William Beinart - The Scientific Imagination in South Africa: 1700 to the Present

The Scientific Imagination in South Africa

South Africa provides a unique vantage point from which to examine the scientific imagination over the last three centuries, when its position on the African continent made it a staging post for Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonialism. In the eighteenth century, South African plants and animals caught the imagination of visiting Europeans. In the nineteenth century, science became central to imperial conquest, devastating wars, agricultural intensification and the exploitation of rich mineral resources. Scientific work both facilitated, and offered alternatives to, the imposition of segregation and apartheid in the twentieth century. William Beinart and Saul Dubow offer an innovative exploration of science and technology in this complex, divided society. Bridging a range of disciplines from astronomy to zoology, they demonstrate how scientific knowledge shaped South Africa s peculiar path to modernity. In so doing, they examine the work of remarkable individual scientists and institutions, as well as the contributions of leading politicians from Jan Smuts to Thabo Mbeki.

William Beinart is Emeritus Professor, St Antony s College, University of Oxford and former Director of the African Studies Centre. His publications include The Rise of Conservation in South Africa (2003), Environment and Empire (2007) with Lotte Hughes, Prickly Pear: The Social History of a Plant in the Eastern Cape (2011) with Luvuyo Wotshela , African Local Knowledge & Livestock Health (2013) with Karen Brown and Rights to Land (2017) with Peter Delius and Michelle Hay.

Saul Dubow is Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of books, edited collections, and articles about nineteenth and twentieth-century South African history including Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (1995), A Commonwealth of Knowledge (2006), South Africa s Struggle for Human Rights (2012), and Apartheid 1948 1994 (2014). He is the editor of Science and Society in Southern Africa (2000).

The Scientific Imagination in South Africa

1700 to the Present

William Beinart

University of Oxford

Saul Dubow

University of Cambridge

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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108837088

DOI: 10.1017/9781108938198

William Beinart and Saul Dubow 2021

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First published 2021

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library .

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Beinart, William, author. | Dubow, Saul, author.

Title: The scientific imagination in South Africa : 1700 to the present / William Beinart, University of Oxford, Saul Dubow, University of Cambridge.