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, so no more than 6,000
words for the whole paper.
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. “Since the seventeenth century, the predominant ontological understanding of
the world has been its calculability” (Stuart Elden, 2015). Assess this claim.
2. Have diffusionist models for the spread of knowledge, such as that proposed by
George Basalla in 1967, actually been abandoned?
3. To what extent does the history of twentieth-century sciences involve a shift in
focus from physical to biological phenomena?
SECTION B
4. How did the Jesuit strategy of accommodation shape scientific exchanges
between late imperial China and Europe?
5. Why did the Beagle have a naturalist on board?
6. What effect did the arrival of the Black Ships of Matthew Perry have on science
and technology in Japan?
7. What role, if any, did the display of people in public exhibitions have in the
development of anthropology?
8. How did the status of physics laboratories change during the nineteenth
century?
9. To what extent was the “Darwinian revolution” a debate about Britain’s imperial
future?
10. What role did the brewing industry have in shaping new biological research
agendas around 1900?
11. How have anthropologists challenged understandings of “universal economic
man”?
12. Why did the May Fourth Movement call for the adoption of science and
democracy in China?
13. Was Bronisław Malinowski’s self-critique his greatest contribution to
anthropology?
14. How did eugenicists and racial anthropologists define purity and why was it an
important concern to them?
15. Offer a history of the computer that does not centre on the machine.