Jeremy Adelman, ed. Empire and the Social Sciences: Global Histories of Knowledge. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 248 pp. $114.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-350-10251-4.
Reviewed by Jack A. W. Bowman (University of Warwick)
Published on H-Socialisms (November, 2020)
Commissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark)
Empire and Academic Disciplines
Living through a continuing global pandemic has, among a great deal of other things, brought fresh awareness to the systems of interdependence and knowledge production that encircle our world. In doing so, it has brought home the fact that the roles of social scientists are still ones performed across local and national boundaries and that these are built on past networks of information exchanges. It has also highlighted the virility of the new forms of global orders: nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), global think-tanks, and world-stretching knowledge producing organizations that operate in ways reminiscent of past imperial projects and apparatuses.
As academics and intellectuals across the globe grapple with changing currents and an increased sense of responsibility, so their services are called upon by governmental and nongovernmental causes alike. Likewise, the very questions of knowledge production and ultimately “who holds the keys” are increasingly being brought to the fore. Jeremy Adelman’s, if not prophetic then perhaps worryingly aptly timed, release of Empire and the Social Sciences: Global Histories of Knowledge has coincided with these renewed debates almost perfectly. This work offers interesting insights into how these two titans of critical frameworks interact with one another and what happens to those caught in the middle. The text offers several convincing answers to questions that the Covid-19 pandemic has raised, intentionally or not. It gives a fresh framework to view the work of social scientists and the ways they functioned within, for, against, and apart from empire. It is an ambitious but successful work, and one that perhaps will become even more important in the years to come.
The book seeks to understand how the social sciences, and social scientists more specifically, operated within the imperial project. In doing so, it offers methodological advances and approaches and makes a number of key arguments pertaining to the role of the former within the latter. Adelman’s statement that “empire was the crucible that forged global knowledge producers” runs throughout this edited collection (p. 216). The book’s various contributors unpack this idea and suggest the duality of how social scientists operated within the imperial project. Of major importance was the view of the impartial and outside social scientist. This stemmed from the very birth of the nation-state in a time when, with the shrinking of feudalism and growth of outside institutions, the intellectual was looked to to form some kind of order. Their impartiality was one drawn from opposing the notion of knowledge producers as tools of the state, employed to develop governance and political reformation. The removed scholar, the idea of the intellectual as an observer, can be seen as a direct response to the former, the question of bettering humanity or the nation. As Adelman posits in the introduction, “the history of social science has been entangled from the start with national-level social demands, identities and economic pressures” (p. 2). Regardless of which side of the table certain figures stood, this book seeks to assess how exactly social scientists operated, and more specifically how the global imperial order shaped, and was shaped by, this profession. As imperialism created and fueled global integration (to use generous terming), so the role of the social scientist grew.
The role of the intellectual from feudalism to nation-building is thus similarly reflected, and indeed even intensified, by the development of imperial nations, casting their greedy grip across the globe. Indeed as time went on this question of the impartiality of the social scientist or the need for nation-sponsored intellectuals continually grew. By the twentieth century, there was an increased demand for objective work that functioned outside of national and imperial frameworks and at the same time a sharp rise in governmental interest and sometimes necessity in employing social scientists to its cause. This then leads to the suggestion that social scientists, sometimes unknowingly but often with some sense of awareness, were “world-makers” (p. 215). Empire and the Social Sciences works to understand how. It contributes to the book’s third aim, to recast methodology focused solely on the nation and to extend gaze to empire and beyond. Ultimately this goes some way to suggest how to write truly global histories of knowledge producers and, in essence, what they produced.
The chapters in this edited work, although often varying in scope and context, link convincingly through their thematic and methodological suggestions. This variation is perhaps an argument for the strength of their approach, demonstrating how global histories of knowledge producers can operate in a broader critical engagement with imperial histories and the agents within them. As Adelman posits in the introduction, “perspective and place matter” (p. 4). Both are shown to be of importance, with chapters that vary from the Spanish Empire of the mid-eighteenth century to the modern Chinese Empire. Diana Kim’s chapter, “The Periphery’s Order: Opium and Moral Wreckage in British Burma,” focuses on opium in British Burma and builds on recent imperial histories that have stressed the peripheral states as “vibrant sites of inquiry” (p. 79). Her questioning of how peripheral colonies operated for empire, but also how they still operate as sites of historical inquiry, offers a different perspective of the role of the social scientist within the imperial project. Her conclusions that the peripheries of empire were offered more than one-way traffic to the colonial metropole or center, and instead can be seen at times as driving and dictating imperial policy, highlight the opportunities that global histories of knowledge production affords. Similarly David Ekbladh’s chapter, “Knowledge as Power: Internationalism, Information and US Global Ambitions,” illustrates how the rise of the social scientist within imperial spheres of thinking had far reaching effects not just in how these systems operated but also in how they were seen and understood contemporarily. He argues that the creation of information and information networks were global projects undertaken by agents across the world, and that the result was the realization that information could become, as he puts it, “a tool, even a weapon, for the United States to engage and transform the world” (p. 141).
Margarita Fajardo’s engaging chapter, “Circumventing Imperialism: The Global Economy in Latin American Social Sciences,” offers the interesting premise of imperial orders and structures across localities with no formal empires. Fajardo’s assertion that social scientists in particular drove Latin America into a rough order reminiscent of those under imperial rule demonstrates the strong connection between social scientists and empire even when the two were not explicitly or formally engaged. This chapter, like others in the book, also focuses on less-trodden grounds of imperial historical inquiry, in a refreshing take on moving away from Eurocentric approaches. Indeed the book as a whole strongly acknowledges the flaws of past Eurocentric histories and actively seeks to move toward a more authentic global methodology. However, this is underscored with the understanding that neither these histories nor the undeniable influence of European nations and ideas can be ignored or dismissed completely. Rather the focus is on reconciling their importance into crafting more nuanced histories that grapple with European impact rather than sweeping it under the rug. Fajardo’s chapter is a high point of the book and demonstrates how the approach Adelman sets out initially can come to fruition.
In short, this book is a successful and engaging project that offers a number of key arguments pertinent to past and current discussions of empire and the role of the social sciences. Its ambitious scope and variation offer strong support of its initial argument, and several of the chapters are standout pieces in their own right.[1] It lays important methodological foundations for any observer of empire and continues Adelman’s own run of successful and important historical projects. While it answers only some of the questions we face today, I have little doubt it will continue to be a useful text in the years to come, and for the many years already passed.
Note
[1]. I also thoroughly enjoyed Sophus A. Reinert’s “Poor Mao’s Almanack? Empire, Political Economy and the Transformation of Social Science,” Alexis Dudden’s “Nitobe Inazo and the Diffusion of a Knowledgeable Empire,” and Inderjeet Parmar’s “Knowledge for Empire: American Hegemony, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rise of Academic International Relations in the United States.”
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-socialisms.
Citation:
Jack A. W. Bowman. Review of Adelman, Jeremy, ed., Empire and the Social Sciences: Global Histories of Knowledge.
H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews.
November, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55038
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |