A01=Helen Tilley
administration
africa
african research survey
agriculture
anthropology
Author_Helen Tilley
Category=NHH
Category=NHTQ
Category=PDX
colonialism
colonies
colonization
empire
environmentalism
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
field sciences
history
imperialism
infectious diseases
intelligence
land use
medicine
mental capacity
methodology
modernity
nonfiction
race
science
scientific knowledge
territory
tropical
Product details
- ISBN 9780226803470
- Weight: 709g
- Dimensions: 15 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 15 Apr 2011
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of new scientific specialties and research methods. "Africa as a Living Laboratory" is an ambitious study of the thorny relationship between imperialism and the role of scientific expertise - environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological - in the colonization of British Africa. A key source for Helen Tilley's analysis is the African Research Survey, a project undertaken in the 1930s to explore how modern science was being applied to African problems. This project both embraced and recommended an interdisciplinary approach to research on Africa that, Tilley argues, underscored the heterogeneity of African environments and the interrelation of the problems being studied. While the aim of British colonialists was unquestionably to transform and modernize Africa, their efforts, Tilley contends, were often unexpectedly subverted by scientific concerns with the local.
Meticulously researched and gracefully argued, "Africa as a Living Laboratory" transforms our understanding of imperial history, colonial development, and the role science played in both.
Helen Tilley is affiliated with the Department of Medical History and Bioethics and the Program in African Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. She is the editor, with Robert Gordon, of Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism, and the Politics of Knowledge.
