Why read Africa as a Living Laboratory?

Book cover of Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Africa as a Living Laboratory as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Gufu Oba

Author

Africa as a Living Laboratory is a far-reaching 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 interrelations among the problems being studied. While the aim of British colonialists was unquestionably to transform and…

From Gufu's list on The best books on environmental history, science, and development.