Colonial Knowledges: Environment and Logistics in the Creation of Knowledge in British Colonies from 1750 to 1950.

The effects of colonial power dynamics on knowledge creation in the long nineteenth century and beyond are well known and have become the foundation of a postcolonial reading of British scholarship in the context of empire. What has been less well examined are the practical effects of the colonial context on knowledge making. This seminar series seeks to explore how logistical and practical factors, such as the physical environment including climate and distance from the metropole, influenced the creation of both scientific and humanistic knowledge in British colonies.

Seminar 3

Edward Tan Yu Fan, Ministry of Education (Singapore): 'Mobilising Knowledge for Colonization: The Knowledge Infrastructure in British Malaya and the Growth of Rubber, 1867 to 1914'

Colonialism in British Malaya was embodied by the production of crude rubber harvested from the Hevea Brasiliensis plant. By the dawn of the 20th century, British Malaya was the largest producer of rubber in the world. The success of rubber in Malaya intimately linked the fates of the colonial subaltern to the metropolitan working classes. The rubber plantations of British Malaya represented a fundamental restructuring of Malaya’s moral economy — the relationship between land, labour, and capital was effectively renegotiated by the act of colonization in the late-19th century. Beneath the surface of an increasingly hegemonic British Empire, were the deeper knowledge infrastructure that went into enabling the colonisation and governance of Malaya. Through an examination of journals such as the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Kew Bulletin, this paper will demonstrate how a growing body of knowledge over the indigenous customs of the land, the social structures of the Chinese and Indian settler colonial projects, and the painstaking study of botany culminated in the spread of British influence from three coastal ports to the rest of British Malaya by 1895 as told through the fortunes of the rubber plant.

K.A. Thilini Prasadika, The Open University of Sri Lanka: ''Can the Centre Hold?': Class and Cultural Politics of Knowledge Production and Dissemination at English Departments in Sri Lanka'

This study seeks to explore the establishment of English Departments in Sri Lanka in the 1940s as centres of colonial knowledge production and dissemination. As a work in progress, this study examines the historical anthropology of social class in establishing and sustaining English Departments in Sri Lanka as a colonial project. The presentation will be based on archival documents, journal articles and pamphlets which sought to further the project at the time. The study intends to ask the following questions; 1) What are the purposes and motives for establishing English Departments in Ceylon? 2) What was the basis for selecting students for the programmes? 3) What purposes did the curricula serve? 4) How has its establishment changed the dynamics of the university system as a whole? Apart from archival documents, his presentation will also use unstructured qualitative interviews from selected English Department affiliates, both past and present, in order to substantiate the argument.