Chapter 2 examines attempts to develop a new model observatory in which the physical sciences could be investigated. Although often positioned as the poor cousin to the pursuit of terrestrial magnetism, the study of meteorology was a critical component of activities at physical observatories at home and overseas and was required to conform to the same exacting requirements. The chapter focuses on Britain’s magnetic crusade and the establishment of a series of so-called colonial observatories across the British Empire. It then investigates the history of one physical observatory – the Colaba Observatory in Bombay, India. The chapter considers Colaba’s place within a set of imperial and climatic geographies that extended across the Indian subcontinent.

Part I, “Before Breadfruit: Natural History, Sociability, and Colonial Identity in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” explores the multiple meanings of science for Jamaican colonists by reconstructing the careers of Patrick Browne and Anthony Robinson, two naturalists active from the 1740s into the 1750s. The introduction situates their work in a chronology of naturalists working in Jamaica from the late seventeenth to the 1790s, when the dream of Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society of London, and botanically inclined Jamaicans culminated in the successful importation of the breadfruit from the South Pacific. It briefly sketches the social, economic, and political circumstances in which Browne and Robinson worked; it signals Part I’s emphasis on the circulation of information about the island’s natural history within Jamaica and between Jamaicans instead of the connections between colonists and metropolitan naturalists and institutions. Part I reveals how colonial naturalists worked in the field; how enslaved and free Jamaicans acquired and deployed knowledge about their environment; and how natural history promoted an affectively rich male intellectual sociability among White colonists.

Chapter 2 shows how transnational cooperation in Europe led to the ICI’s invention of transcolonial and emulative development in the 1890s. The ICI’s transcolonial development differed from the state-led investment programs of the 1930s but resembled the functional governance famous among the UN development agencies in the 1960s. For utilitarian, racist, and ethical reasons, tropical hygienists, free-trade capitalists, Social Christians, and colonial lawyers in the ICI assumed that only the intrinsic motivation of Africans and Asians themselves could make colonial development a success. In the 1890s, the ICI’s showcase project was the Matadí-Léopoldville railway line in the Congo Free State, which successfully combined international investment and emulative development. The ICI facilitated the transcolonial recruitment of 10,000 indigenous workers for the construction by establishing rules for their employment. Although many workers died on the construction site, ICI members propagated a “soft” development that allegedly combined economic with ethical standards. Christian ICI members promoted this “ethical” development policy. Rarely, however, the ICI’s “soft” development could live up to the expectations it raised. Instead, ICI members designed colonial law and manipulated customary law to use both as a legal basis for exploitation under the guise of “soft development.”

South Africa was a regional rather than a world power; it was not a global centre for invention or new scientific ideas. Yet its geographic position on the African continent made it a staging post for Portuguese, Dutch and British colonialism and part of a global imaginary. Colonisation by Britain brought the region into connection with a technologically advanced world empire. South Africa was at key moments an incubator and testing ground of innovation, which had profound social and economic effects on the country: agricultural technology underpinned exports of wool and ostrich feathers; new rifles changed the balance of power in favour of colonial regimes; the mineral revolution necessitated developments in applied geology and gold extraction. Key advances were often a response to urgent economic requirements, but the scientific imagination was also more exploratory with respect to astronomy, palaeontology, and wildlife conservation. And as a crucible of racial politics in the twentieth century, South Africa has long been seen as a social laboratory for the study of 'race relations'. We aim to illustrate the scientific imagination as an expression of human curiosity and ingenuity, to discuss the politics of science and to examine its imbrication with white political power.