce nouveau levier pour ancrer dans les mémoires la supériorité de l’...
The conversation deals with ways of writing a global history of science and the main methods and concepts needed to do so. Beginning with the questions of non-Eurocentric periodisation, it deals with the issues of sources and key concepts for global historiography like circulation, introduced as a non-dif-fusionist way of looking at the movement of...
Anna Winterbottom Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, xii-324 p. - Volume 72 Issue 2 - Kapil Raj
In recent decades historians of science have increasingly questioned the widespread belief that science and knowledge are untouched by local conditions. Place thus occupies a central role in the field. Through an examination of the writings of Sir William Jones (1746-1794) during his Indian sojourn, in particular his genealogy of mankind following...
In recent decades historians of science have increasingly questioned the widespread belief that science and knowledge are untouched by local conditions. Place thus occupies a central role in the field. Through an examination of the writings of Sir William Jones (1746-1794) during his Indian sojourn, in particular his genealogy of mankind following...
Un dialogue des savoirs : telle est l'ambition de cet ouvrage qui vise à faire échanger histoire des sciences et histoire des techniques. Deux historiographies qui, pour être complémentaires, n'ont pas pour autant toujours été associées. Les techniques ont été, en effet, longtemps perçues comme des « sciences appliquées ». Or il s'agit plutôt de dé...
Com formação inicial em matemática e filosofia, Kapil Raj é atualmente professor e pesquisador em História da Ciência na École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Seus trabalhos abordam a circulação e a construção de conhecimentos entre a Ásia Meridional e a Europa Ocidental entre os séculos XVII e XX. Nessa entrevista, Kapil Raj fala d...
The conversation deals with ways of writing global history of science and the main methods and concepts in doing so. Beginning with the questions of non-Eurocentric periodisation, it deals with the issues of sources and key concepts for global historiography like circulation, introduced as a non-diffusionist way of looking at the movement of knowle...
Tradução feita pela professora Julina Freire da Pontifícia Universidade Católica - Rio de Janeiro do artigo de Kapil Raj.
Este ensaio traça a evolução paralela, mas não relacionada, de dois conjuntos de reações à história idealista tradicional da ciência em um contexto histórico-mundial. Apesar de os estudiosos que promoveram a abordagem pós-colon...
This essay traces the parallel, but unrelated, evolution of two sets of reactions to traditional idealist history of science in a world-historical context. While the scholars who fostered the postcolonial approach, in dealing with modern science in the non-West, espoused an idealist vision, they nevertheless stressed its political and ideological u...
Founded in 1690 as an entrepôt by the English East India Company, Calcutta has been at the intersection of a number of heterogeneous long- and short-range networks of trade, finance, diplomacy, law, crafts and learning. This article explores the history of the first century of its existence during which it grew from insignificance to become the sec...
Créée de toutes pièces à partir de 1690 par la Compagnie anglaise des Indes orientales,Calcutta va se transformer en à peine un siècle en la deuxième ville de l’Empire britannique.Durant la même période,elle émerge aussi comme une des capitales mondiales des sciences.Zone de contact entre cultures européennes et asiatiques, Calcutta fournit un exem...
This article explores the history of the first century of Calcutta's existence from a swampy village of mud-huts in 1690 to the second most-important city of the British empire at the end of the 18th century. During the same period, Calcutta also emerged as a world-renowned centre of scientific knowledge making in botany, geology, geodesy, map-maki...
Créée de toutes pièces à partir de 1690 par la Compagnie anglaise des Indes orientales, Calcutta va se transformer en à peine un siècle en la deuxième ville de l'Empire britannique. Durant la même période, elle émerge aussi comme une des capitales mondiales des sciences. Zone de contact entre cultures européennes et asiatiques, Calcutta fournit un...
In opposition both to the dominant vision of colonial science as a hegemonic European enterprise whose universalization can be conceived of in purely diffusionist terms, and to the more recent perception of it as a simple reordering of indigenous knowledge within the European canon, this chapter seeks to show the complex reciprocity involved in the...
The crowing of the cock awoke Sir William Jones, puisne (or junior) judge at the Supreme Court at Calcutta, on the morning of 2 February 1786, as indeed it had every morning since his arrival in India barely two and a half years earlier.1 Leaving his wife Anna Maria to her dreams, he rose silently from his bed and stepped out of his palatial garden...
