Paper 2
Sciences and Empires (1780–present)
You should answer four questions in total. Answer one question from
Section A and three questions from Section B. All questions carry equal
weighting.
Begin each answer on a separate sheet.
Write legibly and on only one side of the paper.
Answers must be tied up in separate bundles, marked 1, 2, 3, etc.
according to the number of the question.
Attach a completed coversheet to each bundle and complete a master
coversheet listing all questions attempted. It is essential that you write
your examination number and not your name on the coversheet and on
each bundle.
You may not start to read the questions printed on the subsequent
pages of this question paper until instructed to do so by the
invigilator.
Page 2 of 2
SECTION A
1. “The name ‘Science and Empire’ is as unsatisfactory as it is Eurocentric”
(Kapil Raj, 2007). Do you agree?
2. “The ways societies support science have changed since 1800, but their
reasons for doing so have not.” Assess this claim.
3. What implications did the emergence of laboratories and disciplines in
Northern Europe have for the history of science and technology in East
Asia?
SECTION B
4. Samurai hung tablets with the solutions to geometry problems on the
walls of Japanese temples in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
How did this reflect broader trends in knowledge exchange and
production in the Tokugawa shogunate?
5. What problems and opportunities does the term “Humboldtian science”
pose for the pursuit of a global history of science?
6. What was the relation between the public display of scientific knowledge
and the production of scientific knowledge in nineteenth-century Britain?
7. Why did so many early debates about Charles Darwin’s Origin of
Species focus on humans, a subject only briefly mentioned in the book?
8. What roles have the audiences for anthropology played in its
development?
9. Did industrial scientists and academic scientists pursue the same goals
in the early twentieth-century USA?
10. “Society does not a priori owe the scientist, even the good scientist,
support, any more than it owes the artist or the writer or the musician
support” (Alvin Weinberg, 1964). Why was this claim controversial?
11. How have colonisation and decolonisation affected anthropological
fieldwork?
12. What does the history of Tsinghua University suggest about the relation
between technocracy and socialism in the People’s Republic of China?