Paper 2: Sciences and Empires
You should answer three questions. 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.
1. What role did mines and mining play in the formation of modern science?
2. “Every ambitious scientist … is a son of Humboldt. We are all his family” (Emil
du Bois-Reymond 1849). Why would a nineteenth-century scientist say so?
3. “Both anthropology and colonialism were expanding heartily at the ‘Darwinian
moment’” (Philippa Levine). Discuss this statement.
4. What role, if any, did submarine telegraphy play in the development of physics
as a discipline?
5. Why was the maintenance and repair of scientific instruments such a significant
challenge for practitioners of the “survey sciences” in the nineteenth century?
6. What was “Dutch learning” (rangaku) and what significance did it hold for the
history of science in Tokugawa Japan?
7. Discuss the relationships between science and society in Republican China
during the early twentieth century.
8. At what point(s) during the twentieth century could Japan be considered a
technocratic state, and why?
9. How have seeds been used as instruments of state and imperial control, and
what understandings of plant biology and human nature underpinned this use?
10. How did imperialism shape the methods and ideas of conservation?
11. How and by whom have “natural resources” been made? Your answer should
compare at least three kinds of these “resources”.
12. What is the place of the Manhattan Project in the history of Big Science?