The end of the eighteenth century is commonly considered crucial in the transition from the gentleman-amateur tradition based on private initiative in science in Britain (but also elsewhere in Europe) to one based on organized public instruction and research. This story is normally told as a purely European one, which then affected the rest of the...
This book began with the observation that modern science is widely considered to be a purely West European creation and then went on to present a brief account of academic conceptions and debates of its relationship to other societies and cultures. These have centred either on the epistemological, sociological, and economic uniqueness of the West,...
It is commonly believed that modern cartography and the surveying activity on which it is based are a purely Western invention introduced into the rest of the world in the course of European colonial expansion. To take an example, in his book on the British geographical surveys of South Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Matthew Edney...
On 14 May 1816 a group of more than fifty Hindus gathered at the house of Sir Edward Hyde East, chief justice in the Supreme Court of Calcutta, to discuss the foundation of a college in order to introduce into India ‘the literature and science of Europe’ in a liberal manner and without any reference to Christianity.1 These men all came from Calcutt...
On a warm spring day in May 1863 two men, a South Asian and a European, are walking endlessly up and down a sinuous mountain path in the Himalayan heights somewhere to the east of Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir. A pilgrim’s staff in hand, the former leads the way, the latter closely follows meticulously counting and measuring his companion’s pace...
In recent years there has been increasing interest in the strategies employed by Europeans for gathering natural-historical, ethnographic, and geographical knowledge beyond the confines of the metropolis in the context of European expansion. Academic attention has focused in two main directions. One examines the specificity of these modes of ‘field...
Relocating Modern Science challenges the belief that modern science was created uniquely in the West and was subsequently diffused elsewhere. Through a detailed analysis of key moments in the history of science, it demonstrates the crucial roles of circulation and intercultural encounter for their emergence.
Jan af Geijerstam. Landscapes of technology transfer: Swedish ironmakers in India, 1860-1864. Stockholm, Jernkontoret, « Jernkontorets bergshistorika skriftserie-42», 2004, 456 p. - Volume 60 Issue 2 - Kapil Raj
Pour les nations européennes qui s'étaient engagées dans la conquête du monde, dresser l'inventaire des flores locales constituait un enjeu prioritaire. De volumineux herbiers furent préparés par les Portugais, les Hollandais et les Anglais. Un chirurgien français de Chandernagor consacra plus de trois décennies à mener à bien une entreprise simila...
Early 19th-Century orientalism in India : The British response to the universalist ideals of the French RevolutionThe end of the 18th century saw Great Britain and its empire under severe threat from revolutionary France, both through its military strength and the force of its egalitarian ideals. In 1800, in order to put a stop to the propagation o...
The European exploration of the Pacific Ocean in the latter half of the eighteenth century is usually presented as part of the Enlightenment's quest for pure knowledge, knowledge which was shared freely in the “Republic of Letters”. In this essay, however, these expeditions are set against the background of a ferocious struggle between western Euro...
In opposition both to the dominant vision of colonial science as an hegemonic European enterprise whose universalization can be conceived of in purely diffusionist terms, and to the more recent perception of it as a simple reordering of indigenous knowledge within the European canon, this essay seeks to show the complex reciprocity involved in the...
Compétition ou coopération? Fonds publics ou investissements privés? Libre circulation ou secret de la connaissance? Ces questions qui sont au coeur des grands programmes de recherche de nos jours, agitait déjà l'Europe lorsqu'elle lançait d'ambitieuses expéditions maritimes à la découverte du Pacifique au XVIIIe siècle.
The manners and sentiments of the eastern
nations will be perfectly known ; and the limits
of our knowledge no less extended than the
bounds of our empire.
Sir William Jones, A Grammar of the Persian Language
Yes, and thou must learn how to make pictures
of roads and mountains and rivers — to
carry these pictures in thine eye till a suitable
time c...
La géographie est la reine des sciences de l'empire britannique. Mais comment cartographier une région hostile, à la fois par son paysage et sa population? Comment arpenter avec précision sans aide des instruments de mesure classiques, trop encombrants ou trop voyants? Au Tibet, au second moitié de XIXe siècle, Britanniques et Indiens innovent: un...
The Argument
Sociologists of Third World science, who share the dominant assumption in the philosophy of science that the “culture” of specific substantive fields of scientific inquiry is invariant across the globe, have, after a period of blind optimism devoted to building a critical mass of scientists in the developing countries, relapsed into a...
