"Colonial science and its histories. The workshop" to be held at the Institute of Historical Research, London on 14 January 2011 (360G-Wellcome-095046_Z_10_Z)

This will be a one-day symposium involving both established scholars and early career researchers from the disciplines of history of science, history of medicine and historical geography. The discussion will focus on pre-modern natural history (1450-1850), and its relevance for the practice of medicine, pharmacy, and science more generally in Europe and, eventually, its colonies. In particular, natural history will be considered in its importance as a gateway for colonial expansion and later imperial high-handedness, and concurrently as one of the few successful vehicles for a fruitful exchange between metropolitan and indigenous knowledge. Hence the title: colonial science, or, rather, colonial life sciences. For the four centuries covered by the workshop, indeed, natural history lived at the intersection of a major concern about the relationship between health and the environment- offering answers to Europeans increasingly disquieted by the widening of their world's horizons: from revisions of the ancients' materia medica to the first modern theorizations of race as both a physiological and geographical construct. As such, it lends itself particularly well as a platform for historians working from different disciplinary perspectives to reflect on the historiographical and conceptual developments that now allow us to talk of 'colonial sciences and colonial medicines'.