Paper 2: Sciences and Empires
You should answer four questions in total. Answer one question from Section A and
three questions from Section B. All questions carry equal weighting.
You should spend no more than three hours on answering all the questions, and a
word limit is set of no more than 1,500 words per answer.
All your answers for this paper should be submitted in one DOC, DOCX or PDF
document. Each answer should be clearly headed with the question number and the
question.
Put your Blind Grade Number (BGN) at the start of the document. Do not put your
name anywhere in the document.
SECTION A
1. Theodore Porter claims in Trust in Numbers (1995) that accounting in the
context of state bureaucracy and commerce contributed to quantification and
measurement in the natural sciences. How does this statement help us to
understand the history of the modern sciences?
2. “Scientific knowledge is made in a lot of different places. Does it matter where?
Can the location of scientific endeavor make any difference to the conduct of
science? And even more important, can it affect the content of science?” (David
Livingstone, 2003). How would you answer these questions?
3. Did the end of empires fundamentally disrupt imperial regimes for managing
nature and natural resources?
SECTION B
4. According to James Secord, a “Darwin-centered account” of nineteenth-century
changes in understandings of the natural world “is no longer credible” (Victorian
Sensation, 2000). Discuss alternative accounts and evaluate their merits.
5. In 1885, Agnes Mary Clerke argued that the advent of astrophysics had made
astronomy “more popular, both in its needs and in its nature”. What evidence
can you give to support or refute this claim?
6. How did the status and position of the “embodied observer” in physics change
between the 1860s and 1920s?
7. Why was it important for Newell, Shaw and Simon to emphasize “we are not
using the computer as a crude analogy to human behavior” in 1958?
8. “The history of petrochemical science and technology is as much a history of
producing ignorance as it is a history of producing knowledge.” Do you agree?
9. Does the history of other natural resources support the characterisation of data
as a “resource” to be “mined”? Where does the history of data as a resource
converge or diverge with that of things like water, oil, and genes?
10. How did the translation of texts shape the history of science in China’s Qing
dynasty?
11. What impact did the collapse of the Japanese empire after the Second World
War have on the history of science in East Asia?
12. What roles have conceptions of science played in the development of
anthropology?